Kees Driessen

An impressive student film, world premiering in DOK Leipzig’s German Competition, about the Mozambican contract workers in the GDR who were forced to return after German reunification, and the children they left behind. These include children like Sarah, who has been questioning her Afro-German identity and now is taking her own child to Mozambique for a family visit.

Stylistically dreamlike, emotionally intimate, Srđan Keča’s debut feature, which screens in the AJB Doc Last Minute Cinema section, leads us into the homeless lives of a young girl, her mother and an ersatz grandmother, living in the basement of the never completed Museum of the Revolution in Belgrade.

In The Super 8 Years, one of two documentaries screening at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, celebrated French author Annie Ernaux and her son David revisit their family’s home movies, reinterpreting them, with melancholy hindsight but also a sense both of emotional and historical detachment, as a sign of their times.

In his film selected for Cannes Special Screenings, it is incredibly moving to see veteran filmmaker Patricio Guzmán return to a changed Chile where his old political dreams, crushed when the Pinochet coup killed Allende and democracy, are being revived by a new generation.

Edited from countless home movies, Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How to Save a Dead Friend not only shows her best friend Kimi’s descent into drug-induced depression and death, but indirectly portrays a whole generation growing up – but often not growing old – in Putin’s Russia.

A chilling and heart-wrenching portrait of wartime life in Ukraine, Mariupolis 2, added at the last minute to the Cannes programme as a Special Screening, is a posthumous but living monument to its director, who was killed in Ukraine by invading Russian forces.

Evelien Spreitzer is disabled and in a wheelchair. Her sexuality has always taken a back seat, but now she’s on a quest. A quest which she shares with honesty and intimacy. Screening in Hot Docs World Showcase, the resulting film is an inspiring portrait of self-discovery, despite doubts and vulnerabilities, with starring roles for sex toys and a professional sex carer.

Edited from countless home movies, Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How to Save a Dead Friend not only shows her best friend Kimi’s descent into drug-induced depression and death, but indirectly portrays a whole generation growing up – but often not growing old – in Putin’s Russia.

World premiering in Visions du Réel’s International Feature Film Competition, Éclaireuses follows two passionate teachers in Brussels who create their own little safe space for children – many of them refugees – who never went to school before. The doc may eschew analysis of wider pedagogical issues but shines a deserved light on two teachers who lovingly, patiently, and professionally take care of children who have fallen through the cracks of the system.

A maelstrom of images poetically reflects Life on Earth in this short film by Danish video artist Jeppe Lange, co-directed by Google’s Image Recognition AI, at the same time providing a cosmic trip for the viewer. World-premiering in CPH:DOX New:Vision, it’s like an alien intelligence is sifting through images representative of the planet - and trying to make sense of them.