Not as seen on TV: Unorthodocs series launched

Town-of-Runners-for-Unorthodocs

Town of Runners

A screening programme has been launched to widen the audience for award-winning, festival-storming documentaries that seem to have been shunned by UK television.

The series, showing at Somerset House in London, kicked off this month with the WorldView-funded How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire, the hilarious and moving story of Dan Edelstyn’s search for his Jewish heritage in Ukraine, which leads the impoverished filmmaker into a crazy scheme to become a vodka baron.

Producer Dartmouth Films and documentary networking group Docheads, have curated the series for documentaries that have been in big international festivals, or won prizes, or both.

Christo Hird, head of Dartmouth Films, said: “There are a lot of great documentaries on television but, with the increased competition for viewers, the range of these films is becomingly increasingly limited. The aim of Unorthodocs is to increase the chances for the public to see these films and to hear from some of the people associated with making them.”

WorldView continues to develop and champion documentaries for television that provide important context to the news – and we believe that the shrinking space for documentary slots on TV can only ever be countered with the creation of further compelling content. So we welcome Unorthodocs as an effort to gain the wider audience that these films deserve.

The programme continues with Call Me Kuchu on 28 October and the WorldView-funded Town of Runners on 11 November.