Mr. Pawlikowski, most of whose previous films have been documentaries, balances the harsh naturalism his story demands with an almost romantic sense of visual beauty.
Although the crisis was cogently covered in news reports, The Last Days of Lehman Brothers draws viewers into the drama in a way that a dry documentary featuring balance sheets and banking experts never can.
"She's a very strong woman, I'm a very weak man…" Filmed over a period of five years, this intimate and insightful documentary perfectly balances the personal and the political, telling its tale of national and international upheavals through their impact on individuals at the cutting edge of change.
"I think the only words most people hear or read and retain are 'dangerous' and 'predator' even when an article or documentary is balanced," West says.
And I'll regret it if I don't.'" Her friends suggested a blog, so she did one and is in the process of making a film called "Chill," which she described as a documentary about "balancing life, career and cheating the biological clock". Questions swirl around the egg-freezing phenomenon: Are women shouldering just another burden of creating families?
To use technical language, the story is bonkers: Bendjelloul's documentary is delicately balanced on an iceberg-sized peripeteia that is easily spoiled, so if you want to see this movie (currently in limited release, and opening nationwide throughout the summer) read no further.
And what I think what separates good documentaries from bad documentaries is finding that balance between truthfulness and storytelling.
How does one strike the balance between documentary and entertainment?
Where, this documentary asks, should the balance lie between openness and effective oversight?
The raw material of "American High" was some 2,800 hours of digital footage; about 70percentt of it shot by two fly-on-the-wall documentary crews and the balance provided by camcorded "video diaries" shot by the subjects themselves.
