Kees Driessen

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.

Having spent her whole life aspiring to be a professional singer, middle-aged cleaner Gil finally achieves her dream in Maria Clara Escobar’s hybrid documentary, which invents an alternative story in which Gil can shed the mask forced on her by economic and class factors, and at last present her true self, her own voice, to the world.

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson’s deliciously paced Vacances is neither a reductive portrait of an old eccentric nor a sensationalist dissection of a dysfunctional family. Although either could probably have been edited from her material. Instead, we mostly find ourselves lounging languidly around a sunny villa in Provence, as the uninhibited, at times inexcusably rude, Granny dominates the proceedings. But at some point, something’s gotta give…

This elegiac ode to a crumbling cinema in Amman intertwines the messy reality of making a documentary [which entails the filmmaker constantly steering his protagonists from behind the camera] with archival news footage on Palestine-Israel. Both meta levels reflect on this beautiful portrayal of the cinema’s last two elderly employees, who struggle daily to keep their doomed movie theatre afloat. Thus say I, a critic and lover of cinema…and of this film.

The Israeli targeted killing of Fatma Hassona, a photojournalist in Gaza, just one day after the ACID selection of Sepideh Farsi’s documentary about her was announced, has cast a dark shadow over the Cannes Film Festival. The powerful and minimalist film has become an international cause célèbre, and artistically, the documentary is worthy of all the attention. 

In the Mexican documentary Niñxs (a gender-free spelling of ‘children’ in Spanish), director Kani Lapuerta follows trans girl – and friend – Karla for eight years until she enters high school. Looking back from the present, the pair also provide a commentary track on Kani’s film, criticising, discussing and changing the narrative. It’s clever, and it works – and could work for many other documentaries as well.

There is another world behind the wall. This could be one summary of Callisto Mc Nulty’s La Muraille, which reminisces with staff and patients about the Fontilles sanatorium in Alicante (opened in 1909), where lepers were housed, treated, and also locked away. Callisto Mc Nulty creates a quietly haunting reflection on how history – often painful, sometimes joyous, never truly past – echoes through the sanatorium, the surrounding landscapes and its inhabitants.