Kees Driessen

Seldom is a hybrid documentary as clear-cut as Une fleur à la bouche by French director Éric Baudelaire, world-premiering in Berlin Forum. Preceded by images of the world’s largest flower market, a 1923 play by Pirandello suddenly appears as a reflection on the nature of documentaries. Are they, in essence, escapist distractions? Or rather, reminders of the value of life?

The first thing to note about Everything Will Be OK, world-premiering in Berlinale Competition, is that you will have never seen anything quite like it. And that in itself should be enough to make you want to experience the latest work by Cambodia’s leading arthouse filmmaker, in which animals in the near future have taken over the role of totalitarian tyrants that we, as humans, have so far reserved for ourselves.

Stylistically dreamlike and emotionally intimate, Srđan Keča’s debut feature, world premiering at IDFA, 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.

Endlessly fascinating, and equally recognisable to a Western audience, and following in the footsteps of Abbas Kiarostami’s classic from 1989, Tonight’s Homework, world premiering at IDFA, shows Iranian primary school children being interviewed about their lives.

The historic first public cinema screening of The History of the Civil War (1921), long-lost sophomore film by Russian master Dziga Vertov, in Amsterdam’s Tuschinski Theatre, was both a glorious event and an archival triumph, if at times somewhat slow. That said, uninspiring scenes of parading soldiers were offset by an excellent live score, striking war footage and scattered hints of Vertov’s later genius.

This endearing portrait of multi-faceted trans artist and adult performer Tara Emory impresses with its gentle approach to potentially sensationalist subject matter. It shows Emory as, above all, an interesting individual – who just happens to make some really cool retrofuturistic sci-fi porn.

A documentary which manages the seemingly impossible feat of merging myth and actuality, thereby becoming mythological itself without diminishing the impact of its factual reporting on the disappearing reindeer and reappearing mammoths of the Siberian tundra.

There is a rhythm to the film’s sounds and images, a balance between the wild and the thoughtful. It’s as if we’ve entered Hobert’s mind and are dancing with her thoughts, associations and emotions…and what a privilege. (CPH:DOX 2021 review)

A dazzling dive into the deep underbelly of drug-fuelled red light tourism in Thailand and Cambodia, looking for two missing Finnish junkies through the eyes of their former travel companion. A morally ambiguous trip into the heart of darkness. (CPH:DOX 2021 review)

A single sow and her piglets is the subject matter of Russian documentary master Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda. In the film, animals which are usually thought of as meat are here observed as fellow living beings. (Berlinale 2020 review)