Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
I didn’t like the story I was given. So I wrote a new one.
A feminist, a social-justice advocate and a media sensation in her own right, the US journalist Elizabeth Cochran Seaman (1864-1922) – aka, Nellie Bly – would have been right at home in the 21st-century media environment. Yet she started her writing career more than three decades before women in the US got the right to vote. First hired by The Pittsburgh Dispatch after writing a spirited rebuke to a sexist column entitled ‘What Girls Are Good For’, Bly then moved on to the New York World, where she exposed the squalid conditions inside mental institutions by getting herself committed to an asylum. The resulting piece, published in 1887, catapulted her career, making her one of the most well-known and widely read reporters in the country.
In Nellie Bly Makes the News, the US director Penny Lane melds fiction and documentary to chart Bly’s improbable rise from domestic worker to famous journalist. Using a combination of scripted recreations of scenes from her life, expert interviews and faux ‘interviews’ with Bly herself, this inventive and frequently funny animation probes the good, the bad and the everything-in-between of her legacy, cleverly exploring the ever-blurry border between journalism and storytelling.
Director: Penny Lane
Writers: Thom Stylinski, Penny Lane
Producer: Gabriel Sedgwick
Director of animation: Julie Gratz
video
Sports and games
Young Palestinians find fleeting moments of freedom at a West Bank skate park
13 minutes
video
History of science
Meet the Quaker pacifist who shattered British science’s highest glass ceilings
14 minutes
video
Gender
A catchy tune explains the world’s ‘isms’ – according to your mum doing the laundry
5 minutes
video
Human rights and justice
Surreal, dazzling visuals form an Iranian expat’s tribute to defiance back home
10 minutes
video
Language and linguistics
Do button-pushing dogs have something new to say about language?
9 minutes
video
History
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
13 minutes
video
Love and friendship
Never marry a man you love too much, and other views on romance in Sierra Leone
5 minutes
video
Gender
A filmmaker responds to Lars von Trier’s call for a new muse with a unique application
16 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
Why large language models are mysterious – even to their creators
8 minutes