Geoffrey Macnab

When he was growing up in Mozambique, Pierre-François Sauter used to go on holiday to Cape Verde. Years later, the Swiss filmmaker has returned to the islands to make his stark new feature documentary Far West (world-premiering at Visions Du Réel). The film, which has almost no dialogue, focuses on two characters, Angela and Jair, as they try to eke out an existence in their fishing village in a rocky, volcanic corner of Cape Verde.

If you go to Niscemi in Sicily, you’ll find both picturesque woodland and, very incongruously, a US base housing a Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite ground station. Right in front of it lives Valentina, a woman in her 20s, together with her parents. “In the beginning, it [the film] started as a story about the base. But then, as I was discovering that the fight was gone and there was no hope anymore, I met the family. I found their resistance [to the base] very interesting,” director Francesca Scalisi tells BDE.

In the mountains of Afghanistan, a Hazara family seeks to uncover the truth behind the sudden death of their daughter, Zahra, who moved to Kabul to study. Co-director Yourish is from a Hazara background himself. “The story of Zahra, the story of the family, it doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens within the historical context. It is a continuation of the systematic discrimination against the Hazara people,” he tells Business Doc Europe.

The Ocean Viking has often been in the news in recent years. It is the ship chartered by humanitarian organisation SOS Méditerranée to rescue migrants fleeing by sea from Libya. It has been impounded, harassed by Libyan coast guard vessels and criticised by European politicians - but it has saved countless lives. Jean-Baptiste Bonnet talks to BDE about his new film for which he followed the ship for six weeks.

Mother Vera, which world-premieres in Nyon, follows the eponymous protagonist, a charismatic former heroic addict who had lived in an Orthodox monastery in Belarus for 20 years. “I felt very drawn to her quest,” co-director Embleton reflects on her subject. “She wants to experience all of life, and yet she was in this monastery.”

Thomas Pickering’s hard-hitting (but funny) new documentary world-premieres April 10 at London’s Curzon Soho. Growing up in Yorkshire, the director never ate animal products. The future filmmaker remembers as a seven-year-old wandering through a supermarket with his mum, looking at the meat shelves and knowing instantly that he didn’t like what he was seeing. “I said to my mum, ‘I don’t want to walk down this aisle anymore,’” he tells BDE.

Dutch producer/director Pieter van Huystee tells a largely untold story in his new feature doc When I Close My Eyes (which world premiered March 24 at Movies That Matter) - that of the Dutch women and children interned in Japanese prison camps in Indonesia during the Second World War. His mother and grandmother were among the captives enduring tough and traumatic experiences. The director talks to BDE.

Joe is the main protagonist of The Flats, living in a near derelict count estate in north Belfast. He’s a craggy, weather-beaten figure with a bony face full of grief. There is very little laughter in Joe’s life. He grew up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Nearly 50 years on, he is still painstakingly re-living those traumatic days. Bitter memories have distorted his life. “The face carries the scars…I think his face says so much,” director Alessandra Celesia tells BDE of her subject.

Shot over four years, The Black Garden tells the story of three generations living in the shadow of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, where war has become part of everyday life. “They've never known anything else. Their grandparents experienced war, their parents, and now it's the younger generations. They're unfortunately prepared for it, but they have an unshakeable determination,” director Pazoumian says of his subjects.

Yance Ford’s new feature doc Power (which screened at CPH:DOX and is soon to launch on Netflix) looks at the origins of police power in the US and asks why American citizens have allowed cops to hold so much sway over their lives. The film features interviews with many leading academics who detail with chilling clarity the reasons behind 200 years of American police bias and brutality. This, as Ford puts it to Business Doc Europe, is a system with “violence, coercion and control’ at its core.