Stanley Kubrick gave very few interviews, which is exactly why the recordings at the centre of Kubrick by Kubrick carry weight. Grégory Monro's 2020 French documentary builds a 61-minute portrait around the director's own voice, letting him account for his films himself.
What is Kubrick by Kubrick about?
The documentary is organised around a set of previously unheard interview recordings in which Kubrick talks about his work, his methods and the thinking behind his pictures. Instead of handing the job of interpretation to an outside narrator, Monro lets that voice lead and arranges the rest of the material around it, moving back and forth between the life and the filmography. The two are treated as parts of one story: how a filmmaker who kept his distance from the press thought about cinema, and how those thoughts found their way onto the screen. At just over an hour, it works as a guided tour through a career, told largely by the man who lived it.
About the cast
Because this is a documentary, nobody in the credits is playing a character. Stanley Kubrick is the central presence, and the listing around him includes Malcolm McDowell, Jack Nicholson, Peter Sellers, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Roger Ebert and Kirk Douglas. Grégory Monro is the sole credited director and shapes the recordings into a single continuous line of thought.
Context & significance
Kubrick by Kubrick is a French production and sits squarely in the documentary genre, in the specific corner reserved for films about filmmaking. Its running time of 61 minutes makes it one of the shorter feature documentaries in the K-Time catalogue, closer to a long essay than to a full biography. Viewers who already know the director's work will find it a companion piece that adds his own commentary; those who are new to him get an introduction that starts from his words instead of from other people's opinions of him. The title is available here with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so it can be followed in Farsi either way.
Watching Kubrick by Kubrick on Ktime
Kubrick by Kubrick streams on K-Time, the Persian-focused service built for the Iranian diaspora. Reading this page is open to everyone; playing the documentary requires logging in to a K-Time account. The interface is available in Farsi, and you can choose between the Persian dub and the Persian subtitles once playback begins.