Kees Driessen

Wandering through the forest, foraging for fungi, indigenous mycologists Juli and Lis are literally following in their ancestors’ footsteps while also contributing to scientific knowledge and sustaining their communities. Beautifully filmed, the documentary portrays the mycelium as a living, breathing and talking entity connected to all of the forest – and to all of us.

In her delicately handled, insightful, loving and highly moving debut film (the first Kazakh documentary feature ever to be screened at the Berlinale), director Kristina Mikhailova travels slowly down the Aksay River, sitting down with young women to reflect on their powerful, vulnerable, terrible, hopeful lives, despite living within the Kazakh patriarchy. (The film was awarded February 21 the Ecumenical Jury Forum prize.)

In his restrained yet devastating documentary, Belgian-Syrian filmmaker Tawfik Sabouni visits the prison where he was held under the Assad regime. Accompanied on his journey by four other survivors, this painful confrontation with personal and political history at the same time honours the ghosts of the past, which makes it not just informative and important, but an intense privilege to be allowed to witness their historic journey.

In the first four episodes of his planned 16-episode series, Mark Cousins provides a stimulating overview of the history of documentary film up to the 1960s. It’s precisely the director’s personal touch, his willingness to choose, combined with an effort to include more diverse voices outside of the traditional documentary canon, which make this series, at least so far, particularly enjoyable.

With this well-crafted, engaging and touching film, in which his elderly father and uncle are seeking information on their own long-ago departed father, Dutch director Tom Fassaert raises poignant, at times troubling, questions about the personal and private aspects of filming your own family affairs.

Gara and daughter Nada live on a gorgeous, sparsely populated plateau, which the Montenegrin military is eyeing up as a NATO shooting range. To Hold a Mountain, selected for World Doc Cinema Competition, explains their resistance not through arguments, but through the sublime beauty of the landscape. Because to be there, to live on this ancestral mountain, is to experience the most wondrous sense of space.

In this entertaining, clever and very personal film, what at first appears to be a culture clash story about a Chinese film student returning home from Poland to her family in Huai’an, explodes – or rather, implodes – into something much more intensely and darkly personal, and therefore highly universal. What’s more, it includes some of the most intense and intimate arguments you will have ever witnessed in a documentary film.

There’s a gentle prodding of issues surrounding AI in this documentary-fiction hybrid by Marc Isaacs, in which a research lab requests access to his documentaries to help train their AI to display more ‘sincerity’. The resulting film is highly entertaining with its interplay between the real and the artificial but, intellectually, it does not delve so deeply. What ‘sincerity’ is or could be – or could be defined as for AI purposes – is never seriously discussed.

As the opera house is for opera, and a church is for service, the cinema is a temple to its art form. Victor Kossakovsky’s Trillion, which is best experienced without any prior knowledge of its content, is one of those rare documentaries that has to be seen on the big screen. As a kind of audiovisual ‘music’, Trillion has a theme, but no plot, dialogue or traditional storytelling. But the black-and-white imagery is gorgeous and the sound design superb, making Trillion an immensely immersive experience.

Frustrated teenager, talented artist, battered wife. Mehrdad Oskouei’s remotely directed Afghan niece Soraya is all these things, while she tenaciously tries to enter the EU from Iran and Turkey, hoping to reunite with her mother in Austria. In this nuanced and intimate documentary we follow Saraya as she films herself during her desperate odyssey. Visually, the whole experience is enriched by beautiful, painterly animations which are clearly fantastical, but convincingly integrated into the documentary reality.