Factual America

Natalie Wood was an iconic American actress, featuring in many influential Hollywood movies in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Her life was tragically cut short when she drowned at the age of 43.  Today we talk with Laurent Bouzereau, the director and producer of the recently released HBO documentary Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (2020). The film explores Natalie’s life and career through the un...

The Hart Family had the perfect American life. At least, that is what their social media accounts showed the world. But the reality was very different.  A Thread of Deceit: The Hart Family Tragedy documents a family’s spiral into abuse and despair. Ultimately, Jennifer and Sarah Hart decided to drive their family SUV off a cliff, killing them and their six adopted children.  How could th...

Cowboys are as American as hot dogs and apple pie. But what is life like for the modern-day American cowboy? Filmed on eight of the nation’s largest cattle ranches across ten states in the American West, Cowboys: A Documentary Portrait (2019) provides an intimate look at life in the modern world for this most American of icons.  A cowboy’s life has always been one of solitude and hard work. T...

Narrated by Samuel L Jackson, I Am Not Your Negro (2016) uses James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript to tell the horrific history of racism in America. Following the lives of three slain civil rights leaders, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr, Baldwin’s words still resonate today.  Since the beginning, race has defined America and racism permeates its politics to this day. To...

Warning: This Drug May Kill You (2017) by broadcast journalist Perri Peltz is a heart-wrenching account of opioid addiction in the US. Before the coronavirus, a different epidemic plagued America. Medical researchers will hopefully develop a vaccine for Covid-19 in the near future. But more than 2 million Americans remain addicted to opioids. Is there any hope in sight?  Norman Stone, award-w...

In America religion and politics are inextricably linked, despite what the US Constitution might say. Using The Most Hated Family in America (2007) by Louis Theroux and its sequel, America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis (2011), Factual America explores the history of religion in US politics. Not only does religion polarise American society, but it also played a big role in determining the winner of...

How many of us think about where the meat on our tables comes from? Well, we all should! That’s the message of Eating Animals (2017), produced and narrated by Natalie Portman and based on the best-selling book on factory farming by Jonathan Safran Froer. The film shines a light on corporate farming. Besides being inherently cruel to animals, it  has destroyed entire ways of life and is devast...

Is it ever right to kill someone? Are lethal injections really humane? Is capital punishment going to be around forever? In some parts of the world the US is infamous for its continued use of the death penalty. Using the BBC’s Life and Death Row – The Mass Execution as a backdrop, Dr Vivien Miller discusses the history of capital punishment in America. In doing so, she reveals how the death penalt...

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) won two Academy Awards, and turned former Vice President of the United States Al Gore into an international celebrity. More importantly, it brought climate change and global warming to the forefront of our collective consciousness. Drawing on his own research, our guest Dr James Lyons shows how director Davis Guggenheim uses performance to dramatically animate risk in...

Factual America caught up with director and producer Adithya Sambamurthy, who is heading to the US to cover the 2020 American election for The Guardian newspaper. We discuss the upcoming elections and take a look back at President Donald Trump’s rise to power.  In 2016 and 2018 Adi spent weeks on the campaign trail filming and producing Anywhere but Washington . He shares his experiences cris...

Soyalism (2018) explores how factory farming has become a giant global business concentrated in the hands of a few Western and Chinese companies. Across the globe, people are eating more and more meat. Demand has increased sevenfold since 1960 with 70 billion animals currently being killed per year. That number is set to reach 120 billion by 2050. To meet this demand, corporate giants have taken o...

America’s love affair with guns is one of its defining attributes, and the number of mass shootings hit an all-time high in 2019. While politicians vow to tackle the problem, a powerful gun lobby stands in the way. To help us understand why the US struggles with gun violence on such a massive scale, Dr Peter Squires, an expert on the subject, joins the show. He is a sociologist and professor of cr...

As a tribute to documentary film pioneer DA Pennebaker, who passed away in August 2019, Factual America explores his groundbreaking Dont Look Back (1967), considered one of the best documentary films of all time. Dr Stella Bruzzi, author of the acclaimed New Documentary , demonstrates how the film about Bob Dylan is a shining example of the direct cinema style pioneered by Pennebaker and in the pr...

In Silicon Valley, where “fake it till you make it” is a mantra, Elizabeth Holmes stood out. Theranos, the company she founded, drew the support and accolades of investors and senior statesmen alike – that is until a Wall Street Journal reporter’s prying questions spelled the beginning of the end. What originally looked like a revolutionary technology in blood sampling quickly became a scandal tha...

In The River and the Wall (2019), a group of modern-day adventurers led by filmmaker Ben Masters sets out on a 1,200-mile journey along the Texas-Mexico border to understand the economic, environmental and social impact of President Donald Trump’s border wall. They not only encounter a land of soaring vistas, outstanding natural beauty and unrivaled ruggedness but also discover something about the...

Award-winning journalist, Kevin Turley, joins Factual America to discuss Albert and David Maysles’ seminal documentary. Kevin places Salesman in the context of 1960s America and traces the film’s influence on documentary filmmaking to this day. Along the way Kevin and host Matthew Sherwood discover that the film about hard-luck Bible salesmen is actually about so much more — namely the pursuit of...