The Beeb’s documentary strand announces a new slate of films to be shown on BBC Four and iPlayer this year…
The corporation has confirmed the BBC Storyville content for 2025 with a selection of international documentaries to be shown from January 2025 on BBC Four and iPlayer.
Firstly, Your Fat Friend charts the rise of writer and activist Aubrey Gordon from anonymous blogger to best-selling author and beloved podcaster. Aubrey’s aim? A paradigm shift in the way we see fat people and the fat on our own bodies.
Her life-changing work has brought her an ardent international audience but also threats to her life. One of her biggest challenges is getting her parents to listen. Made over six years by acclaimed director Jeanie Finlay, Your Fat Friend is a film about fatness, family, the complexities of change and the deep, messy feelings we hold about our bodies.
While Black Box Diaries follows 25-year-old journalist Shiori Ito’s courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in 2015 and attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Combining secret investigative recordings and emotional first-person video, Shiori’s quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s desperately outdated judicial and societal systems.
Life: Inside the San Quentin Prison Marathon takes viewers behind the walls of San Quentin State Prison in California, three men sentenced to life for murder undertake running a marathon.
Training all year, their route is unconventional, a105 dizzying laps around a crowded prison yard. The bonds they forge on the track create a community that transcends prison politics and extends beyond the prison walls as members are released. 26.2 to Life is a story of transformation and second chances. The film offers a rare glimpse into a world out of bounds, as the men navigating life sentences seek redemption and freedom… or something like it.
In Gaucho Gaucho: Argentina’s Last Ranchers the lives of Argentina’s gauchos’ – cowboys and cowgirls – come to screen as they proudly preserve their traditions in a fast-changing world. They travel on horseback, accompanied by their dogs, moving their cattle across stunning landscapes. Their handmade clothing, woollen ponchos, bombacha trousers, and boina hats, are signs to the outside world that they remain unshackled by the bindings of modernity. The film follows the lives of men and women of different ages, backgrounds, and talents who are all connected by their incredible bonds with their animals and their fight to remain free.
The Battle for Laikipia was filmed across several years and charts the relationship between the Samburu people, a nomadic pastoralist community that has always grazed cattle and goats on the land, and the third and fourth-generation European settlers who own ranches and conservancies in the region. Filmed at a time of severe drought in one of Africa’s most famous conservation areas, pressure mounts on both sides and unresolved historical tensions result in conflict while in The Covid Queue at Pavilion 6 a humorous and humane snapshot of life in a covid-19 vaccine centre is captured by cameras.
Five years after the world first locked down to limit the spread of the virus, The Covid Queue at Pavillion 6 serves as collective therapy for the post-COVID era. Filmed in Croatia, where at the time, the government was still chasing down supplies of what were hard to get hold of vaccines, the queues of people waiting for them stretch endlessly along streets with a tapestry of personalities amongst them. From the stern ‘gatekeeper’ of the line to elderly women deliberating their vaccine preferences. This is a reminder of a unique moment in time – one shared by people across the globe.
Finally, Eternal Spring: The Heist of China’s Airwaves goes back over twenty years. In 2002 a group of Falun Gong practitioners in China came up with an audacious plan to hit back at the government’s crackdown on their faith. They hijacked the airwaves, broadcasting a video promoting their spiritual movement on state television. Now, more than two decades later Eternal Spring explores the aftermath of that brazen stunt, with Canadian writer-director Jason Loftus following comic-book artist, and Falun Gong practitioner, Daxiong.
Featuring vivid animation based on Daxiong’s drawings, the film recounts how their plan succeeded, but soon the authorities retaliated and Daxiong left his homeland. Now Daxiong travels to Seoul and New York, interviewing some of the planners to hear their memories and ask their opinion of the scheme’s lasting impact.
