God Damn, "Shoe Prints In The Dust"

“[D]ocumentary filmmakers… eager to broaden the variety of tools at their disposal and hoping to tell their stories to a wider audience, have been pushing aggressively at the boundaries of their genre. The traditional ‘A-roll, B-roll, talking heads’ paradigm, influenced by journalism, is increasingly being challenged by experiments in which all of the standard features of the traditional documentary — like voice-over, music cues and narrative arcs based on real life — are being mutated or eschewed and devices from the world of fiction embraced,” suggested the New York Times recently, and while I was initially dubious about the premise, now that I have had the opportunity to view this documentary about life in Britain — which veers from a brutally accurate depiction of everyday existence before veering off on a fantastical commentary about the effects of the governing coalition’s evisceration of the welfare state, all scored to some of the whitest music imaginable — I must concede that the assertion is correct and the technique is indeed effective.