It is also, paradoxically, a novel of harsh, documentary realism..
In the early 1950s, Italian cinema was turning away from the politically charged movement known as neorealism, with its harsh, documentary-like depiction of daily life.
This harsh pseudo-documentary was rife with innuendo and emblematic of the state media programming served to viewers by an increasingly anxious Russian government.
Shot over two years in the city dubbed "the capital of the revolution", Talal Derki's harsh, jolting documentary traces the protesters' journey from pacifism to violence and finally towards martyrdom, the only ending they can envisage once the conflict turns against them.
Shia LaBeouf plays the 15-year-old Dito and his story is told in a harsh, semi-documentary manner with no expletives deleted (Dito's former girlfriend, played by the lovely Rosario Dawson, says 'fuck' more than 30 times in one single outburst).
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.
They tried appealing but the rules for appeal would have pushed the film's release date back months (that we don't have), but it's personally frustrating to see documentaries hit with harsh ratings that would impact the potential audience.
The documentary was a harsh, unvarnished but not unsympathetic look at ambition, and the ferocity it takes to stay in the entertainment business.
The entries, every one a harsh gem, riffed on a documentary about the actor who played Big Bird, but they also satirized the way that the media had recently been strip-mining Letterman's decades on television, seeking revealing nuggets.
When Gutiérrez returned to Cuba in 1954 he made a documentary about the harsh working conditions of charcoal burners in Havana, El Megano (The Charcoal Worker), arguably Cuba's first revolutionary film.
