HIGH-END DOCUMENTARY
FACTUAL TV
content,” says Pearlman. “The players are part of it and understand their brand is far greater than the play on the field.” 72 Films is behind upcoming Amazon All or
Nothing: Arsenal. Co-founder of the indie and executive producer Mark Raphael says that after the initial discussions everyone involved takes a leap of faith. “They let us get on with, it it’s a relationship built on trust that grows over time.” For Pearlman, while he observes that access
has underpinned a boom in sports documentary, “the flip-side is that the market is saturated.” He takes his hat off to the huge access of the All of Nothing series and Netflix’s FI vehicle Drive to Survive and its spin-offs in the less charted sporting territory of tennis and golf. “Two years ago, no-one would have bought them for love or money. But Box to Box have changed the dynamic, by changing the format.” At Noah Media, founder John McKenna
remembers sports interviews where most of the footage would stay on the cutting room floor. “We were told time and again that people are only interested in the game,” says McKenna. “That perception is massively different now.” Noah has had success with Finding Jack
Charlton for the BBC, Arsene Wenger: Invincible for Amazon Prime and Canal + and 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible for Netflix. The indie recently entered a development deal with Sky Studios. “Definitely sports documentary has exploded,” says McKenna. “Sport has a warm audience already. Commissioners and buyers
EXPERIMENTATION: DOCUMENTARY TAKES ON NEW FORMS
The world of documentary has been a petri dish of experimentation in recent years. Filmmakers are inspired to take risks and reimagine form, bolstered by demand for stand-out programming and investors prepared to back riskier approaches. Since Asif Kapadia’s Senna in 2010 and the increasing volume of user-generated footage, archive has come front and centre. In 2021, think Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s Summer of Soul, or 9/11 documentaries, including Life Under Attack from Brook Lapping and Nat Geo’s 9/11: One Day in America. Upcoming Wall to Wall BBC documentary The AIDS Tapes is using actors to lip synch audio archive. Alongside the rise of graphic novels, comes animated documentary: in Flee, director Jonas Rasmussen uses a blend of animation and live action to tell the dramatic story of escape and protect the
identity of the protagonist. On the Oscars’ documentary shortlist, Flee rubs shoulders with Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground, which uses split screen, montage and layers of sound and images. And Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s The Rescue takes dramatic reconstruction to new heights. At Sky, recent examples include the use of a stylised model of the farmhouse at the centre of Mindhouse four-parter The Bambers: Murder at the Farm, or the use of actors in Royal Bastards: The Rise of the Tudors, from 72 Films, where actors feature in dramatic reconstruction but also appear in plain clothes, as commentators. While the soap-style of Drive to Survive, from London-based Box to Box, following personal storylines within an entire sport, has already spawned several other series in the same mould.
Spring 2022
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