Marc Fennell is a man of many talents. The Walkley Award-winning host of current affairs show , and the brain-picking quiz commander of is also an author and prolific podcast producer. Somehow he also manages to squish in a bit of streaming pleasure around the edges, but choosing can be tricky.
“There’s no shortage of things you can watch, and actually I find that choice overwhelming,” he says. “This is why I quite like the idea of curating. Maybe it’s the retired film critic in me, but there’s a lot of stuff out there in the world, and just on SBS On Demand, so it helps to have an image in your mind of where you’re going.”
His new documentary series takes a fresh look at a staggering art heist from Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria during the ‘80s that remains unsolved to this day. “Most of my documentary work in podcast, and now also in film, is about using the language of mystery to pull you into things you might not necessarily care about from the outset. I look for small doorways into a big world. That’s how my brain processes stories.”
American Animals
Bart Layton’s exhilarating splicing of documentary and dramatic feature fit the mystery bill. It picks apart an astounding true crime story: four college boys attempt to pull off an audacious heist, robbing Kentucky’s Transylvania University of its most precious books.
“I just love the way they meld interviews with the real people involved with the drama,” Fennell says of this genre-bending work. “Layton does a lot of really clever things, playing with your expectations about what a heist movie is like. There’s a great scene where they have a Reservoir Dogs, Ocean’s 11-style version of the crime and you’re like, ‘Oh, well, that’s how it went’. And then they’re like, ‘No, the whole thing was an absolute fucking shemozzle’ – that interplay between the real and the not real that’s just so well done.”
American Animals is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
New Gold Mountain
Set during Victoria’s gold rush fever, this series writes back in the voices that have been obscured by the history books: most notably Chinese immigrants, but also First Nations peoples.
“I absolutely mainlined New Gold Mountain,” Fennell says. “It’s a beautifully structured mystery about a chapter of Australian history that we should all know about. One of the things I love about this show is that there are all these pockets in the history of this nation that we just don’t teach in schools. It’s been brought to life really beautifully by who also did remarkable work on . And , to me, is the stand-out. She’s the next big thing.”
Four-part series New Gold Mountain is now streaming at SBS On Demand. Episodes are also available with subtitles in , , , and .
Temple
British actor Mark Strong plays a surgeon with a big secret who has set up shop below the London tube station that lends its name to this gripping show, in order to treat a ragtag bunch of crims and other desperate folks. “I’m obsessed with this show,” Fennell says. “It’s one of those shows where you keep thinking, ‘How many more stupid decisions are you gonna take to make your life a nightmare?’”
He admires Strong’s stoic central turn. “In the hands of any other performer, that stoicism could be quite boring. But in his close ups, you can actually see this subterranean world of anxiety building up. We’re used to seeing him as supporting characters where he doesn’t really get many close ups. But here he’s front and centre and there are all these shots where his face isn’t moving, but underneath is an actual tornado.”
Strong Female Lead
Fennell was hooked by this doco that traces former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s fraught time in Australia’s top job entirely through news footage. “It’s very, very hard to construct a story if you have no control over what has been filmed,” he notes. “The amount of work that must have gone into this is next level. Director Tosca Looby does insert a narrative component through a quirky choir that sings the major thematic turning points. On one level, it’s so simple, but on another it’s like, ‘How did they come up with that?’ Despite the horrific treatment of Julia Gillard, they do manage to locate hope at the end.”
Strong Female Lead is now streaming at SBS On Demand. It is part of SBS’s series of documentaries.
Halt and Catch Fire
Set during the explosion of home computing pioneers during the ‘80s, this snappy period drama is all big hair and bigger attitude. “I was born in the ‘80s, so to me the decade exists purely in the realm of pop culture,” Fennell says. “It’s John Hughes movies and Eurythmics tracks. My parents worked in computers, so we were surrounded by that. It was an era of computing built in backyards, and the show brings to life the arc that goes from garages to boardrooms, from being a very small thing, to suddenly a lot of money. And this show captures the ego of the time. Plus a good friend of mine did the awesome opening titles, which was actually how I first started watching it.”
Borgen
star Sidse Babett Knudsen plays Danish Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg, who, after unexpectedly gaining power has to contend with increasingly murky realpolitik to achieve her lofty goals. “Borgen is like my alternative to the very idealistic American vision of government in The West Wing,” Fennell says. “Itactually captured some balance and acknowledged the politicking. It acknowledged the darkness, and also the mundanity of government. It was something a bit closer to our level of cynicism, and the performances are just remarkable.”
Framed
And last but not least, why should we watch Fennell’s new show? “There are parts of our history that we, as a nation, let go of too quickly. And this is just too wild and strange to ignore. There were so many mysteries that were allowed to proliferate around it, and it’s actually really important to go back and go and stress-test those rumours. Because as funny and entertaining as it is, it started a chain reaction that ended up really destroying people’s lives. People who never got front page stories, and now there’s an opportunity to return some justice to them.”
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