Kees Driessen

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.

This intriguing portrait of the chief of the most important Soviet intelligence network during World War II, the one which first informed Moscow about Hitler’s plans for attacking Stalingrad, is as fascinating as it is frustrating – which in turn makes it all the more fascinating. Was Leopold Trepper a Gestapo collaborator or a war hero? Or perhaps both?

Timely, but disappointing, Visions du Réel’s opening film Blame by Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei portrays three scientists who got caught up in the geopolitical and anti-scientific blame game surrounding the 2019 Covid outbreak. But taking just one side – even if it’s the right one – on an issue as fraught as the Covid pandemic merely makes for meagre storytelling.

The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, held in Helsinki in 1975, gathered world leaders as part of the détente between the Warsaw Pact and NATO countries. Arthur Franck’s archival documentary is fascinating, relevant and exciting - especially now, fifty years on, as Russia and the West are once again at war. But it is less in need of irony than director Franck may think…

Ai Weiwei’s Animality offers a global overview of human-animal relationships in the age of industrialisation, from circus animals in China to the culling of mink in Denmark. Documenting without judging, Ai’s often beautiful, often hard to watch panorama quietly forces us to rethink our own opinions. That Ai Weiwei manages to raise so many questions without ever asking them is a testament to the effectiveness of his wide-ranging approach.