Digital Commons Network^™

Senza Parole: A Review, Robyn Ravlich

RadioDoc Review

This is a charming radio feature of modest length in the form of a travel memoir. Its author-producer is Katharina Smets, a radio maker with a background in philosophy, theatre and philology with experience in teaching radio documentary at the Royal Conservatory in Antwerp, Belgium and as a reporter and feature maker for Radio 1, KLARA (VRT in Belgium) and Holland Doc Radio (VPRO in The Netherlands). Originally produced in Dutch, her English language version of Senza Parole has attracted attention at both the Third Coast International Audio Festival (2014), USA and the Sheffield Doc/Fest (2014) in Britain.

In Senza …

Still Glowing Strong: Review 2 (Australia), Maree Delofski

RadioDoc Review

Still Glowing Strong is an elegant and poetic documentary about a dreamer. Harald Brobakkan has an obsessive desire to create an everlasting battery. From the outset, the minimalist music and Leganger’s beautifully written narration set up the tone of the documentary – gentle, respectful, restrained, occasionally melancholic yet never maudlin. Program maker Sindre Leganger very successfully conveys Harald’s story together with rich observations about the universe, science and its treatment of ‘outsiders’, life - and the nature of a very long relationship.

Still Glowing Strong: Review (Denmark), Anna Elisabeth Jessen

RadioDoc Review

Still Glowing Strong is Norwegian Sindre Leganger’s tender story of an old man, Harald, who thinks he has invented an everlasting battery that could save the world. The problem is that no one has the time to look at it – his wife in particular. But as Leganger and the old man’s grandson take an interest, this short but remarkable feature reveals much about our finite lives and the eternal starry sky above us, about being stubborn, being optimistic and about hope. Leganger illustrates Zola’s dictum, that “art is a corner of reality seen through a temperament”. He plays three …

Editorial Overview, Volume 2, Issue 1, Siobhan A. Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

Overview of the nine audio features critiqued by Guest Reviewers, who are themselves eminent producers and curators of audio features. The works reviewed are from the US, UK, Canada, France, Poland and Denmark.

Not Quite Cricket By Jon Rose: A Review, Jane Ulman

RadioDoc Review

In Not Quite Cricket, Jon Rose reaches into the well-known story of the first Australian cricket team to play at Lords and draws out a tragedy dressed up as music hall comedy, in what he calls a 'historical intervention'.

Rose is an Australian-based polymath creator: a musician, inventor, composer, improviser, educator and entertainer. Radio production is just one strand of his prolific body of work. Over decades he has forged an innovative style, a distinctive radio form. His work has always been a fusion of genres, a hybrid of fact and invention with composed and improvised music carrying its …

Golden Boy - Zĺoty Chĺopak: A Review, Anna Sekudewicz

RadioDoc Review

This feature is a story woven from the lives of two people: Abraham, the son of a tailor from Łódź, and Kasia Michalak, who’s also from Łódź and whose grandfather was a tailor. How do you present Abraham Tuszyński without pigeon-holing his story as yet another tragic Holocaust narrative – particularly since the programme-maker wanted to avoid making a strictly historical feature? Where and how to find excitement, tension, heat and feelings in material that is by nature informational, objective, cold and factual? Despite posing a huge risk, the collision of the two stories, or realities, creates a new perspective, …

Little War On The Prairie: An Auto-Critique, John Biewen

RadioDoc Review

Using RadioDoc Review’s suggested criteria for evaluating a radio documentary, John Biewen delivers an auto-critique of his own program, Little War on the Prairie. It tells the story of the U.S.-Dakota War, a bloody Plains Indian war that broke out in the summer of 1862 in southern Minnesota. That six-week conflict took the lives of hundreds of people, perhaps a thousand, a larger death toll than in the better-known bloodlettings at Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee. Most of the dead were white settlers, though the U.S. government’s reprisals in the aftermath of the war killed up to several …

Everything, Nothing, Harvey Keitel: A Review, Sarah Geis

RadioDoc Review

Although producer Pejk Malinowski is originally from Denmark, and Everything, Nothing, Harvey Keitel is a project of London-based Falling Tree Productions, its premise seems cringingly American: our narrator goes to a self-help class, has an encounter with a celebrity. Which is to say, the risk of self-indulgence is high. To make it worse: the documentary takes place almost entirely within Malinovski’s mind. But these factors make it only more astonishing to hear how – through his singular voice, playful sense of humour, and impeccable sound design – Malinovski tells a story that makes the listener laugh, feel, and consider …

Rien Que Les Os: Version Française., Irène Omélianenko

RadioDoc Review

Critique d'un documentaire de création conçue par l'artiste Française Floy Krouchi à Radio France en équipe avec la réalisatrice Nathalie Battus et le chef opérateur du son Bruno Mourlan (2010).

Nothing But Bones (Rien Que Les Os): A Review, Irène Omélianenko

RadioDoc Review

This documentary by the French artist Floy Krouchi in collaboration with Nathalie Battus and Bruno Mourlan from Radio France is a hybrid piece that lies between music and poetic creation. It attempts to make a radiophonic connection between the mythic memory of the indigenous peoples of India and what remains today in certain pieces of music, in (people’s) memory, in singing and translation. The project began five years ago (2010) in Southern India where Floy Krouchi was then travelling. There she heard a short piece of music taken from a very ancient tradition that struck her as so strange and …

The Change In Farming: A Review, Neil Sandell

RadioDoc Review

The protagonist of the CBC documentary, The Change in Farming, is an 89-year-old farmer, called Henry. We learn that his grandson, Adam, has been recording Henry’s reminiscences about farming as a way of preserving his family heritage. The program was produced in 1998 by Adam Goddard, a 25-year-old musician and composer, in collaboration with veteran CBC producer, Steve Wadhams.

Adam is more hunter-gather than farmer. He collects found sound, an artist alert to its musical possibilities. He is composing a work using Henry’s speech. We hear the elder’s reaction. And then, in an indispensable coda, the two of them …

Efter Festen (After The Celebration): A Review, Leslie Rosin

RadioDoc Review

This 2002 feature is a masterpiece of our genre. On one level, the story examines how a young man called Allan told on Danish radio how he confronted his father at his 60^th birthday celebration with the devastating fact that the father had abused him and his twin sister as children. But Allan’s story is also the subject of the successful Danish film The Celebration by Thomas Vinterberg, part of the Dogma Film Group founded by Lars von Trier. The feature’s title, Efter Festen, (After the Celebration) is ambiguous in Danish, the Danish word 'efter' being …

Qui A Connu Lolita: Who Killed Lolita? A Review, Chris Brookes

RadioDoc Review

The brilliant and disturbing work Qui a Connu Lolita? (Who Knew Lolita?), or as it is more provocatively titled in the authors' English translation Who Killed Lolita?, starts with a precis: voices tell us there have been three deaths, of a mother and her two children, the bodies found in their Marseilles apartment two months later.

This is a composition for radio, not a collection of easy evidence for a police dossier. Who did kill Lolita? Who is to blame? The program draws its power from suggestion, like footnotes plucked from a subterranean soundtrack. It poses uncomfortable …