One of the UK’s most distinctive documentarians, Jeanie Finlay has collaborated with HBO, IFC, and BBC Storyville on feature documentaries including Your Fat Friend (now streaming exclusively on DocPlay), Seahorse, and Game Of Thrones: The Last Watch, amongst others.
Jeanie is a Chicken & Egg Awardee with retrospectives of her work shown at MOMI NYC, BFI, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, and Criterion.
She is currently at work on her tenth feature film.
Cameraperson
If you have any interest in documentary, you have to watch Cameraperson! It’s really a film about what it means to hold a camera. Director Kirsten Johnson got access to the rushes of all her previous films, which include a number of legendary documentaries, and she made this memoir film from those. What’s really fascinating is that you can see the process of filmmaking in the moment of making the film, and its really moving. It’s got those small little details, which is what I’m really interested in as a documentary filmmaker.
Bunch of Kunst
Sleaford Mods are a noisy and brilliant band from Nottingham, my adopted hometown, with a lot to say. They’re brilliant – I really recommend you seek them out. This film, by Christine Franz, is a really good introduction to their unique and noisy charms. It’s just great – they have a great sense of humour. The film is about what it’s like to live in Britain today, far from London, and what that looks and feels like. Look out for what Jason’s wife says he suffers from when he comes back home from tour.
Honeyland
Another observational doc. It’s set in Macedonia, and it’s about a mother and daughter who keep bees. It started off as a nature documentary, but everything changes when a combative family move into the property next door. Life completely changes. I think that the film started off as a nature documentary, or human life documentary, and then everything shifted, and the directors really stick to and follow the story. It looks absolutely gorgeous, and you feel like you’re seeing a story unfurl in real time.
The Mole Agent
A brilliantly human and funny film by Maite Alberdi. It’s a Chilean film about an undercover OAP who goes into an old peoples’ home as an investigator. It’s just brilliant – it’s really funny and entertaining, and also makes you think about the lives of older people. More docs should be funny!
Stop Making Sense
I’ve seen this film many times over the years; I watched it when it came out. My memory is of watching it at someone’s garden on a sheet, probably 20 years ago. But I watched the reissue recently when it came to cinemas and I was struck at how simply yet brilliantly done it is; and just how cool the band is. David Byrne is just effortlessly brilliant… it’s a banger; it makes you want to get up and dance!
