Thrills, love, humour - it's all at the Dochouse

Among The Believers

Image by Among The Believers

Forget over-hyped Hollywood films and lily-white Oscars, and get on down to the Bertha Dochouse.

Thrills? Try Cartel Land, where Mad Max meets Mexico, or avalanches and punch-ups on Everest, in Sherpa. A tangled tale of love? Go for A Syrian Love Story. 

What I am saying is: documentaries are not earnest, didactic lessons – they are exciting, dramatic, romantic, wistful, gentle, startling. And informative.

And now they have their first dedicated London screen in the Curzon Bloomsbury (formerly the Renoir).

With up to five screenings a day (and £5 tickets for some shows), the Bertha Dochouse is approaching its first anniversary.

It s existence reflects a rise in the popularity of documentaries, which Dochouse founder and director Elizabeth Wood, in an interview in The Huffington Post, said was sparked in 2002 by Spellbound – not the Hitchcock thriller, but a film that follows the fortunes of eight youngsters working their way toward the finals of a national spelling championship in Washington.

That hugely entertaining film spawned a genre of competition docs that ranged from young ballroom dancers to Afghan star (“In Afghanistan, you risk your life to sing”). But docs come in all shapes and sizes and on every conceivable topic.

That’s a problem for the Bertha Dochouse, because audiences for Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict are likely to be completely different from those interested in Land Grabbing, which looks at multinational purchases of land in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

With a tiny budget, admits Dochouse producer Jenny Horwell, that often means screening a film with scant publicity and relying on word of mouth to spread news of its merits – as happened with Sherpa.

One of the biggest surprise hits, says Horwell, has been A Syrian Love Story. It  seems like nothing: the story of a marriage and its disintegration, but it’s a riveting fly-on-the-wall ‘s-eye-view of a relationship forged in desperate times and under strain by conflict and exile.

Post-screening Q&As, sometimes via the now more reliable Skype, adds a bonus bang to the audience’s bucks.

However eclectic the films, there are discernible patterns in documentary making.

“A few years ago there were a lot of big budget documentaries about environmental issues,” says Horwell. “Nowadays there are more documentaries about music and more biographies.

“But there are an extraordinary amount of documentaries out there, and some brilliant ones,” she adds. Some get taken up by Netflix and TV channels, which gives them a far wider audience.  There are also many docs that get a screening at a festival but do not get picked up for wider distribution – like the recent Patience Patience You’ll go To paradise, which follows a group of older North African migrant women in Belgium, whose children have grown up, as they begin to venture into the world around them. Only Dochouse has screened it. “Ideally, our programme is a mixture of the two, the successful and the ones that few people will get to see.”

A key factor in the documentary boom is what Horwell calls ”the democratisation of the film-making process”. They are easier and cheaper to make because of changes in technology in the last five years.

“Bertha Dochouse was a massive experiment,” she says, “and to be honest it was a huge experiment for people who hadn’t programmed a cinema. So it’s been a big learning curve since the opening.”

* Bertha Dochouse films to look for in the next few weeks include Elephant's Dream, a gentle, revealing look at a handful of people trying to keep three Congolese institutions running in the face of almost total neglect; The Propaganda Game, filmed in North Korea; and Among The Believers, filmed in Pakistan and focusing on cleric Abdul Aziz Ghazi. 

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+ Bertha Dochouse Screen is at the Curzon Bloomsbury, The Brunswick, London, WC1N 1AW. Info: http://www.dochouse.org/ info@dochouse.org 

+ Elephant's Dream

+  Patience Patience You’ll go to Paradise

+  Sherpa

+  A Syrian Love Story

+  Cartel Land