Landline
2019 · 12m · United Kingdom
Directed by Matt Houghton
Genres: documentary, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, tender
Through recorded telephone conversations and reconstructive visuals, a documentary portrait of the UK's only helpline for gay farmers — and of LGBTQ life in the British farming community.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the gay farmer angle to be the hook, but Houghton's actually interested in something weirder—the formal constraint of the landline itself, how those recorded voices create a kind of intimacy that feels almost anachronistic. It's a doc that distrusts the visual and trusts the telephone, which is genuinely perverse.
Landline positions itself in a lineage of essay films and radio documentaries—the influence of the Griersonian tradition is evident—while the decision to structure the entire piece around telephonic testimony creates a formally rigorous meditation on presence and distance that recalls works like *Letters from Siberia*. The restraint here is remarkable: letting voices carry the emotional weight while visuals remain reconstructive rather than illustrative.
The singular choice is letting the recorded phone calls remain unadorned, refusing to sweeten them with music or montage—those gaps and silences in conversation become the film's most powerful moments, lifting what could've been a conventional advocacy doc into something that trusts its audience completely.