London film festival 2018: documentaries to watch out for

October’s festival brings stories about hiking as bereavement therapy, an early portrait of Putin, and the blighted holiday resort with more staff than guestsCurating documentaries can be hard because the genre encompasses so many forms.

It can be a political essay typified by Michael Moore, an archive-heavy historical, sporting or musical epic, such as the two recent Whitney Houston documentaries, a challenging dramatised documentary playing with the whole notion of truth, or just a cracking story told beautifully.

Some documentaries, such as Chloé Zhao’s recent release The Rider, even pretend not to be documentaries at all.

It’s a weird form to programme at a film festival, and it can leave curators open to criticism of being knowingly obtuse or lazily populist.The documentary programmers of the forthcoming London film festival (10-21 October) have done an impressive job of walking this line.

Their selection this year offers

Read full article