Geoffrey Macnab

In his latest documentary, Dutch filmmaker Frank Scheffer profiles virtuoso Syrian musician Kinan Azmeh, who has lived in New York since 2001, unable to return to his home town of Damascus since the uprising of 2011. “The film is about Kinan and his musical friends,” the director explains, adding that, “I regard all my films as non-political, but I agree with Johan van der Keuken [Dutch master documentary maker] when he says that every work of art is politically engaged.”

Gyz La Rivière’s Videotheek Marco, a world premiere at IFFR, is a tribute to the lost world of Dutch video stores - to a now bygone era when VHS tapes dominated leisure time in the Netherlands. “I really miss it,” La Rivière sighs as he contemplates the days when video outlets were almost as commonplace as supermarkets. “I was born in the year of video, 1976, and so I really love the ratio 4:3,” he says of the (almost) square format in which almost all movies were seen on VHS.

David Borenstein talks to BDE about his Sundance feature doc co-directed with, and featuring, Pavel (Pasha) Talankin, a schoolteacher in an industrial town in Russia who decided to chronicle the way the war was affecting his school. “This is something of a political thriller and a very vital record of wartime Russia, but then to have Pasha’s voice at the centre creates that heart-warming, schoolyard drama vibe as well,” says Borenstein.

In his latest documentary, world-premiering at Sundance, Charlie Shackleton ruminates both over his abandoned investigation into a notorious (and unsolved) murder as well as the limitations of the true crime genre. “It does increasingly feel that absolutely the only thing you can get made is true crime or celebrity documentary. And it feels really suffocating,” Shackleton tells BDE.

The feature doc Khartoum brings together five very different stories from the conflict in Sudan. As co-director Cox tells BDE, it is a ”radical” project in that it brings Arabs and Africans, rich and poor, men and women, adults and children, together. “The issue of divide and rule is what fuels the war today…it’s not just in front of the camera but the act of the directors working together behind the camera is a really bold thing. It’s a statement of collectivity and unity.”

Gianluca Matarrese’s new feature doc (a world premiere in Sundance) profiles the remarkable and highly cherished Dr Maurizio Bini as he tends to would-be parents undergoing in vitro fertilization, and folk seeking to reconcile their bodies with their gender identities. In the film we see Bini as he approached the end of his career, mentoring a successor while continuing to fight for his patients.

In How to Build a Library two Nairobi women set out to transform what used to be a whites-only library into a vibrant cultural hub. When filming began almost a decade ago, the place was like a bombsite. “Visually it was such a fascinating space,” Lekow tells BDE. “It felt so symbolic of this paralysis you feel in the Kenyan state and the way that things move; this post-colonial identity crisis where there is a painful history, but it’s also something you can’t ignore, erase, and pretend that it didn’t happen.”

In her latest doc, New York-based Amber Fares once again follows fearless Israeli comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi as she tries to use comedy to solve the Middle East crisis, and as she develops her stand-up routine at Harvard University. “Noam has a niche where she does her stand-up. Those are in mixed areas, in Haifa, in Jaffa, in those theatres where she draws a lot of left-wing Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel,” the director tells BDE.

In Kim A. Snyder’s Oscar short-listed doc, survivor Sam Fuentes testifies at the trial of the Parkland high school shooter. Both women discuss the short film with BDE. “I prepared quite heavily for both the testimony I had made as a victim but also my victim statement at the end,” says Fuentes. “It was a lot of preparation. I knew that even though I had so much rage and so much sadness and frustration, I wanted to approach it with a foundation of dignity and composure.”

Sundance winner Union, an underdog in the race for the Feature Doc Oscar, resembles a modern-day David taking on a Goliath in the shape of Jeff Bezos and his Amazon empire. “[A] nomination would signal to the field that audiences want to see political stories,” co-director Brett Story tells BDE. “And that a film without distribution can still break through despite not spending millions of dollars on a campaign.”