North Circular Stories

I met Simon Ostrovsky in Berlin, where he sold me a bike that only had one pedal and then disappeared. I forgave him because he makes really interesting documentary shorts, like the recent North Circular Stories that aired on Channel 4 two weeks ago. Obviously I missed them - we don’t get Channel 4 here - but they’ve now been uploaded onto something like YouTube.

The films uncover an underworld of Eastern European migrants in London living in abandoned houses on the city’s infamous North Circular Road, and forming a tight-knit community of Latvian and Lithuanian menial workers, freeloaders and students alike.

I love this format - basically these are the documentary equivalent of pop videos, with three minutes to tell the story and a tendency to get under your skin. There’s no time to present an argument or squeeze a moral out - what you get is people’s lives, edited.

Perfect for our information-saturated culture. Without further ado, I give you - North Circular Stories.