Evening all!

It’s Imogen here, delighted to be bringing you our Weekend Edition, including Stewart Lee on Russia; a read from our Dutch friends Follow the Money on Palantir’s contracts across Europe; a tale about the dark underbelly of the 90s; and Hannah Jane Parkinson speaking to Stan Rennie, the fisherman at the heart of All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea, a new must-see eco-documentary set on Teesside.

It’s a bumper season for great documentaries holding power to account. Seriously, I’ve been struggling to find enough free evenings to watch everything. There’s Naza, out today, from the Oscar-winning directors of No Other Land, featuring 24 Israeli military/intelligence whistleblowers examining how AI is being used for the mass killings in Gaza. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything, a close-up look at disgraced billionaire and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the month leading up to her 11-year prison term, has been hailed as a masterpiece, with festival audiences queuing round the block to see it in the US where it’s released today (out 20 November in the UK). Next month also sees the release of Ava DuVernay’s latest, 14th, an urgent rallying cry about injustice in the US. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is going to great lengths to obstruct the release of Alex Gibney’s documentary about him, from legal action to infantile insults aimed at discrediting him (including – lol – comparisons “with dog feces”). Brilliantly, Gibney seems to just be turning it all into marketing for the film (including creating an X account called @MuskFilmFacts). Still no UK release date, though. 

Thankfully, UK audiences can soon watch the latest from the award-winning British talent Jeanie Finlay who previously made Your Fat Friend and Seahorse. All Rivers Spill Their Stories to the Sea has been described by the mighty journalist Tina Brown as “one of the most moving, thrilling and fantastic documentaries I have ever seen”. She even compared fisherman protagonist Stan to the postmaster who doggedly campaigned for the truth to come out over the Horizon IT scandal, saying he’s “the next Mr Bates, believe me”.

Beautifully shot but maddening to watch, All Rivers will leave you reeling. It tells the story of how, in September 2021, a mass “die-off” on England’s north-east coast decimated the local fishing industry. With their livelihoods lost, the fishing crews became environmental activists, their campaign to prove that industrial pollution from the local freeport was to blame taking them all the way to Westminster. (Where, incidentally, actor Danny Dyer also found himself this week as part of his own fight against sewage pollution, delivering a petition to Downing Street while floating a giant poo emoji down the Thames. Go Danny!). 

All power to those taking a stand about the environmental disaster unfolding in our seas and waterways. All Rivers is in cinemas a week today (23 October) but here at the Nerve we are proud to be partnering with Jeanie and the team on an exclusive screening on Monday 2 November on the online screening platform Kinema, with a post-film Q&A. More details coming on Tuesday.

And big news – our new zine is a finally available to buy, with free P&P to UK addresses, via this link. All profits go straight back into our journalism; speaking of which, if you’re a free reader, you can upgrade to paid membership here!

Now for today’s links:

“It’s been a great week for pointing out elephants in the room,” writes Stewart in his weekly column. “And it turns out there’s so many of them hiding in plain sight, it’s amazing there was room for the nest of tables and the kids’ Nintendos." The “elephants" in question are the things Britain hasn't talked about for a decade but really needs to – the best example being Andy Burnham saying out loud that Russia interfered in Brexit. But while we’re finally facing up to Putin’s threat, Stewart says, we still haven’t acknowledged the most powerful troll our way of life still faces: Donald Trump. Read his column here.

On the north-east coast of England, maritime livelihoods are in crisis – and, as a powerful new documentary reveals, crews are sure the local freeport is to blame. Read Hannah Jane Parkinson’s story on the fishermen fighting back here, plus our film critic Ellen E Jones picks five more documentaries to look out for.

Kerry Shaw began the 1990s by being photographed in a catsuit for the cover of i-D magazine and then signing a record deal. Who better to look back on the tumultuous decade currently being celebrated at the Tate? But the pre-#MeToo world she encountered as a fledgling pop star was a much darker – and weirder – place than the exhibition suggests. “There was one particular major label boss who obviously found my conversation particularly scintillating,” Kerry remembers. She innocently arrived at his suite one day for what she thought would be drinks… and you will genuinely not be able to guess what happened next. Read Kerry’s wild recollections here.

New research by a network of journalists across the continent reveals that US AI and surveillance firm Palantir has offices in 14 European countries, including the UK, and does business with national governments – ministries, armed forces and national police forces – in at least 11 of them. But as Carole Cadwalladr explains in her introduction to Sebastiaan Brommersma's report, the pushback has begun...

“Fontaines DC have always dealt a decent hand in doom,” writes Nerve music critic Kate Hutchinson. But now on their fifth album, the Irish five-piece are “using their voice to express how far we are from humanity”. The band have had a massive year – headlining festivals, making music for the Peaky Blinders film – and now the album, which includes a duet with none other than Rosalía, is getting rave reviews. “Despite being arena-massive”, Kate writes, they’re still “keenly emphasising their political stance, expressing support for Palestine at their gigs” and now, with Dopamine Chamber, “trying to make sense of the overwhelm”. Read Kate’s review here.

It’s been a firm fixture on the menu ever since Jacob Kenedy opened his restaurant Bocca di Lupo on a Soho back street in 2008 and now his ‘nduja and orecchiette pasta dish has made it into the pages of his third cookbook, Pasta Tricolore. Combining rich ’nduja, or Calabrian sausage, with fresh tomatoes and rocket, stirred into orecchiette, Kenedy says creating it “remains among my prouder moments”. Find the recipe here.

Thanks for reading – we’ll be back on Tuesday. And please do forward this newsletter to anyone you think might enjoy it – it really helps us grow.

Have a great weekend!

Imogen