Welcome to The Watchlist 006.
Usually I send these out on a Friday, but life got in the way slightly! So apologies for the delay. To fit the Sunday theme, the picks this week are great Sunday evening documentaries - nothing too hard if you’re feeling a bit fragile after a big weekend.
01 THIS WEEK’S PICKS
Directed by Nicole Lucas Haimes · 2016 · Available for free on Youtube.
Chicken People
Did you know competitive chicken breeding is a thing?! I didn’t before this documentary. It’s got great, eccentric characters and a whole bunch of cute chicken breeds I never knew even existed. Bonus points for it being free on YouTube as well.
Watch it here.
Directed by Chris Smith · 1999 · Available to rent on Amazon Video and Apple TV, or you can find it on YouTube sometime.
American Movie
This one's a cult classic. The funniest film ever made about making a film.
Mark Borchardt is a Milwaukee filmmaker with no money, loads of debt, but really isn’t short of self belief. He's trying to make his short horror film Coven, funded by his 80-year-old Uncle Bill, who has to be talked into every cheque, and shot with his best mate Mike, who mostly plays guitar.
Every scene is a disaster and Mark just keeps going.
Directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw · 2020 · Available to rent on most major platforms.
The Truffle Hunters
This one's a gem. A handful of men in their seventies and eighties roam the forests of Piedmont at night with their dogs, digging up white truffles that sell for thousands. They won't tell anyone where they find them, and they refuse to retire.
The dogs get their own cameras strapped to their heads. Every frame looks like a painting, it’s a perfect Sunday watch.
So I did a post this week of eleven great documentaries to see in the cinema in September. Here’s a rundown of them all.
In the UK:
Already showing: Hanging by a Wire, the true story of eight people, six of them schoolboys, left dangling 900 feet up when a cable car breaks in northern Pakistan.
4th Sept: Super Nature, shot entirely on Super 8 by 40 people across 25 countries. Looks absolutely gorgeous.
7th Sept (one night only): Lomu, on rugby's first global superstar. Looks like much more than a sports doc. Already out in NZ and Australia.
11th Sept: Better Go Mad in the Wild, two twin brothers living as hermits in the Czech forest. Karlovy Vary winner, and there's a talking cow.
18th Sept: The Cycle of Love, one man's 6,000-mile cycle from India to Sweden for love. From the Virunga team.
25th Sept: Remake, Ross McElwee revisiting decades of family footage after the death of his son.
In the US:
4th Sept: Barbara Forever, an archive-driven portrait of queer cinema pioneer Barbara Hammer. Hoping it gets a UK release soon.
4th Sept: Brailled It, filmed by blind and low-vision kids at the National Braille Challenge on their own cameras. Gives Spellbound vibes.
10th Sept: The Oldest Person in the World, Sam Green's decade chasing a title that (for obvious reasons) keeps passing to someone new.
11th Sept: Black Zombie, the zombie's real roots in Haitian Vodou, and how Hollywood rewrote them.
18th Sept: The History of Concrete, John Wilson trying to make a Hallmark-formula doc about concrete. Trailer really got me hooked.
03 THIS WEEK ON DOCS TO WATCH
I helped launch YANUNI, a documentary following Indigenous chief Juma Xipaia and her husband Hugo Loss in their fight to protect the Amazon. Juma has survived six assassination attempts. It's free on YouTube, since the streamers were (as usual) shy about anything this political or environmental. Watch it here.
And the usual reminder you all have 20% off to use in the rental store… So don’t be shy and rent one of the docs I have on there, trust me - they’re good. Use code MAILER at checkout.
Thanks for reading!
See you next week.
Cheers, Patrick.