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Blog posts tagged with 'Alexander Nanau'

Two Romanian Docs in Book on 100 Most Compelling Documentary Films- Friday, January 13, 2023

Two Romanian Docs in Book on 100 Most Compelling Documentary Films

New book recommendation: “Well Documented” by Ian Haydn Smith

Corneliu Porumboiu’s Infinite Football and Alexander Nanau’s Collective are included among the 100 most compelling international documentaries, each with the power to radically change our perceptions and challenge the way we see the world.

Author Ian Haydn Smith, a good friend of the Romanian Film Festival in London and host of our Q&As for more than ten years, has recently published a new book. This is Well Documented: The Essential Documentaries that Prove the Truth is More Fascinating than Fiction.

Every so often a documentary comes along with the power to change the way you think, to share alternative perspectives, to make you furious about injustice or warm your heart. Contained in Well Documented are documentaries that fulfil these criteria and astound viewers around the world; real-life stories to stop you in your tracks, bring tears to your eyes and put your heart in your mouth. This book delves deep into how these films were made, what makes them great, and also what other films you might like if you loved these ones. A foreword from BAFTA and Grammy-winning director Asif Kapadia helps situate this book as one of the invaluable works on cinema today.

Among the 100 gems of the genre, Ian Haydn Smith included Infinite Football and Collective. In Infinite Football (2018), Corneliu Porumboiu talks about his love of football with his friend, Laurentiu Ginghina, who wants to change and streamline “the beautiful game”, and to free it from all restraints. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Collective (2019) follows a crack team of investigators at the Romanian newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor as they try to uncover a vast healthcare scandal that came on the footsteps of the tragedy of the Collective nightclub fire, where innocent people died or had their lives radically changed because of greed and corruption.

Well Documented: The Essential Documentaries that Prove the Truth is More Fascinating than Fiction, by Ian Haydn Smith
White Lion Publishing (4 Oct. 2022), ‎ English, Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN-10: 0711267995, ISBN-13: 978-0711267992
Order from Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Well-Documented-Essential-Documentaries-Fascinating/dp/0711267995