By Iminza Keboge
Published October 3, 2022
Al Jazeera English (AJE) has announced several themed series as well as powerful single documentaries for the October-December 2022 period.
In ‘Bollywood Dreams’ audiences follow some of the thousands of ‘strugglers’ across India, who pin their futures and hopes on Bollywood.
In USA, Colombia, Finland and Australia’s Torres Strait Islands we observe First Nation communities reclaim their heritage, combat environmental disaster and fight to sustain their lives and livelihoods.
The award-winning ‘Africa Direct’ returns for a second series, with African filmmakers telling African stories in immersive, first-person short docs.
AJE’s flagship strand, Witness, premieres several new films including from Ukraine, India, Iraq, Armenia, South Sudan, Algeria, Spain and Lebanon.
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Beyond the premieres, AJE says it shall show some outstanding environmental and football films again in November and December. Witness Australia’s bushfires up close, and experience the permafrost during COP. And while the world is glued to football fields, AJE goes off the pitch to understand six football clubs in the popular series ‘The Fans Who Make Football’.
AJE’s Documentaries unit accounts for around a quarter of the Channel’s total output. From immersive, character-led stories to issue-led exposures, the films prioritise the human lived experiences behind news stories. They aim to challenge prevailing narratives about people, places and power by elevating seldom-heard voices and featuring people telling their own stories.Its documentaries present a range of experiences, lives and views to help viewers think, understand, feel and connect with the world around them.
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“Our award-winning documentaries provide great range, depth and nuance to our daily news coverage,” saiys Giles Trendle, Managing Director of Al Jazeera English, “and we are lucky to have a talented and diverse team which works with a wide array of filmmakers from around the world.”
Ingrid Falk, AJE’s Manager of Programmes, saiys, “Stories are hugely important in shaping our understanding of the world, so we in the Documentaries unit focus as much on how we tell stories, and who tells them, as the subject matter itself. We try to shift the power of the storytelling itself towards those who have experience the events – we have the space to move away from presenters and reporters as authoritative voices towards first person narratives. Our philosophy is that when we see and hear from people directly, confidently, centred in their own stories, only then can we reimagine notions of authority and power. And in this very unequal world, that is an important thing to do.”
