Past screening

Guardian Documentaries Presents…

Directed by: Various
Runtime: 1hr 30min Year: 2023

Details

Directed by: Various
Runtime: 1hr 30min Year: 2023

An evening of short documentaries commissioned by The Guardian, featuring some big hits from the previous months plus a sneak preview of a new film.

Guardian documentaries are short films made by global filmmakers for a global audience, telling stories of the people, places and situations less covered by the media. Centred around hearing directly from the participants in stories, Guardian documentaries feature the best of documentary storytelling and video journalism.

The Island
Dir. Gabrielle Brady / 20’
Christmas Island, off the coast of Australia: here 50 million crabs make their slow and ancient migration from the jungle to the ocean’s edge, while thousands of people seeking asylum are indefinitely held in a high security detention facility. Poh Lin, a trauma counsellor living on the island, bears witness to the dramatic stories and decline of those being detained.

Dearborn Michagan
Dir. Katharine Round and Ben Steele /16’
In the last 12 months the city of Dearborn, Michigan, has been thrown into conflict. At its heart, the conflict is about fear, ideology and identity politics – and what it means to be an American. Dearborn, home to the largest mosque in North America, is a place of apparent contradictions: simultaneously a sleepy, affluent suburb and yet also the subject of rumours about Isis terror cells and sharia law.

Home Match
Dir. Alisa Kovalenko / 18’
One crucial year in the life of Alina Shilova, a young Ukrainian woman born and raised in the poor suburbs of Kiev, who is torn between playing football and looking after her family. Alina’s life has always been based around playing football and she was considered for the Ukrainian football team. Her coach knows she is talented but Alina is failing to live up to her potential.

Erica: Man Maded
Dir. Ilinca Calugareanu / 15’
Erica is 23. She has a beautiful, neutral face and speaks with a synthesised voice. She has a degree of autonomy – but can’t move her hands yet. Hiroshi Ishiguro is her ‘father’ and the bad boy of Japanese robotics. Together they will redefine what it means to be human and reveal that the future is closer than we might think.

On the Road
Dir. Piers Sanderson / 21’
This immersive short documentary goes deeply into the lives of Nigerian girls smuggled to Europe and the social workers who dedicate their lives to try and help them.