Festival Review: Inside The Chinese Closet (2015)
★★★☆☆
With fake marriage markets and illegal babies, Sophia Luvara’s intimate documentary Inside The Chinese Closet reveals gay men and women shouldering their parents’ burden.
★★★☆☆
With fake marriage markets and illegal babies, Sophia Luvara’s intimate documentary Inside The Chinese Closet reveals gay men and women shouldering their parents’ burden.
★★★☆☆
Exposing the secrecy around cyber-warfare and the US attack on Iran’s nuclear industry, Alex Gibney’s Zero Days pleads for a break in the silence.
★★★★☆
Half-documentary, half-fiction, Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare paints a portrait of life on Lampedusa with its fishing traditions and new waves of migrants.
★★★★☆
Grant Gee’s Innocence of Memories is a multilayered exploration of the innovative novel Museum of Innocence by the Turkish Nobel prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk.
★★★☆☆
Giving a voice to the sherpas who risk life and limb to make a living on Everest, Jennifer Peedom’s Sherpa finds itself caught between two camps.
★★★★☆
Exposing a drug fuelled, self-destructive seam within London’s gay community, William Fairman and Max Gogarty’s Chemsex makes for intoxicating viewing.
★★★☆☆
A fascinating though soft-focus documentary, Davis Guggenheim’s He Named Me Malala reveals the inspirational teenager fighting for girls’ right to education.
★★★☆☆
Malian music in exile, Johanna Schwartz’s documentary They Will Have To Kill Us First is a celebration of music and its invincible power.
★★★★☆
An impressionistic portrait of the Louvre Museum under Nazi occupation, Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia reveals the chequered history of art.
★★★☆☆
Revisiting history through the descendants of two high-serving Nazis and a Holocaust survivor, David Evans’My Nazi Legacy bites off more than it can chew.
★★★☆☆
After An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim’s He Named Me Malala brings Malala Yousafzai’s story to the masses. Just a little too easily.
★★★★★
Jerry Rothwell’s inspirational documentary How To Change The World explores the birth of Greenpeace and the tumultuous sea-change it sparked in environmentalism.
★★★★☆
A haunting portrait of Sweden’s one and only serial killer, Brian Hill’s The Confessions of Thomas Quick reimagines the collaborative nature of storytelling.
★★★★☆
A retrospective of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado’s The Salt Of The Earth sees man and mankind come to life.