Kees Driessen

Comme un château fort is less about mourning, more a form of mourning itself. Lou Colpé’s debut feature seems especially worthwhile for those of us who have lost loved ones or whose friends recently have. It shows how silence and presence are key to providing the support we need where words often fail.

How to film on the massive scale of a melting glacier? Rafa Molés and Pepe Andreu, directors of the feature doc La Pietà, selected for Thessaloniki Doc Fest International Competition, approach the subject both from up on high and from right up close, considering both the present and the past, but only sporadically connect with the geological and human perspectives.

Excellent film, wrong genre. Whispers in May blurs the boundaries of the hybrid documentary subgenre to such an extent that its documentary status becomes unclear. This doesn’t mean its story is any less engaging or its young leads any less mesmerising. It is a very enjoyable watch – it’s just that it would better be labelled ‘fiction.'

Fifty years after the first squatters arrived at the abandoned military barracks close to the heart of Copenhagen, the now-legendary, über-libertarian district of Christiania is still thriving. Karl Friis Forchhammer has been around the area his whole life and provides us with the full history of how a small group of people managed, through ups and downs, to build their own community. What the eponymously-titled doc implicitly underlines is that the world is a better place for having Christiania in it.

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.