Thursday, September 02, 2004

What I'll be watching on TV tonight

Mission Accomplished: Langan in Iraq - BBC2 11.20pm-12.50am tonight.

Sean Langan makes brilliant 'behind the lines' documentaries. His 2001 'Langan Behind the Lines' series include films made in Afghanistan and Iraq. He exposes the repressive nature of regimes, while getting to know people as individuals. He also made 'Travels of a Gringo', looking at the impact of globalisation on the lives of people in south America.

1 comment:

clarrie said...

Kathryn Flett on the programme
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1278482,00.html

and AA Gill in the Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7946-1205544,00.html

"The best history programme this week came to tables still steaming from the oven of current events. Sean Langan’s first-hand account of life in Iraq, Mission Accomplished: Langan in Iraq ..., was a brilliant, timely, brave and humane piece of first-person journalism. Everything that is wrong and reprehensible about Michael Moore is right and admirable about Sean Langan. There is a continuing war in newsrooms about the place of first-person journalism as opposed to third-person reporting. In an ideal and open world, you get both, and this was a great example of how first-hand accounts give you a sense of atmosphere and place that news film, with its lexicon of images that are by their nature staccato and repetitive, doesn’t. "