Five Pieces on Documentary, Power, and Control
Steve Rickinson, Managing Editor of Modern Times Review, curates today’s HFF TakeOver
I’m Steve Rickinson, Managing Editor of Modern Times Review, an independent European “cinepolitical” documentary magazine based between Bucharest and Siracusa and developed in close collaboration with editor-in-chief Truls Lie. Truls, who is Norwegian, brings three decades of editorial experience from newspapers and magazines, along with his own practice in essayistic nonfiction filmmaking. I’m American, and around us sits a pool of international critics, journalists, academics, philosophers, and other contributors who approach documentary as part of a larger cultural and political field. We are a fully independent, non-commercial publication, operating on a minimal budget between Bucharest and Siracusa, answerable to nobody, funded by our readers.
Our archive now runs to nearly 2,000 film and book reviews, interviews, reports, industry news, and critical essays, with two seasonal digital magazines produced annually. Modern Times Review follows nonfiction through questions of power, media, conflict, climate, and the control pressures shaping how reality is framed and understood. We also teach workshops for young critics and have done so in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Italy, and Uzbekistan.
You’re catching us in the thick of our busiest month. Modern Times Review is partnered with five major events this March: Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, FIFDH in Geneva, One World in Prague, Movies That Matter in The Hague, and CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. Truls is on the ground in Thessaloniki, and I am filing from CPH:DOX.
For this TakeOver, I selected five MTR pieces that approach documentary through pressure. All five are free to read. What links them is use. Each offers something practical to filmmakers, critics, programmers, and cinephiles trying to understand what nonfiction cinema can do under difficult social conditions. Together, they form a small field guide to how current documentaries hold on to urgency and political force. If any of this speaks to you, subscribe to our free Substack newsletter, follow us on Instagram and Facebook. A small donation unlocks our seasonal digital edition.
Palestine ‘36: A Mirror to the Times
Francesca Borri’s piece on Palestine ’36 restores historical depth to a subject that is often stripped of it. Through Annamarie Jacir’s narrative film, Borri revisits the 1936 uprising as a point of origin whose consequences have never really lifted. She writes through British colonial policy, expropriation, and administrative violence with a sense of how deeply dispossession settles into everyday life and collective memory. For filmmakers, the takeaway is that historical framing is not background material. In many cases, it is the work itself.
Orwell: 2+2=5: The Rat Cage Has Been Digitised
In his piece on Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, John Hawkins stays close to the way language gets worn down in public life. Words are repeated until they go blunt, bent by ideology, and swallowed by media noise until they barely mean what they claim to mean. In Hawkins’ reading, Orwell does not sit safely in the past. He feels alarmingly close. That carries a clear lesson for filmmakers and critics alike. Nonfiction doesn’t work through images alone, but also on verbal precision. Once language is degraded, interpretation becomes harder and manipulation becomes easier.
Mr Nobody Against Putin: The Nobody Who Saw Everything
Nick Holdsworth’s review of Mr Nobody Against Putin brings the discussion into the school system and the everyday rituals through which state ideology settles into ordinary life. The Oscar-nominated, BAFTA-winning 2025 film follows Pavel Talankin, a school videographer in Karabash, whose work gradually becomes a record of militarised education after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It also reveals how ideology shapes a child’s sense of belonging and duty through habits, symbols, and routines. One of the most useful takeaways here is that a documentary often becomes most revealing when it records systems from within. Schools, ceremonies, routines, and bureaucratic performance can tell us as much about power as any spectacular event.
Melt: What Vanishes While We Watch
Aleksandra Biernacka’s piece on Melt centres on the way ecological collapse enters ordinary life long before it is fully acknowledged in public. She writes with a sense of proximity, staying close to the textures of thaw, instability, and environmental strain. Here, in his distinct style, Nikolaus Geyrhalter has created a documentary shaped by the lived atmosphere of climate change. The crisis no longer occupies the level of policy discussion. Now, it settles into the material conditions through which people try to make sense of the world around them. For filmmakers working around climate, the film feels like a genuine lesson. Ecological cinema is more affecting when it trusts atmosphere, proximity, and material reality over explanation alone.
Cutting Through Rocks: The Woman Who Wouldn’t Sit Down
We close with the Oscar-nominated Cutting Through Rocks, bringing this list down to simple, everyday courage. In Melita Zajc’s piece, Sara Shahverdi emerges as a woman working within the dense pressures of rural Iranian life, pushing against the expectations placed around her as the first woman elected to her village council. What gives the film its force is the way change happens through small, stubborn acts of teaching, organising, and refusing to disappear into the order already set for her. The practical reminder here is that a documentary does not need geopolitical scale to feel politically urgent (although this is not the case at the current moment with this film). Local struggle, embodied persistence, and close attention to daily life can carry great force when a film stays close to the real conditions through which change is lived.
These five films recover buried histories, stay alert to damaged language, observe ideology where it becomes ordinary, make planetary crisis feel lived, and recognise political courage at the scale of everyday life. For filmmakers, programmers, and viewers, all of this feels like a useful reminder right now. Documentary still matters most when it helps us see pressure clearly and remain answerable to the worlds we claim to represent.
Our thanks to Ted for entrusting the keys to HopeForFilm.
Steve Rickinson, Managing Editor, Modern Times Review
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