Tag: TV producer

Prime Minister

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 5 December 2025
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Directors – Michelle Walshe, Lindsay Utz – 2025 – US, New Zealand – Cert. 12a – 102m

*****

A portrait of Rt Hon Dame Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s 40th Prime Minister – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, December 5th

There has never been a documentary quite like this before, and perhaps there never will be again. For one thing, it turns out that Jacinda Ardern’s partner Clarke Gayford is an established TV producer who shot a wealth of home movie footage, albeit with professional equipment, throughout the period for which she served as New Zealand’s Prime Minister. For another, this home movie footage covers her pregnancy and the early years of her daughter Neve. For a third, as an MP she became involved with a project in which MPs would record their thoughts at various points during their tenure. When she agreed to this, no-one, including herself, had any idea that she would subsequently become Prime Minister. And that’s the fourth reason: this is a portrait of a PM in office who had no intention of being either a party leader or the Prime Minister of a country. And then who suddenly found herself the sole candidate for the post of leading New Zealand’s Labour Party weeks ahead of a General Election, in which she led the party to victory,

In this documentary, Jacinda (as I shall call her) describes being the leader of a country as “the worst job in politics”.… Read the rest

Tags advice, Andrew Little, Antarctic, ascendancy, authenticity, autobiographical family footage, automatic weapons, baby, backlash, being oneself, Boris Johnson, Boston, bump, buyback programme, camped out on the lawn, child’s early years, Christchurch mosque shootings, Clarke Gayford, cleared by the authorities, closed borders, conspiracy theories, couple, COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-free, crises, Decision To Leave, Deputy Leader, electable leader, Ernest Shackleton, events, explorer, family life, focus groups, fully-rounded, General Election, gun law reform, gun laws, home movie, human lives, husbands and wives, immigration. Let’s Do This, in office, in which a man shot about a hundred people, intention, Jacinda Ardern, kindness, labour, Labour Party, Lindsay Utz, Massachusetts, Michelle Walshe, mother, motherhood, mothers and daughters, MP, MPs record thoughts, New Zealand, office, optimist, parenting duties, Parliament Building, partner, pleased to meet you, PM in office, political party, poll ratings, pregnancy, pregnant. pregnancy, press conference, prime minister, Q-Anon, redesign yourself, right wing rhetoric, semi-automatic weapons, service to others, ship locked by ice, social media, social welfare, someone who doesn’t do economics, starting a fire, stepping down, survival of his men rather, tape recordings, the worst job in politics, TV producer, United Nations, US, victory, weight on your shoulders, world manifesto

Features Live Action Movies

September 5

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 6 February 2025
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Director – Tim Fehlbaum – 2024 – US, Germany – Cert. 15 – 95m

****1/2

A dramatisation of the events of September 5, 1972 when broadcast TV sports journalists found themselves covering the terrorist kidnapping of Israeli athletes in the Olympic village – out in UK cinemas on Thursday, February 6th

There have been movies about the terrorist incident at the 1972 Olympics before: the documentary One Day in September (Kevin McDonald, 1999) and the drama about its aftermath Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005). Like the latter, September 5 is a drama. What marks it out as different, however, is that it tells the story from the point of view of broadcast journalists working out of a studio.

In this respect, its feeling for capturing the processes of live US network television renders it not entirely dissimilar to recent release Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024), yet in many ways, it couldn’t be more different. Saturday Night is about the birth of a legendary US comedy show; September 5 starts in an arguably similar area of entertainment (live sports coverage) before swiftly moving into the wider, more problematic area of live broadcast news coverage. The coverage of the incident around which September 5 is based forever changed the face of broadcast television media.… Read the rest

Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Contestant

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 29 November 2024
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Director – Clair Titley – 2023 – UK – Cert.12a – 90m

*****

How a man’s incarceration in a room, broadcast on TV, became a media sensation in Japan– out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 29th

Before The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), which would be released later the same year, a couple of years before Big Brother and the start of the UK’s reality TV phenomenon, a Japanese TV show breaks new boundaries. A man is put in a room where he had to earn a million yen in prizes from magazine competitions before being released. The facilities are basic – there is a sink unit and a gas ring, but no cooking utensils. The whole situation is filmed by two cameras. The man in the room, Nasubi, knows it is being filmed, but has been told by the producer that most of it will be thrown away. He is completely unaware that this setup is being edited into a weekly, six-minute TV spot and going out on the weekly, magazine format, endurance TV show Denpa Shonen.

The Denpa Shonen show is the brainchild of TV producer Tsuchiya, who for this segment auditions a dozen or so male hopefuls and chooses one of them, Nasubi, by lottery.… Read the rest

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