what we’re streaming in September

Ready to catch the latest screen hits for September? This month brings a fresh batch of content, including some older documentaries now streaming thanks to DocPlay and the new National Film and Sound Archive Player.

The first of these, Hearts of Darkness, is a timely watch as we await Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming passion project, Megalopolis (and as Coppola continues to make headlines for kissing extras on the film’s set).

For those wanting a more contemporary take on documentary, Netflix’s The Man With 1,000 Kids tells the provocative story of a Dutch man who seems intent on fathering as many children as possible. And over in New Zealand, the newest season of The Traitors provides plenty of suspense and intense drama.

Enjoy the show!

Occupied City

DocPlay

Steve McQueen’s Occupied City juxtaposes two narratives: the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and the COVID lockdown. Based on the book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940–1945 by Bianca Stigter (McQueen’s wife), the documentary recites the names and addresses of Jewish families murdered by the Nazis while presenting contemporary footage of these locations, now marked by their mundane, everyday domesticity.

The film cuts to footage of the riots that took place in Amsterdam during COVID. McQueen appears to be drawing visual parallels between systems of state control.

Occupied City is a four-hour endurance that transforms watching into an excruciating visceral experience of witnessing. Streaming this film at home, one might pause, seeking escape from the weight of the images. But on the big screen, where I first saw it, there is no reprieve.

McQueen forces you to confront what it means to witness atrocity and do nothing. This cinematic endurance compels us to reckon with our own complicity, asking what it truly means to observe and act in a world still haunted by the echoes of this history. The unsettling parallels between past and present draw you into a discomforting reflection on how different forms of occupation shape urban life and memory.

– Cherine Fahd

The Traitors season two

Paramount+

The first season of murder-mystery reality show The Traitors NZ undid itself somewhat by casting a bunch of media personalities who’d known each other for years. This diminished some of the hit international franchise’s tongue-in-cheek drama, wherein the premise relies on the “traitors” in the group being able to trick the others into trusting them.

For the second season, once again hosted by Paul Henry in high-camp mode, the producers put their trust in the charm and idiosyncrasies of the general public. An impeccably cast collection of “normies” is placed in the picturesque Castle Claremont, on the aptly named Mt Horrible Road, and divided into faithfuls and traitors.

They undertake missions to accrue money for the prize pot, leveraging quickly-built relationships to their advantage. But the real pleasure is in watching everyday New Zealanders, many of whom are naturally very funny, enthusiastically lean into the show’s deceptions.

The season has good pacing, strong story beats and plenty of opportunity for players to shine. There’s no villain edit here (although the grinning Dungeons and Dragons game master Mark comes close to giving one to himself). With an awful lot of strategy – and a genuine sense that the game could go anywhere – season two is one of the strongest and funnest examples of New Zealand reality TV in years.

– Erin Harrington

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse

DocPlay

Coinciding with the release of Frances Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, DocPlay is currently screening Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now (1979). In case you haven’t seen it, the war epic follows a US army officer serving in Vietnam as he is tasked with eliminating a rogue colonel who views himself as a god among Cambodian tribal people.

Hearts of Darkness is compiled, in part, from footage and recordings made by Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, as well as outtakes and fascinating new interviews. This documentary, which has won several prizes itself, tells the story of the long, complex and disorderly shoot in the Philippines that promised little of the prizewinning film that resulted from it.

Coppola’s aspirations were grandiose, and every day the shoot got bigger and more out of control. The chaos was intensified by Coppola’s intuitive, self-indulgent working methods. He shot “irrationally”. He wrote call sheets with “scene unknown”, encouraged drug-addled actors to improvise, and dithered about the ending.

Eleanor documents Frances’ doubts about completing the film he dubs “the idiodyssey” – and his fear of producing a pretentious flop. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong, from a typhoon that killed 200 people, to actor Martin Sheen suffering a heart attack.

This was film-making as war: a psychedelic, rock-and-roll war like Vietnam itself. And as Eleanor says, “there is a kind of powerful exhilaration in the face of losing everything”.

– Joy McEntee

Facing the Music

NFSA Player

Bob Connelly and Robin Anderson’s extraordinary 2001 documentary Facing The Music is one of many classic Australian films available to view via the new, low-cost National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) Player.

This film is a candid portrait of the composer and teacher Anne Boyd and her radicalisation in the face of cuts to university funding by the Howard government. Set in the Department of Music at the University of Sydney, we move between footage of talented young music students and tense staff meetings where Boyd and her colleagues grapple with their growing budget deficit. They try to paper over the budget problems by teaching more classes and (excruciatingly) trying to secure external sponsorship. They work in crowded offices and teach in shabby buildings, but their dedication to their students shines.

In Boyd, Connelly and Anderson have the perfect protagonist for a story about the funding crisis in higher education. Boyd transforms from an academic who refuses to strike, because teaching is her “calling”, to staffing a picket line. But the budget deficit still looms – and Boyd and her colleagues face difficult choices.

Universities have only become more neoliberal in the years since this film was made. This beautiful film is a reminder that the university’s role as a place of knowledge is still worth fighting for.

– Michelle Arrow

The Man With 1,000 Kids

Netflix

This docuseries went gangbusters on Netflix not too long ago, unsurprisingly. It follows the exploits of a fecund fertility fraudster who employs the internet to promote his seminal services. It’s the kind of contemporary clarion call that was always going to make the streamer’s recommender system go nuts.

As well as advertising online, Jonathan Jacob Meijer spread his seed by combining regular trips to repositories around the world with travel and lifestyle vlogging on YouTube (an archive for which the producers must have cried tears of joy). The result: the Dutch citizen became the father of many, many children as far afield as Australia.

The series shows how Meijer deceived women with ticking biological clocks by being indispensable and accessible, even offering to donate his DNA “the natural way”. Going by the online pseudonym of “Viking”, Meijer was also able to exploit the desires of prospective parents seeking “top” genetic stock.

I appreciated the show’s empowering aspects as it closely follows the stories of victims. Many of the interviewees are loving and grateful parents who are understandably horrified by the situation. It’s great to see them band together with the collective goal of humbling Meijer’s hubris.

Overall, it’s a slick story with abundant plot twists and funny (if sometimes poor-taste) visual gags to boot. Maybe not entertainment for the whole the family, but a conversation starter for sure.

– Phoebe Hart