Louis Theroux has been praised for his return to TV after the release of The New Builders.
The BBC Two Documentary is a follow-up of 2011’s Ultra ZionistsWhere he visited and interviewed Israeli settlers on the Palestinian West Bank.
In the new film, Theroux arrives back in the West Bank 14 years after his last visit, where Settler ideology has found itself to have political traction. Among the settlers he meets is Ari Abramowitz, who says they do not believe that Palestine exists as a nation or with “a real claim to this country”.
Theroux also meets Issa, a Palestinian man who gives him a guided tour of the city of Hebron on the southern west bank, where everything is closed with dozens of control points in place.
The journalist has been praised for his signature interview style through which he makes his topics feel comfortable enough to speak freely.
“Who ever performs Louis Theroux good job,” said a fan of X/Twitter. “His documentary The New Builders was very good. Let the settlers just show people who they are. ”
Another viewer wrote online: “Louis Theroux’s brilliance as a journalist is that he has such a gentle approach that truly unhinged people feel safe enough to pout their worldview.”
“Louis Theroux delivered a masterpiece in silence,” another fan concluded.
IN The independent” s four-star review of the documentary, pointed out Phil Harrison, that Theroux’s moments of unintended honesty when talking to his topics is his “greatest strength as an interviewer” as “people don’t feel threatened by him”.
“They are encouraged to open up,” he wrote. “At the beginning of his career, he often deployed this skill in service for junkness. He has now added seriousness – and even sometimes a degree of physical bravery.
“He has been criticized in some quarters for platforming this particular extremism, but no one goes off the hook here – and in fact it is hardly unknown territory to challenge people who seem beyond the pale territory of Theroux.”
The documentary manufacturer is best known for its disarming interview style, as seen in his 2007 documentary on a controversial Christian ministry The most hated family in America and his 2018 polyamory series Changed states: Love Without Limits.
Among his most famous and widely seen documentaries are Louis and the Nazis (2003), where the filmmaker spent time with a white supremacist organization.