Director Al Bailey
Score 5.5/6

DFT (DTF) is currently being screened in the 2021 Melbourne Documentary Film Festival.

A filmmaker follows his friend and widowed pilot across the world, to find love on Tinder. The quest spins to an expose of depraved behaviour.

My first thought when I finished watching DTF (for those of you who might go searching for this after the MDFF) or DFT was that this was Alan Bailey’s own personal heart of darkness. Some of you might get the reference but I feel I might need to explain it, dealing with ‘Christian’s (whose face was blurred for the entire documentary) behaviour as it was presented in the documentary seemed that it must have been as stressful for Alan Bailey and his crew as it was dealing with Marlon Brando’s ego on the set of Apocalypse Now. This actually had the potential to be something that was heart-warming and sweet in the same way of watching the love story of your favourite couple progress in your favourite television series. Instead, it was awkward and troubling and the feelings I had watching this spiraled into the feelings you have watching a multi-vehicle pile-up on television. Though it is more socially acceptable to laugh at a documentary like this rather then a multi-vehicle pile-up. It was beautifully shot documentary and some of the interviews that were featured in the documentary where interesting but perhaps where not as in depth as I would have liked, it would have been interesting to hear more about the nature of addiction.
This is the second documentary that I have watched in the past three months that has challenged my notions of what a documentary is. I have always believed documentaries are truthful and are essentially feature length article of something that you might watch on the nightly news. Instead for the better part of an hour I kept asking myself ‘is this real?’, ‘does ‘Christian’ really want to be in this?’, ‘wait … no … it can’t be’, ‘yes, it is … it’s so ridiculous it has to be’.