Are you ready for the latest box office hits in September? This month brings a ton of fresh content, including some older documentaries that are now available to stream thanks to DocPlay and the new National Film and Sound Archive Player.

The first of these films, Heart of Darkness, comes at just the right time, as we await Francis Ford Coppola’s next passion project, Megalopolis (and as Coppola continues to make headlines for kissing extras on the film’s set).

For a more modern take on a documentary, Netflix’s The Man With 1,000 Kids tells the provocative story of a Dutch man who seems intent on fathering as many children as possible. And in New Zealand, the latest season of The Traitors is packed with suspense and intense drama.

Enjoy the show!

Occupied city

DocPlay

Steve McQueen’s Occupied City juxtaposes two narratives: the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and the COVID lockdown. Based on the book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940–1945 by Bianca Stigter (McQueen’s wife), the documentary gives the names and addresses of Jewish families murdered by the Nazis, while showing contemporary footage of these places, now marked by their banal, domestic everyday life.

The film cuts to footage of the riots taking place in Amsterdam during the COVID pandemic. McQueen seems to draw visual parallels between state control systems.

Occupied City is a four-hour long film that turns watching it into an agonizing, emotionally charged experience. If you watch it at home, you might pause and try to escape the weight of the images. But on the big screen, where I first saw it, there is no respite.

McQueen forces you to confront what it means to witness atrocities and do nothing. This cinematic endurance forces us to confront our own complicity, to ask what it really means to observe and act in a world still haunted by the echoes of that history. The disturbing parallels between past and present engage you in an uncomfortable reflection on how different forms of occupation shape urban life and memory.

– Cherine Fahd

The second season of The Traitors

Outstanding+

The first season of reality crime series The Traitors NZ somewhat undermined itself by casting a number of media personalities who had known each other for years. This somewhat diminished the tongue-in-cheek drama of the hit international series, whose premise is that the “traitors” in the group can get the others to trust them.

In the second series, once again hosted by Paul Henry in high camp mode, the producers rely on the charm and idiosyncrasies of the audience. An impeccably cast collection of “normals” are housed in the picturesque Castle Claremont on the aptly named Mt Horrible Road and divided into loyalists and traitors.

They undertake missions to amass money for the prize pot, using quickly-built relationships to their advantage. But the real fun is watching ordinary New Zealanders, many of whom are naturally very funny, enthusiastically get involved in the show’s deceptions.

The season has good pacing, strong story highlights and plenty of opportunities for players to shine. There’s no villain edit here (although grinning Dungeons and Dragons game master Mark is close to giving himself one). With plenty of strategy – and a real sense that the game could go anywhere – season two is one of the strongest and most entertaining examples of New Zealand reality TV in years.

–Erin Harrington

Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse

DocPlay

Coinciding with the release of Frances Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, DocPlay is currently screening Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about the filming of Apocalypse Now (1979). If you haven’t seen it yet, the war epic follows a US Army officer serving in Vietnam who is tasked with eliminating a renegade colonel who sees himself as a god among Cambodian tribal people.

Comprised in part of footage and footage of Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, as well as outtakes and fascinating new interviews, Hearts of Darkness is a documentary film, itself a multiple award winner, that tells the story of the long, complex and chaotic filming in the Philippines that did not bode well for the award-winning movie that resulted.

Coppola’s ambitions were high, and with each passing day the shoot grew larger and spiraled out of control. The chaos was compounded by Coppola’s intuitive, complacent approach to work. He shot “irrationally.” He wrote shooting schedules with “scene unknown,” encouraged drug-addicted actors to improvise, and procrastinated over the ending.

Eleanor documents Frances’ doubts about completing the film, which he calls “the idiodyssey” – and his fear of producing a pretentious flop. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong, from a typhoon that kills 200 people to actor Martin Sheen having a heart attack.

This was filmmaking as war: a psychedelic rock-and-roll war like Vietnam itself. And as Eleanor says, “It’s a kind of powerful exhilaration to think you’ve lost everything.”

– Joy McEntee

Face the music

NFSA Players

Bob Connelly and Robin Anderson’s extraordinary 2001 documentary Facing The Music is one of many classic Australian films available to watch on the National Film and Sound Archive’s (NFSA) new, affordable player.

This film is a candid portrait of composer and teacher Anne Boyd and her radicalisation in the face of cuts to university funding by the Howard government. Set in the music department at Sydney University, the film moves between shots of talented young music students and tense staff meetings as Boyd and her colleagues grapple with their growing budget deficit. They try to cover up the budget problems by teaching more courses and (agonisingly) trying to attract outside sponsorship. They work in crowded offices and teach in shabby buildings, but their commitment to their students is evident.

In Boyd, Connelly and Anderson have the perfect protagonist for a story about the funding crisis in higher education. Boyd goes from being an academic who refuses to strike because teaching is her “calling” to being a picket line worker. But the budget deficit still looms – and Boyd and her colleagues are faced with difficult decisions.

Since this film was made, universities have only become more neoliberal. This beautiful film reminds us that the role of the university as a place of knowledge is still worth fighting for.

– Michelle Arrow

The man with 1,000 children

Netflix

This docuseries was a huge hit on Netflix not too long ago, and not surprisingly. It follows the exploits of a fertility scammer who uses the internet to promote his sperm services. It’s the kind of contemporary wake-up call that would have the streamer’s recommendation system in turmoil anyway.

In addition to promoting himself online, Jonathan Jacob Meijer spread his talent by combining regular trips to treasure troves around the world with travel and lifestyle vlogs on YouTube (an archive that must have made the producers cry tears of joy). The result: The Dutchman became the father of many, many children, stretching as far away as Australia.

The series shows how Meijer deceived women with ticking biological clocks by making himself indispensable and accessible, even offering to donate his DNA “naturally.” Under the online pseudonym “Viking,” Meijer was also able to exploit the wishes of prospective parents seeking “best” genetic material.

I appreciate the empowering aspects of the show as it follows the victims’ stories so closely. Many of those interviewed are loving and grateful parents who are understandably appalled by the situation. It’s great to see them banding together to humiliate Meijer’s hubris.

Overall, it’s a clever story with plenty of twists and turns, and some funny (if sometimes cheesy) visual gags. Maybe not entertainment for the whole family, but definitely something to talk about.

– Phoebe Hart