Documentaries about the working class will only feel authentic when they are made by people who have experienced hardship
Documentary as a genre is sometimes regarded as being made by and for do-gooders enjoying, as the Sex Pistols put it, a cheap holiday in other people’s misery. That isn’t always inaccurate. There have, of course, been exemplary films about people living in hardship, from the original poverty documentary Housing Problems to the Why Poverty? series, an ambitious international co-production shown on the BBC in 2012. But more often than not the people making films and programmes on this subject neglect to involve anyone behind the camera who has direct experience of being poor and vulnerable.
That’s how we ended up with a show such as Channel 4’s Benefits Street, the 2014 series about Birmingham’s James Turner Street, which was accused of being “poverty porn” for focusing too...
Documentary as a genre is sometimes regarded as being made by and for do-gooders enjoying, as the Sex Pistols put it, a cheap holiday in other people’s misery. That isn’t always inaccurate. There have, of course, been exemplary films about people living in hardship, from the original poverty documentary Housing Problems to the Why Poverty? series, an ambitious international co-production shown on the BBC in 2012. But more often than not the people making films and programmes on this subject neglect to involve anyone behind the camera who has direct experience of being poor and vulnerable.
That’s how we ended up with a show such as Channel 4’s Benefits Street, the 2014 series about Birmingham’s James Turner Street, which was accused of being “poverty porn” for focusing too...
- 6/25/2018
- by Charlie Phillips
- The Guardian - Film News
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