Documentary

Film news

Cuban documentary about government censorship of the arts wins top film festival prize

Miguel Coyula’s "Chronicles of the Absurd" provides a rare inside view of artist interactions with an oppressive government

Film review

Fourteen-hour film on Documenta 14 foreshadows the bureaucracy and culture wars that followed

At 840 minutes, “exergue - on documenta 14” exhaustively chronicles all that went right and wrong with Adam Szymczyk’s edition of Documenta in Kassel and Athens, though the actual art gets surprisingly little screen time

Filmsreview

New Niki de Saint Phalle documentary chronicles her personal struggles and aesthetic triumphs

Michiko Matsumoto’s film “Viva Niki”, which recently premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival, also attests to the artist’s enduring popularity in Japan

Film review

New repatriation documentary chronicles Indigenous groups’ struggles to recover artefacts from collectors and museums

The Canadian documentary “So Surreal: Behind the Masks” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival

Film review

New film on Ernest Cole, photographer who chronicled South African apartheid, presents trove of 60,000 rediscovered negatives

Raoul Peck’s new documentary “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”, having its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, is narrated by Lakeith Stanfield

Salvator Mundi documentary The Lost Leonardo to become a television series starring Julianne Moore

Moore, who is also an executive producer on the series, will star as art restorer Dianne Modestini

Film preview

Pioneering gay photographer George Platt Lynes is ready for his closeup

Lynes, whose homoerotic images from the first half of the 20th century have had relatively little exposure, is the subject of a new documentary

New documentary tracks the return of looted art from France to Benin

Mati Diop’s “Dahomey”, which won top honours at the Berlin International Film Festival, takes a pensive and unconventional approach to its subject

New documentary traces Iranian artist Nickzad Nodjoumi’s quest to retrieve his paintings decades after the Islamic Revolution

Directed by the artist’s daughter and her husband, “A Revolution on Canvas” is a heart-breaking family drama disguised as a political thriller

Documentary offers a close-up on the foul-mouthed Frida Kahlo

New film about the Mexican artist quotes extensively from her unguarded, strident diaries and notebooks

Film review

Was Rauschenberg’s grand prize win at the 1964 Venice Biennale a US plot, or just good PR?

A new documentary delves into the machinations that led to the upstart American artist’s stunning triumph at the art world’s Olympics

Film preview

Ghosts in the streets: Steve McQueen documentary delves into the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam

The four-hour film, shot mostly during the Covid-19 pandemic, opens in the US on Christmas Day

A film-maker shares affliction and inspiration with Paul Klee

In his new documentary “Angel Applicant”, Ken August Meyer finds solace in the late works of Klee, who likewise suffered from scleroderma

Film preview

A documentary portrait of the artist as a young woman fighting to live and make work

In “Apolonia, Apolonia”, Lea Glob tracks the fitful ascent of French painter Apolonia Sokol and captures something elemental about the artistic spirit

Film review

One artist’s decades-long quest to build the largest brass and copper structure in the world

A new documentary chronicling Nyoman Nuarta’s 28-year struggle to build the world’s fifth-tallest statue also doubles as a portrait of contemporary Indonesia

New 3D documentary tells the multidimensional story of American artist H.C. Westermann

Westermann’s hand-carved wooden sculptures pop off cinema screens in Los Angeles and Chicago this month

'A meteor blazing through the world': tributes pour in for the influential film producer Jess Search

The co-founder of The Doc Society and the architect behind numerous films by visual artists was diagnosed with a brain tumour in July

Mediareview

Artists who stayed in Ukraine navigate cultural war and actual warfare in new documentary

“Rule of Two Walls”, showing at the Tribeca Film Festival, follows artists in Ukraine after the launch of Russia’s invasion

Modern artinterview

Interview magazine editor and Warhol confidant Bob Colacello opens new show on Pop art heyday

The photographer speaks with us about his intimate images of the famed artist, how he got the coveted New York media job and his "diehard" Republicanism

New documentary gives inside view of art museum’s attempts to become more diverse

“White Balls on Walls” shows how the staff of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum have tried to implement change amid a shifting social landscape

A new documentary tracks David Hammons, the art world's invisible man

A new documentary surveying the revered but elusive artist is playing at New York's Film Forum

Vermeer fever: documentary on blockbuster Rijksmuseum show reaches record number of UK screenings

The film, 'Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition', will be shown in over 300 cinemas across the country

'The outsider': a film about the forgotten photographer Tish Murtha to open Sheffield DocFest

Murtha died suddenly in 2013, having never received recognition for her photography. But today, she is recognised as one of the most significant artists of her generation

Abenaki artist and film-maker Alanis Obomsawin’s remarkable career comes into focus at the Vancouver Art Gallery

A survey of the 90-year-old activist, artist and documentarian’s tells a parallel story about the shifting relationship between Canada and its First Nations peoples

Richard Bell’s activist art hits the big screen in Chicago

Bell is showing in Expo Chicago's sector for large and site-specific works, and is the subject of a documentary screening during the fair

Brutal demand for change: Steve McQueen's Grenfell Tower film at the Serpentine

Weeks after a fire took the lives of 72 people, the British artist, who was born nearby, shot the ruin of the 24-storey tower from a circling helicopter

Filmsreview

A film about self-taught artist Nellie Mae Rowe shows the limitations of the artist documentary genre

"This World Is Not My Own", which recently premiered at South by Southwest, parallels Rowe’s life with that of the gallerist who championed her work

Nam June Paik the prophet: documentary creates chronological collage of pioneering video artist's life

Director Amanda Kim’s "Moon Is the Oldest TV" supplements a timeline of the artist’s life with archival footage of his work

Oscarsnews

Documentary about Nan Goldin and her opioid crisis activism earns Oscar nomination

Laura Poitras's film, which follows Goldin's campaign against members of the Sackler family, has been nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category

Film on Nan Goldin and her campaign against the Sacklers shortlisted for best documentary Oscar

Laura Poitras’s “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is one of 15 films on the shortlist to be nominated in the documentary feature category at the 2023 Academy Awards