Documentary
Short Film Screening and Discussion: Framing the Future of Water
A panel of professionals from a range of disciplines, including journalists and water experts, will come together for a unique event to talk about one of the biggest challenges facing our planet today – the global water crisis. The future of water isn’t a simple topic – it is vast and can often be overwhelming. During the discussion we will explore how this topic can be made accessible through the power of storytelling and film.
Screening: They Will Have to Kill Us First + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Johanna Schwartz.
In 2012, three extremist groups captured most of northern Mali – an area the size of the UK and France combined. The cities were virtually shut down, sharia law was instituted and all music was banned. They Will Have To Kill Us First follows a number of prominent musicians in Mali in the wake of a jihadist takeover and subsequent banning of music.
Screening: Among the Believers + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Mohammed Naqvi and producer Jonathan Goodman Levitt.
Charismatic cleric Abdul Aziz Ghazi, an ISIS supporter and Taliban ally, is waging jihad against the Pakistani state. His dream is to impose a strict version of Sharia law throughout the country, as a model for the world. With unprecedented access, Among the Believers follows Aziz on his very personal quest to create an Islamic utopia, during the bloodiest period in Pakistan’s modern history.
New Scottish Documentary Season: Scotland on Screen
Scotland on Screen, part of our New Scottish Documentary season, is an evening of short films produced with assistance from the Scottish Documentary Institute and showcasing the diverse beauty of the Scottish landscape, immersing viewers in breathtaking scenes and remarkable stories from communities across the country.
The Art of Collaboration: Musical Score for Documentary
We will be joined by a panel of some of the UK’s most celebrated composers and filmmakers to discuss the process of constructing a score for documentary, exploring the collaborative relationship between composers and directors, creative approaches to composition and how music can ascribe meaning to images.
New Scottish Documentary Season: 16 Years Till Summer + Q&A
This screening is part of our New Scottish Documentary season and will be followed by a Q&A with director Lou McLoughlan.
Uisdean wants forgiveness. After 16 years in prison, he has returned home to nurse his ageing father in a small village in the Scottish Highlands. But Uisdean also needs to rebuild his life. With the isolation of the Highland landscape both a blessing and curse, he begins the hard graft of reinventing himself. What follows is as much a struggle with tradition and Highland identity as it is with the weight of his own past.
Shorts at the Frontline Club: Inside the Artist’s Studio
This April our monthly short film night is dedicated to profiling artists from around the world, who work with an array of mediums and represent eccentric, inspiring and pioneering personalities.
Screening – This is Exile: Diaries of Child Refugees + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Mani Benchelah.
Over the course of a year, Emmy Award-winning director Mani Benchelah made this intimate portrait of Syrian refugee children forced to flee from the violence of civil war to neighbouring Lebanon. It tells the stories of the children’s lives in their own words and captures the moving truth of how they deal with loss, hardship and dashed hopes.
Al Jazeera Preview Screening: Cuba for Sale + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with reporters Juliana Ruhfus, Seamus Mirodan and others.
Cuba was the first communist state to be created in the western hemisphere – it’s also the last one standing. The President insists that these measures are designed to preserve, rather than dismantle, Cuban socialism. But can he successfully open up the economy without betraying the promise of a classless society upon which the Cuban state was built? Juliana Ruhfus and Seamus Mirodan investigate.
Screening: Boxing for Freedom + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with directors Juan Antonio Moreno Amador and Silvia Venegas.
Sadaf Rahimi is the most accomplished female boxer in Afghanistan and well known within her community in Kabul, though her talent for the sport attracts social ridicule as well as fame. Sadaf’s boxing and academic achievements have led her into public visibility and turned her into a role model for many Afghan young women – although her athletic career has been jeopardised by death threats and interference from the Afghan Boxing Association, which barred her from travelling to compete in the 2012 London Olympics.
Documentary Shorts: Telling Big Stories in Short Format
A panel of industry professionals will come together to discuss methods for short documentary production – focusing on cinematography, editing and storytelling to capture the essence of big stories in short format.
Short Documentaries for Valentine’s Day
This February, our monthly short film night will showcase a selection of documentary shorts exploring the themes of love, romance and longing. Featuring unforgettable stories from across the world and capturing love in extraordinary circumstances, this line-up will have something for everyone.
Short Films at LSE: Whose Utopia?
The Frontline Club is delighted to partner with the London School of Economics in programming an evening of short films during the 2016 Literary Festival on the theme Utopias. This is an external screening taking place at the Sheikh Zayed Theatre (New Academic Building, 54 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2A 3LJ). The event is free and open to all.
Screening: My Jihad + Q&A
In the last year alone over 400 young Belgians have traveled to Syria. In My Jihad, reporter Rudi Vranckx visits the region of Vilvoorde to investigate why a number of young Belgians from the area are becoming radicalised, and how leaders of the Muslim community are working to combat this trend.
Screening: Guantanamo’s Child + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Michelle Shepard and others.
Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was captured by American forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and spent a decade imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, tells his own story in this documentary portrait from directors Patrick Reed and Michelle Shepard.
Cinema for Peace Short Film Night: Refugee Stories
The Frontline Club is delighted to partner with Cinema for Peace to bring you a night of short films illuminating the experiences of refugees and displaced persons from across the world.
Making Change: Documentary Filmmaking and Social Impact
A panel of filmmakers and industry professionals will come together to discuss how they’ve carried their messages beyond the screen to incite engagement from viewers and response to social issues and injustices. Subjects to be discussed include storytelling methods for inspiring action, building campaigns through multimedia platforms, and engaging with the journalistic community.
UK Premiere: At Home in the World + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Andreas Koefoed.
This remarkably intimate and touching documentary focuses on one Danish Red Cross school for refugees, where classrooms are filled with children from more than twelve countries. The students have had to learn Danish while adjusting to new surroundings and, in some cases, dealing with the traumas of conflict.
Al Jazeera Preview Screening – Kisilu: The Climate Diaries + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with producer Hugh Hartford.
Kisilu tells the story of Kisilu Musya, a Kenyan farmer living at the front line of our changing climate. The film intimately documents his family’s struggle against the extreme storms and drought that threaten to destroy their home and crops. Determined to educate his community about methods to combat the damaging impact of extreme weather, Kisilu becomes an impassioned advocate of climate change awareness.
Shorts at the Frontline Club
Join us for an evening of short documentaries from different parts of the world, covering a wide range of topics. Shorts at the Frontline Club showcases moving, striking and funny films, exploring the diverse faces of documentary filmmaking.
Screening: I Am Sun Mu + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Adam Sjöberg. I Am Sun Mu documents the life and work of North Korean defector and pop artist ‘Sun Mu’. In North Korea, Sun Mu was a prolific propaganda artist for Kim Jong-un’s regime. After swimming to safety and beginning a new life in South Korea, Sun Mu turned his skills against North Korean leadership, satirising those who he once worshipped.
The Lives of Others: Factual Filmmaking and Working with Characters
Several acclaimed documentary filmmakers come together for an evening discussing the art of character-driven documentary and working with characters.
Screening and Discussion: A World Without Words
For this unique event a selection of short documentaries by celebrated ethnographic filmmaker Vincent Moon will be screened in alternation with an informal discussion by the director of London’s Institute of Philosophy Dr Barry Smith. He will explore the neural correlates of meaning, music and language in the context of each film, to offer the audience an explanation of the role of language in subjective mental life.
Screening: Yallah! Underground + Q&A
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Farid Eslam via Skype.
From the early days of the Arab Spring that sparked hopes for change to the years of instability and political tension that followed, this enthralling documentary follows the stories of young prominent underground artists from across the Middle East during the period of 2009 to 2013.
Green Caravan Film Festival Screening: Babushkas of Chernobyl
Some 200 women defiantly cling to their ancestral homeland in Chernobyl’s radioactive “Exclusion Zone.” While most of their neighbours have long since fled and their husbands have gradually died off, this stubborn sisterhood is hanging on — even, oddly, thriving — while trying to cultivate an existence on toxic earth.
Green Caravan Film Festival Screening: I Am the People
I Am The People presents a charming, funny and fascinating portrait of a family, far from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s rural South, as they follow the Tahrir uprising. The film charts their progression from amused distant observers of the events in Cairo through their increasing engagement and politicisation.
London Georgian Film Festival Screening: Kulturfilms with Live Score
The London Georgian Film Festival is returning in its tenth year with another exciting programme of the best of Georgian cinema. On 2 October 2015, the Frontline Club is partnering with the festival to host a screening of short classic documentaries from Georgia along with a live score.
The evening will be presented by the writer Aka Morchiladze, who has written some of the bestselling prose of post-Soviet Georgian literature.
Green Caravan Film Festival at the Frontline Club
The Green Caravan Film Festival (GCFF) is a travelling festival of environmental and socially conscious films. It has toured Kuwait and Dubai for four years and now makes its London debut with screenings at the Frontline Club in west London and Rich Mix in east London. The Frontline Club will be hosting three days of screenings showcasing the best of the festival, taking place in the evenings on 29-31 October.
Green Caravan Film Festival Screening: The Wanted 18
The Wanted 18 recreates an astonishing true story: the Israeli army’s pursuit of 18 cows, whose independent milk production on a Palestinian collective farm was declared “a threat to the national security of the state of Israel.”
Screening: Deep Web + Q&A
Deep Web gives the inside story of one of the most important and riveting digital crime sagas of the century – the arrest of Ross William Ulbricht. In May 2015, the 30-year-old entrepreneur was accused and convicted of being ‘Dread Pirate Roberts,’ creator and operator of online black market Silk Road.
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Alex Winter via Skype.