Kees Driessen

The final instalment of Wang Bing’s monumental, masterful Youth trilogy about the young, overworked and underpaid workers of Zhili’s vast textile district, strikes a melancholic note after the high-strung energy of its predecessors. As the director put it to BDE in Venice: “With all the ups and downs that these [past 20] years have brought…it has led me to think that there is no actual hope for a future.”

This terrifying inside account of America’s self-proclaimed Patriot Movement, which overlaps with Trump’s MAGA movement, closely follows both violent extremists and surprisingly sympathetic activists leading up to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. It is an essential document, and one unsettling in its neutrality. The film world-premiered in Venice Settimana Internazionale della Critica.

In the second part of his Youth trilogy (subtitled Hard Times), master documentarian Wang Bing focuses on the economic hardships of young textile workers in Zhili, China. Less immersive than the first instalment Spring, this time we get more of a sense of how non-state-owned capitalism in China functions…or doesn’t. As managers run off with the money, the police extract forced confessions, and workers barely earn enough to get by…

Ukrainian director and activist Oleh Sentsov, who was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize while in Russian captivity before his release in 2019, is now a soldier in the Ukrainian army fighting Russian invaders. In the trenches, he accidentally switched on his helmet cam. Real is the very real result, a film of unprecedented historical value.

A lovingly reverential portrait of the most famous puppeteer of all time, Jim Henson, creator of Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and other fantastical worlds, Howard's film offers eye-opening insights into Henson’s background, delivers anecdotes which will be new to many, and all the time propels this reviewer on a nostalgic trip down memory lane.

French director Yolande Zauberman’s documentary La belle de Gaza, which world-premiered May 17 as a Special Screening at Cannes, has an unapologetically straightforward approach to the trans women it portrays - which is both its weakness and its strength. One thing to note: the film isn’t set in, nor is it about, Gaza.

For two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, director Sergei Loznitsa filmed life across Ukraine. A companion piece to his remarkable 2014 documentary Maidan, about Ukraine’s civil uprising against political alignment with Russia, The Invasion shows the Ukrainian people to be just as stoic and resilient in times of war.

A crowd-pleaser about pleasing a crowd, Orkhan Aghazadeh’s The Return of the Projectionist, world-premiering in Visions du Réel’s International Feature Film Competition, celebrates the rekindled love for the communal cinema experience in a small Azeri village, with the doc images themselves begging to be seen on the big screen.

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, world-premiering in Nyon, 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.

The population of Gran Canaria comprises many different groups. There are the four million holidaymakers who descend on the island each year, the long-term residents and, increasingly, refugees from the African continent, all of whom are portrayed by Danish director Mette Carla Albrechtsen. Meanwhile, a volcano threatens to erupt.