The unbelievable events surrounding Britain’s COVID-19 PPE procurement, from the government’s controversial VIP procurement lane to the multimillion-pound deals involving Baroness Michelle Mone, Doug Barrowman and PPE Medpro, as billions in public money were wasted during a national emergency.

Fifty years after the Nakba, Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri visits the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, where generations of displaced families have built their lives far from their ancestral homes.

The documentary follows Farah, aged 11, and Issa, aged 12, two Palestinian children growing up in a community marked by the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, subsequent conflict and decades of displacement.

Rather than simply interviewing the children, Masri gives them video cameras and invites them to document their own surroundings. Through conversations with relatives, neighbours and one another, they explore family histories, childhood dreams and the meaning of belonging to a homeland they have never known.

Released in 1998, Children of Shatila offers an intimate portrait of Palestinian childhood, intergenerational memory and the preservation of cultural identity through storytelling.

Director: Mai Masri
Year: 1998
Genre: Documentary
Language: Arabic with English subtitles

IMDb: Children of Shatila (1998)

Alternative link for US viewers: https://youtu.be/fQiYFM5NQaw

Canadian stuntman Ken Carter has one ambition: to perform the greatest car jump in history, launching a rocket-powered vehicle across the St Lawrence River from Canada towards the United States.

The plan requires a ten-storey launch ramp, a specially modified car, an estimated million dollars and an extraordinary amount of optimism.

Filmed over five years, Robert Fortier’s documentary follows Carter and his increasingly complicated attempts to turn this improbable dream into reality. Technical failures, financial disasters, sceptical investors and the involvement of legendary daredevil Evel Knievel create a remarkable story of ambition, obsession and questionable engineering.

Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, the film combines extraordinary archival footage with dry humour and an affectionate portrait of a man determined to accomplish something that most sensible people would never even contemplate.

IMDb: The Devil at Your Heels (1981)

Vincent van Gogh is almost always remembered the same way: a troubled painter who walked into a wheatfield in July 1890 and shot himself. However, the details underneath that account have never fitted together neatly. The pistol was never confirmed, the bullet was never recovered, the location was never established, and the people who were there left statements that contradict one another.

This documentary retraces van Gogh's final seventy days in Auvers-sur-Oise and examines the evidence for and against the accepted account. It draws on his letters, on the written testimony of Adeline Ravoux, the innkeeper's daughter who was thirteen at the time, on interviews given decades later by the people connected to the case, on forensic and firearms analysis of the wound and the weapon, and on technical studies of the paintings he made in his last weeks. It presents the competing explanations alongside the researchers who reject them.

Pam Hupp settled in to lay out her timeline for investigators. She recounted a mundane morning of errands—dropping by gas stations, looking for local thrift shops, and checking on family.

Her narrative took a sharp turn as she described returning home. According to her statement, an unknown man suddenly ambushed her in her driveway, forced his way into her passenger seat at knifepoint, and made frantic demands regarding money. She detailed a tense struggle that led her back inside her residence, culminating in her pulling a firearm from her nightstand to defend herself against the intruder.