Kees Driessen

In her remarkable debut feature, Kazakh filmmaker Zhanana Kurmasheva films the invisible, and in the process achieves true cinema. In combining the endless steppe and the whispering wind with her striking montages, she manages to suggest the horror of the radiation still haunting the people living near the massive Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, which was closed – but not closed-off – in 1991.

Human Race by Danish director Simon Lec covers both the scientific research by his compatriot, evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev, into the ancient human genome, and the scientist’s ‘race’ for international recognition – specifically the Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, in the CPH world-premiere doc, the latter tends to overshadow the former.

CPH:DOX’s opening film Facing War, about Jens Stoltenberg’s final years as NATO Secretary General, is instructive in defining a current moment in our global geo-politics, but it already feels like ancient history – or history in the unmaking. Regrettably, Stoltenberg’s promise that NATO will stand by Ukraine “for as long as it takes” has lost much of its lustre since Trump’s re-election.

Accompanied by a literary, autobiographical voice-over, Berlin-based Lesotho filmmaker Lemohang Mosese blends observational documentary and mythical re-enactments to create a highly poetic, highly personal film that transcends the boundaries between reality and dream, showing how, instead of concrete memories, it’s the dream of a mythicised home that sustains the emigrant.

As a member of Palestine’s first parkour team, the energetic Ahmed free-runs through the battered buildings of Gaza pre-October 7, 2023. His goal is to create parkour videos that are so impressive that they could be his ticket out. In the meantime, he strikes up an unlikely online friendship with wistful Palestinian-American émigré director Areeb Zuaiter.

IDFA’s AI-informed opener About a Hero is not, in itself, a very good film. But it’s a good opening film. And it’s extremely timely as a thought-provoking essay, as the documentary community should readily embrace a leading role in establishing AI guidelines to safeguard the public’s trust in the documentary image.

Mati Diop’s stunning Dahomey, winner of the Berlinale Golden Bear and nominated for the European Film Award for Documentary, is a magical work about the restitution of colonial treasures. Diop follows these precious cultural artefacts from the ‘prison’ of a Parisian museum depot back to their home country of Benin, where they once more assume living and mythical significance.

Recently, director Dominique Cabrera’s cousin recognised himself as the young boy, seen from behind, in the fifth shot of Chris Marker’s 1962 masterpiece La Jetée. Thus began a remarkable cinephile detective story, in which coincidences, discoveries, echoes and twists end up in an endless hall of mirrors. Cabrera navigates this hall of mirrors with remarkable ease and clarity, driven by a fundamental curiosity about her subject and the people around her.

The first film in 25 years by acclaimed New German Cinema director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, which received its international premiere in Lisbon, is both an impressive piece of urban intervention by a deeply motivated artist seeking to revitalise the war-ravaged Demmin of his youth, and a painfully ill-timed attempt at historical reconciliation with Russia.

In what feels like a cinematic counterpart to Ivo Andrić’s literary masterpiece The Bridge on the Drina, Swiss filmmaker Nicole Vögele’s The Landscape and the Fury, longlisted for the European Film Awards 2024, juxtaposes the natural tranquility of the north-western Bosnian landscape with the fury of human struggles past and present, as modern-day refugees pass through areas still mined after the Balkan wars of the 1990s.