Jon Snow

When it comes to a show as thoroughly and consistently shocking as Game of Thrones, it’s easy to feel like we’ve already seen it all and that eventually there’s going to be a dip in the steady level of quality. Yet somehow showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss continue to wow their viewers again and again. On the heels of last weeks all out action spectacle, the audience might have expected a quieter more subdued episode in the vein of previous season finales. In that regard our expectations were properly set and toppled with enough major game-changers occurring in “The Children” to fill an entire season.

Filmmaker Mark Donne took to the stage of the East End Film Festival Opening Gala to reassert an unabashed love for his country, inadvertently echoing author JK Rowling’s previous definition of a patriot as someone who gives back to their nation, invests in its potential and favours those less fortunate. The villains of his documentary and opening film The UK Gold do not abide by this compassionate idiom, nor do they care to defend or justify their actions. Rejected outright by the tax avoiders whom he deigned to document, Donne instead took his camera to the likes of Channel 4’s Jon Snow, Private Eye’s Richard Books and UK Uncut’s Danielle Paffard, to have them chronologically chart the spiralling calamity of tax avoidance and its far-reaching consequences.