20,000 Days on Earth

A constructed day in the life of Nick Cave. The writing desk in the morning, a session with a therapist, old boxes in an archive store, conversations with old friends in a car, the stage at night. The twenty-thousandth day is the frame; it is not a real day but a structure shaped like one. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard directed. They wrote it with Cave, meaning the documentary's conversations are scripted. The best passages are in the car: Ray Winstone, Blixa Bargeld and Kylie Minogue each get in separately, talk, and go. Nobody is introduced, nobody says goodbye. There are also studio sessions for the album Push the Sky Away, where a song is assembled piece by piece in front of you. It won the directing and editing awards in World Cinema Documentary at Sundance in 2014. It deliberately breaks documentary form and does not hide it, working more like a fiction built on memory. Who it is for: Nick Cave listeners and anyone who likes music films that break the mould. Who it is not for: viewers wanting linear biography; this does not tell a life story.