It’s hard to avoid describing the documentary series Shadow of Truth as Israel’s Making a Murderer (reviewed earlier by me here). Released at round about the same time, in 2016, it was subsequently picked up by Netflix and became one of their most watched true crime series, before being picked up and aired recently on BBC4.
And, if you’re happy to accept my enthusiastic recommendation as sufficient, I suggest you stop reading now, go away and watch all five episodes, before coming back to read the rest of this albeit consciously brief review.
Notwithstanding which, I don’t think it’s giving too much away to assume that anyone who sits down to watch a five episode docu series on a famous and infamous murder trial will do so expecting at some point to be presented with some class of a twist.
So, and without giving anything away, here very broadly is how it begins. A teenage girl is brutally murdered in a leafy, bubbled suburb in the Israeli hinterland. And the first episode presents us with a clear and apparently un-contestable explanation as to exactly what happened. Up until that is the final 20 seconds, when somehow, we appear to have the rug pulled from under us.
And in episode two, everything we thought we knew about what had happened is, remarkably, turned completely upside down.
Created and directed by Yotam Guendelman and Ari Pines it stirred up quite the storm when it was originally screened in Israel. Constantly surprising, painstakingly researched and utterly compelling, it’s a loud and ringing endorsement for a free and independent media landscape.
Which is as fundamental for a functioning democracy as maintaining a clear separation between the judiciary and the vested interests of political parties.
Watch the trailer for Shadow of Truth here:
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