Gloom and doom

A young American documentary film-maker recently said to me, ‘Do you want to know why no British documentary film-maker would ever make a film about something like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations? There was no blood! No violence! No crack babies! No tears! People were happy, and one thing British documentary film-makers hate is happy people and happy endings. If you want to get a doc made and shown in Britain, you gotta go for gloom and doom.’

Of course my American friend was exaggerating — but by how much? Think British documentary and what comes to mind? For me it’s Pete Postlethwaite wagging a finger and making apocalyptic warnings of ecological disaster in The Age of Stupid. Or it’s something terribly sad like Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life, the story of a young black woman whose body was found in her council flat — three years after she had died. When it comes to the feel-bad doc, Britain leads the way.

But now there’s a growing number of dissenting voices within the documentary community who think it’s time that Brit-docs (and the documentary festivals that promote them) stop being so dour and depressing. Michael Stewart, festival organiser of the Open City Documentary Festival, is one of them. He told me, ‘In retrospect I realised how many gloomy documentaries we were showing — films about mass murderers, war criminals, cocaine gangs, sado-masochistic relationships, the tragedy of life among the down and outs.’

Hussain Currimbhoy denies that it’s all gloom and doom. He’s the man responsible for the selection of films at the Sheffield Documentary Festival. (This annual event is regarded by many in the documentary community as the Cannes of documentary film-making.) Currimbhoy concedes that Britain’s gloom reputation may have been true years ago but ‘anyone who says that now is just out of touch with reality’.