Everyone knows the names of their favourite drama directors but who are the Tarantinos and Scorseses of the cinematic documentary world? With the current resurgence of the screen documentary, Making Movies celebrates the films and filmmakers who focus on real people and real issues, telling stories, stories with the power to change our perception of the world.
Kevin McDonald - 'Touching The Void' 'One Day In September'
McDonald would be filmmaking royalty, if such a term existed. The grandson of producer Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes, A Matter Of Life And Death) and brother to Andrew McDonald, (producer of Trainspotting and The Beach) McDonald won an Oscar for his first cinema doc, One Day In September, the tale of the bungled rescue of the Israeli athletic team in the 1972 Munich Olympics, when they were taken hostage by the PLO.
Touching The Void brought him a second Oscar nomination, for a film that's breathtaking in its dramatic power and ambition. The premise is simple a reconstruction of the now famous expedition to climb the Siula Grande mountain in Argentina using interview and reconstruction.
As the subjects both gave interviews, we knew they had both survived. So where is the suspense? In both September and Void, McDonald concentrates less on the when or why, but on the how - it is his masterful storytelling that floods both tales with tension.
Also intriguing is the open discussion about the issues in question: death and mortality, ambition and failure, and the basic struggle to survive against the odds. The audience are left by McDonald to ponder these for themselves.
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