In spite of the lingering sense of necrophilia, Michael Jackson’s jerry-built swansong has enough juicy titbits to provide succour to die-hard fans

For everyone who’s thirsted for more Michael Jackson since his death little more than four months ago, the wait is finally over. For the rest of us, it’s time to look on in awe as Jackson’s memory – and the legendary fervency of his fans – is ruthlessly exploited till the pips squeak.

As is all too well known, Jackson was carried off shortly before embarking on a 50-date residency at London’s O2 Arena to try and pay off his rumoured $500m debts; footage shot during rehearsal for this series of shows forms

the vast majority of this much-heralded and hyped film, and goes some of the way to plugging both fans’ disappointment and his estate’s balance sheet.

So, to the burning question: is there any intimation of Jackson’s impending demise? I can’t honestly say there is. In the footage we are permitted to see, Jackson appears in pretty good shape for a 50-year-old – even if his general spindliness makes him occasionally look a bit like Skeletor in a lamé tuxedo. He performs at walking pace for much of the time, but makes it clear he is holding himself in.

As for the film itself, I can simply report that it isn’t too bad at all. It’s pretty much unadorned rehearsal footage, artfully stitched together to create complete song sequences; and since the O2 gigs were intended to present his crowdpleasing hits, they’re all here in their toe-tapping glory. Director Kenny Ortega puts himself in the frame quite a bit (sucking up to Jackson something rotten, it has to be said), and we learn that Jackson appeared to prefer culinary metaphors to describe his music: it must “sizzle”, or “simmer”, or indeed “nourish”.

The big fear, though, was that fulsome homages to the man and his talent would smother This Is It in a coating of treacle; thankfully, Ortega limits it to the occasional sobbing outburst from the dancers or choreographers. We are instead offered genuinely interesting tidbits of Jackson’s stagecraft, in the shape of intense discussion of cues, cherry-pickers and trapdoors – presumably to demonstrate how hands-on he was.

And there’s some fun sequences showing the creation of specially filmed inserts, such as the intro for Smooth Criminal having Jackson being Photoshopped into black and white movie clips from the 1940s, fending off Bogart and Cagney.

Jackson’s penchant for drivel couldn’t be entirely eliminated, as evidenced by the sickly little scene, built around a small girl wandering through an enchanted forest, that heralds Earth Song.

Still, this could have been a lot worse. It’s a bit much to claim it’s any kind of viable substitute for the live show, and since Jackson avoids conversation as much as is humanly possible it’s also a bit much to claim we get to know anything more about how he ticks. But This Is It a testament of a kind, and one that is no disgrace to his memory.

The documentary showing rehearsal footage from Jackson’s planned O2 residency will screen simultaneously around the world tonight, regardless of concerns over its verisimilitude

See pictures of the Michael Jackson exhibition at the O2

Michael Jackson fans have launched a campaign suggesting forthcoming documentary This Is It airbrushes the declining health of the singer in his final days.

A website, This Is Not It, suggests Jackson was so frail on the night before he died that 20 fans who regularly followed him penned a letter to the star urging him to take more care of himself.

The fans blame AEG, the promoter of the singer’s abandoned London residency, Sony Pictures and Jackson’s own entourage for exploiting him for their own financial gain. They are planning to protest with leaflets and flyers at premieres taking place around the world later today and tomorrow.

This Is It, directed by High School Musical’s Kenny Ortega, shows Jackson rehearsing at the Staples Centre in LA in advance of this summer’s planned dates at London’s 02 Arena. Jackson died following a heart attack on 25 June before the tour began.

Talin Shajanian, from Los Angeles, who had been following Jackson since 2003, often waiting with others outside the venues where he was rehearsing, told the BBC the singer was “unusually thin” the last time she saw him.

“A couple of weeks before he passed, we saw him change drastically,” she said. “He shared this with us, the pressure that he felt, the concerns that he had.”

“He specifically said he was only one person and only had a certain amount of energy to give, that so much was expected of him for these shows. We were expecting him to bulk up, to put on weight for the concerts like he had in the past, and that wasn’t happening.”

Fans on the This Is Not It website have expressed their scepticism about the project: “The true state of Jackson’s failing health was hidden from you by those who are making a profit from the screening of the This is It movie.

“In the weeks leading up to Jackson’s death, while this footage was being shot, people around him knew that he looked like he might have died. Those who stood to make a profit chose to ignore it. Friends and fans who had no financial interest, chose to address it and attempted to help him.

“AEG, the promoters for This Is It, ignored the signs, ignored the pleas, and in fact, actively covered up the truth. What you will see on that screen is part of that cover up.”

Ortega recently said of Jackson: “Was he slight? Yes. Was he frail? At times. But we had a very strong and excited, happy and determined Michael. He wanted to do this more than anything he’s ever wanted to do … That’s the truth. It really is.”

The film has met with advance praise from Jackson’s friend, the film star Elizabeth Taylor, who called This Is It as “most brilliant piece of film-making I have ever seen” following a private screening.

She added, in a lengthy series of Tweets: “It cements forever Michael’s genius in every aspect of creativity. He cradles each note, coaxes the music to depths beyond reality. I wept from pure joy at his God-given gift. I truly believe this film should be nominated in every category conceivable.”

An autopsy earlier this month found that the 50-year-old star was “fairly healthy” before his death, a coroner having ruled in August that Jackson was killed by the drug Propofol and the sedative Lorazepam.

A statement from Sony Pictures, which is releasing the film, said: “This Is It is a celebration of Michael and his music and the film will demonstrate to fans around the world that he was an artist like no other who was passionately creating a one-of-a-kind concert experience.”

“We believe his fans will be grateful for the rare opportunity to see Michael’s creativity in action as he prepared and rehearsed for his London concerts.”

Highlighting the plight of Japan’s dolphins could reduce the prospects of relief for other suffering creatures

Why would you pay good money to be told what to think? Because you like it, apparently. Al Gore’s chart-flipping, Morgan Spurlock’s burger-munching and Michael Moore‘s stentorian bombast seem to have inspired something of a taste for big-screen indoctrination.

Audiences may not have been vast, but they’ve been prepared to put up with a lot. So far this year, their endurance has been tested by Pete Postlethwaite’s changeless grimace of pained disbelief, the earnest buzzing of schoolmarmish bee-lovers and a watery challenge to their post-movie fish and chips.

The Cove, too, makes a cruel demand of its patrons. This time, though, they don’t have to fear boredom: they’re just going to be horribly traumatised. Apparently, Japanese hunters kill 23,000 dolphins each year, often with spectacular brutality. Spear-wielders portrayed in the film are happy to inflict protracted agony on their prey. The blue waters of the eponymous cove literally run red.

If we must have blatant propaganda on screen, it might as well be good propaganda. The Cove passes this test with ease. It’s almost impossible to watch it (if you can bear to watch it at all) without accepting unquestioningly that the dolphin massacre it depicts just isn’t on. Moore, Gore and Spurlock, eat your hearts out.

The effectiveness of this piece of evangelism is intuitively unsurprising but theoretically puzzling. If corporate greed is destroying our way of life, or profligate carbon consumption threatening our survival, it’s clear why we should care. It’s not so obvious why the fate of a few thousand cetaceans should exercise us rather more.

The film’s spearspersons are certainly puzzled. Westerners, they point out, kill and eat cows. Easterners eat dolphins. What’s the difference? As we know from the work of other film-makers, what happens on the west’s factory farms doesn’t look pretty on celluloid. Yet we don’t seem to care very much about that. After all, cows aren’t dolphins.

It was the big screen that gave rise to humanity’s love affair with seagoing mammals. So different were attitudes when Flipper first swam into view in 1963 that the film-makers got away with speargunning a live dolphin. The subsequent films and TV series have turned dolphinariums, swimming with dolphins and dolphin-spotting excursions into a substantial global industry.

Yet dolphins aren’t as nice as we like to think. They kill porpoises for the hell of it. According to The Cove, they may be more intelligent than people. Why, however, should that entitle them to special treatment? Human brain-boxes aren’t accorded more rights than their dim-witted fellows. We swoon over dolphins, whales and those furred and feathered creatures that strike us as cute. Meanwhile, the overall case for animal rights goes pretty much by the board.

There are signs that The Cove could be having some impact. Those fiendish Japanese fisherfolk are perhaps beginning to give ground. A welcome break for dolphins maybe, but not necessarily for other suffering creatures whose appeal to human beings is less immediate than theirs. On the contrary, the film-makers’ triumph, if it can be called that, may help foster the widespread notion that our sole duty to our fellow creatures is to look after the most winsome of them.

Dying dolphins are all very well, but what about fish writhing in trawlers, rats squirming in laboratories or chickens cowering in broiler-houses? They might pose more of a challenge to the committed camera’s gaze, but they’re more in need of some messianic film-making.

• The Cove is featured at Sheffield Doc/Fest on 5 November.

This outstanding documentary is as exciting as a thriller and centres on a character as fascinating as William Wilberforce’s mentor, Captain John Newton, the skipper of a slave ship who took holy orders, wrote “Amazing Grace” and became a fervent abolitionist. In the 1960s, the handsome, charismatic Richard O’Barry trained the performing dolphins used in the popular, long-running American television series Flipper, which resulted in the creation of dolphinariums the world over.

He then did a complete volte-face and for the past 35 years has been attempting to undo his work by using all means possible to keep dolphins from being captured and exploited.He is an articulate, middle-aged man, exuding an undemonstrative decency and this picture records how he gathered an intrepid team of film-makers, divers, electronics experts and special-ops people who infiltrated the Japanese fishing port of Taiji to record and expose its dirty secret.

This is a first-rate heist movie in which the good guys are the gang and the bad guys the supposed honest citizens upholding law and order. Every year, the local fishermen, in league with various commercial interests, drive dolphins into a local cove where dolphin trainers from around the world select the best specimens, for which they pay up to $150,000.

The rest are pushed around a peninsula to another cove, as closely guarded as Dr No’s lair, to be slaughtered and sold as whale meat. It’s an astonishing story, carefully told, and along the way we learn a great deal about greed, human nature, various kinds of private and governmental chicanery and the working of that dubious organisation, the Japanese-dominated International Whaling Commission.

Shot in Liberia and set during a civil war in an unnamed African state where the official language is a form of English, this is a gut-wrenching, documentary-style look at a company of Kalashnikov-wielding kids, some not yet teenagers. They have been torn from their families, pressed into the service of a self-styled guerrilla general, brainwashed with chants borrowed from Hollywood action movies and turned into ruthless killers, rapists and looters.

Most of them have fierce noms de guerre such as Small Devil, No Good Advice, Never Die and, of course, the eponymous Johnny Mad Dog, and they act without remorse, taking vengeful pleasure in their ability to menace and humiliate.

The most excruciating scenes involve two of the youngest raping an educated woman at a captured TV station as punishment for having called the insurgents terrorists in a news bulletin, and the intimidation and murder of an elderly couple, teachers at a local school, who attempt to retain their dignity. Almost as chilling is the moment the kids retrieve an automatic weapon from one of their victims, identifying it as an Uzi of the sort carried by Chuck Norris in Delta Force.

Parallel to the tragic story of the boys is the comparatively hopeful one of a 12-year-old girl trying to take care of her little brother and their father, who is presumably a doctor or other sort of professional person, who has lost his legs.

There is a brief glimpse of a residual human decency when one of the boy soldiers doesn’t reveal her hidden presence to his comrades, but sadly it’s the one moment that’s a bit Hollywood and doesn’t really convince.

Mugabe and the White African is a covertly-filmed documentary about a white Zimbabwean family’s stand against Robert Mugabe’s land reform campaign. Co-director Andrew Thompson reveals how the film was made against enormous odds

Michael Campbell is one of a handful of white farmers still left in Zimbabwe since Robert Mugabe began enforcing his controversial land seizure program, an initiative intended to reclaim white-owned land for redistribution to poor black Zimbabweans. Since 2000, formerly thriving farms that employed thousands now sit derelict while poverty and hunger are rife among the majority of the country’s citizens. But Campbell, 74, refuses to back down. Our film, Mugabe and the White African, follows Campbell and his family’s unprecedented attempt to take Mugabe to an international court on charges of racial discrimination and violation of their human rights, against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential elections.

It was always our intention to make a really cinematic film, as well as a powerful documentary. So we needed to shoot on a large format: a departure from the hidden-camera news footage that more commonly comes out of Zimbabwe. Images and sound are so important in adding texture and layers to a place, and we wanted the audience to feel really immersed.

But having big cameras, a sound crew and proper recording devices did make it even harder to shoot in a country where filming is, to this day, banned (the only exception appears to be for al-Jazeera). We risked imprisonment or worse if caught – one reason why we get so little news coming out of the country. What makes our film special is that it offers the only insight the outside world has of what is going on behind Zimbabwe’s closed borders, of life lived under Mugabe’s regime.

We were filming during last year’s contested presidential elections, so security was even more tense than usual. On the ground this meant you couldn’t go far before you hit a roadblock manned by the interior security force. It was pretty hairy getting about. We always used different borders on each of the five trips, different transport, and I slept in different safe houses every night to keep moving. Our golden rule, which I was only forced to break once, was to always travel separately from the equipment.

We got away with it – just. After every trip there would be the inevitable knock on the door of Michael Campbell’s farm. The security forces were never more than two days behind me.

I’m quite used to working in hostile environments. I’ve previously made films in Iraq, Afghanistan and, most recently, Gaza. But filming in places like that is considerably more straightforward than shooting in Zimbabwe. In Gaza, the buck stops with Hamas. There, if you’ve got their blessing, you can stand on a street corner and film. In Zimbabwe you couldn’t. There was no rule of law. You were not supposed to be there, full stop. Zimbabwe was an infinitely scarier country to shoot in. You were never quite sure who was your friend or enemy. Mugabe had instilled such mistrust in people.  

One of the white farmers we followed said you could be standing in church with someone who, the next day, would turn up at your farm with an iron bar in his hand and a gang of armed thugs by his side. There was constant fear all over the country. It sounds odd to say it, but in Gaza people felt and looked happier. They smiled. Life went on. But in Zimbabwe, it had stopped. It was not like in the rest of Africa, where you could have people selling mangoes and tomatoes on the roadside; it was like a country that had shut down. There were just shadows. This was the picture in 2008 and, according to most reports, the situation has only worsened.

Zimbabwe is a former British colony, and so there’s a tendency to presume the white farmers shouldn’t be there. Part of what appealed to us about making this documentary is that it wrestles with some uncomfortable questions. At one point, Michael Campbell’s son-in-law, Ben Freeth, asks, “Can you be white and African?” Well can you be white and American, or black and American? Of course you can. Racism is a terrible thing, whether it’s perpetrated by whites or blacks.

This film is ultimately about human rights, the rule of law and democracy. These are universals we should all care about. Zimbabwe is in the grip of a terrible dictator, responsible for serious human rights abuses, and those who oppose the regime are abducted, beaten, tortured and killed.

And what does the world do? Currently, very little. African leaders seem loath to criticise one of their own and the west sits on the fence, paralysed by the fear of being called neo-colonialists or racists.

Zimbabweans need the west not to wobble on sanctions. They need them to stick to the stance that the power-sharing government, the so-called unity government, is anything but. It is a government of disunity that shouldn’t be formally acknowledged. To say that we in the west recognise the government in Zimbabwe would be a catastrophic mistake for the millions of ordinary Zimbabweans trapped in their own country. It would send out all the wrong messages that Mugabe is someone we could do business with. If this film can go some way towards bringing to an outside audience the injustices going on inside Zimbabwe – and, more importantly, get something done about it – then I feel that we as film-makers will have succeeded.  

• Mugabe and the White African is showing at the Ritzy at 6.30pm tonight, as part of the London film festival

This is a remarkable portrait of ceaseless conscience purging, says Catherine Shoard

The great strength of this documentary about the covert killing of wild dolphins in Japan is its aesthetic: artful edits, zippy music, even a few jokes. Radical stuff for an eco-documentary. This easy relationship with the workings of cinema, as well as campaigning, has, however, also proved something of a headache. Look up The Cove online and you’ll find scores of irate bloggers convinced the whole thing is just a yarn, that that sea of red is no more than cherry marmalade and corn syrup. The clincher, though, is not the fury, but the ambiguity. Not only does Psihoyos uncover strange and frightening truths about the way health organisations really work, he also gives us a hero with a broken heart. Ric O’Barry was chief dolphin trainer on Flipper. When it ended, all nine Flippers were shipped out to sea life centres, where they suffered stress and ill health. After one of them “committed suicide” in his arms (by opting not to breathe), he devoted his life to releasing them back into the wild and then steering them clear of the harpoonists. It’s a remarkable portrait of ceaseless conscience purging. O’Barry’s big, wet eyes haunt you even longer than that ocean of blood.

In this edition, Film Weekly visits the London film festival, now in full swing. Jason Solomons and Xan Brooks compare notes and discuss the three films that have starred George Clooney (Fantastic Mr Fox, Up in the Air and The Men Who Stare at Goats) before revealing their favourites so far – Jason highly recommends Jim Jarmusch’s latest, The Limits of Control, as well as a brace of films starring two cherished British actors: Clive Owen in The Boys Are Back and Colin Firth in A Single Man.

Still with LFF, Jason meets British film-makers Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas, who will premiere their “animated” documentary, American: The Bill Hicks Story, at the festival on 23 October. The duo reveal their technique of turning still photographs of the comic in performance into moving images (it takes a day to produce five seconds of footage) and discuss their debt to Hicks’s family and friends in the making of the film.

Jason also meets Jérôme Laperrousaz, director of Made in Jamaica, a documentary about the legacy of reggae, dub and dancehall that examines how and why the songs that express the contradictions and struggle of life in the Caribbean island have travelled around the world. Unsurprisingly, it has a brilliant soundtrack, with tracks from such legends as Toots and the Maytals, Bunny Wailer, Sly and Robbie, Gregory Isaacs, Third World and Bounty Killer. Listen to find out how you can win one of three copies.

And finally, the week’s key releases are reviewed: the surprising meeting of the minds of Roald Dahl and Wes Anderson in Fantastic Mr Fox, the harrowing tale of African child soldiers in Johnny Mad Dog, and the cheap-as-chips zombie flick Colin.

The Palestinian Film Archive was born in 1976 – and destroyed just six years later. Sarah Wood went in search of the missing artists and their work

I am an artist who works with found footage, making films from other people’s films – an act of reclamation and reinterpretation. In the west, this footage is ubiquitous. It wouldn’t be hard for me, for instance, to find an image of the place I come from to show to a stranger; I just have to know where to look.

So imagine what it would be like if every image of 1960s London, or of pre-war France, or Soviet Russia, vanished overnight. Imagine there was no footage of your home town. In an age dominated by the moving image, how would that vanishing act make you feel?

Last year, I came across the story of the Palestinian Film Archive. Established in 1976, this was an archive of political cinema, documenting the Palestinian people’s struggle and resistance movements, as well as images of their everyday lives – homegrown film of a country and people more usually represented by western news footage. The aim of the film-makers who had established it – and in the 1970s, film-makers really did work collectively – was to make “a people’s cinema”. For a nation unused to film, with no infrastructure to show it, and where everyday survival seemed more vital than watching images of that survival, it was an ambitious project. But after six years, the archive was lost in the 1982 siege of Beirut.

I began researching the archive for a film I wanted to make. There was no film, of course, so I searched for the film-makers instead, to see what and who had survived. I met Annemarie Jacir, a young Palestinian film-maker who has curated festivals in New York and the West Bank, bringing together the surviving film-makers and their work. She led me to the work of director Mustafa Abu Ali. Trained in London in the 1960s, Abu Ali had returned to the Middle East and started making films after the 1967 war, most famously They Do Not Exist (1974), a film which humanised the political controversy. This is one of the very few films to have survived.

Abu Ali died in July this year. His films were significant not just for their content; his was a cinema which reinvented the form. He had collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard, criticised western cinema for its orientalism, and created a vital, urgent body of work (including No to a Peaceful Solution, and Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza). His films navigated a course between what he described as a populist heroic tradition (freedom fighters represented as “supermen, Tarzans and Zorros”) and a cinema of ideas (which he feared was “too esoteric for the people to understand”). He reimagined cinema for a country whose film tradition had been, until the 1960s, one of loss and omission.

His masterpiece They Do Not Exist mixes drama (acted by non-actors) with documentary footage; the film’s use of music and silence is finely balanced. There is a layering of narratives: the intimacy of a little girl writing a letter on a sunlit table; the power of fighter planes taking off to a Bach soundtrack; a man remembering the little girl. Scenes from the destruction of a refugee camp are followed by footage of the press conference afterwards. The film shows us how no one image or narrative can fully convey the politics of war.

They Do Not Exist leaves its audience to fill in the gaps. With so few Palestinian films and film-makers surviving, the documentary I was researching followed a similar route, becoming a memory game.

I did manage to make contact with the original archivist – a wonderful film-maker in her own right, Khadijeh Habashneh. Describing the archive, she reminded me how important it was that these films had ever existed, even if they were now mainly lost. I realised it wasn’t enough to feel nostalgic; it was important to piece together as much as I could, even if Abu Ali’s and Habashneh’s work now had to stand for a whole host of other film-makers.

This summer, Palestine’s first multiplex, Cinema City, opened in the city of Nablus, returning commercial Hollywood and Egyptian cinema to the West Bank in a flurry of PR-generated excitement. As the Supermen, Tarzans and Zorros retake their place on the Palestinian screen, it’s timely to remember this “people’s cinema”, at once human and homegrown.

The London film festival’s outdoor screening of historic London transportation films reveals an endless cycle of logjam and innovation

London’s transport history sometimes seems to be an unending tale of a city struggling with the consequences of its own successes. Improve a road and prosperity ensues, but so does damaging traffic congestion. Install Underground trains to take the strain off the roads and such is the demand that the system eventually becomes clogged.

The upswings of this recurring cycle of logjam and innovation are captured and celebrated by the London film festival’s London Moves Me, a compilation of short films that speaks eloquently of Londoners’ historic longing to move round their metropolis with freedom and speed.

You can see it tomorrow evening at an al fresco screening in Trafalgar Square, assuming the rush hour doesn’t trap you on board your bus. The earliest clips are from the tail end of the 19th century: horse-drawn omnibuses trundle past Eros in Piccadily Circus; chaps in imperial bowlers, toppers and boaters promenade in private carriages or stride across Westminster Bridge towards Big Ben; Victorian ladies conquer billowing frocks to cycle down the Mall.

Soon, rails on the streets denote the coming of powered public transport. Panorama of Ealing from a Moving Tram (1901), with its parasols, tree-lined avenue and Union flags, documents too the development of London’s suburbs, for which good transport links were a prerequisite.

Footage of London’s waterways reminds us that the Thames and the canal network were once fundamental corridors of commerce. Barging Through London (geddit?) from 1924 follows in flickering, captioned silence the slow, Dobbin-led progress of a load of coal along the Regent’s Canal from Limehouse to Paddington Basin.

Then comes the internal combustion engine. Royalty opens a renewed Waterloo station, but leaves the scene by limousine. On an interwar London Bridge the horse-drawn cart is squeezed up to the kerb by the car and the petrol-fuelled bus. And suddenly the film is in Claude Friese-Greene’s washed-out early colour and a caption reads “4,000 motor-buses … a formidable item in London’s traffic”. We see a policeman in the road signalling “halt”. We see pedestrians waiting and scurrying. As 1920s London becomes proudly conscious of its “world city” status its authorities become obliged to manage competing transport mode priorities.

Mayor Johnson is but the latest leader to wrestle with this task, and who could blame him or anyone else for gazing nostalgically at the amateur reels of Scenes at Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner Underground Stations, with their uncrushed passengers and cinematic lighting? London Moves Me will close with a contemporary film by Yohan Forbes of a young Londoner’s journey from the Thames Barrier to the South Bank – by skateboard. Draw your own conclusions from that about the future. Before it, indulge in a little time travel under Nelson’s eye from 6.30 tomorrow evening, complete with live piano accompaniment. Be sure to leave in good time.