Kees Driessen

In her thriller-like dive into the secret community of baloeiros, the Brazilian men who illegally build giant hot-air balloons, Danish director Sissel Morell Dargis provides a rare female perspective on this macho world which, as its deeply committed members proclaim, offers an alternative to joining the drug cartels.

In this joyful, inquisitive documentary, Danish filmmaker Max Kestner, triggered by the worldwide uproar caused by the euthanasia of a healthy but superfluous giraffe in a Danish zoo, embarks on an existential, mostly scientific quest to answer his biggest question: what is life? And, as a related problem, how can he feel less lonely now his children have left home?

In Subject: Film-making, acclaimed German filmmaker Edgar Reitz, maker of the much-lauded Heimat trilogy and recipient of the Berlinale Camera 2024, reunites with the former pupils of a unique film class he taught at an all-girls school in 1968. Jumping back and forth in time, Reitz’s love of cinema proves remarkably enduring, having marked these enthusiastic students for life.

When parents die, their descendants are confronted with drawers, shelves and boxes full of things which have been collected and organised over a lifetime. In the case of director Costanza Quatriglio, her father was well-known Italian journalist Giuseppe Quatriglio, and his archives were of interest not only to her but also to the Central Library of the Sicilian Region.

In a film that adds new perspective to the war in Ukraine, four generations of women in one war-torn family, including director Svitlana Lishchynska, wrestle with their conflicting identities and mentalities formed in the Soviet Union, the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, the capital Kyiv and as refugees in the UK. Where, among all these places, is home?

Victor Kossakovsky’s new documentary Architecton, about the architectural use of stone and concrete (and a companion piece to Aquarela, his 2018 doc about water), is beautifully solemn and visually awe-inspiring, even sublime. But it suffers from a muddled narrative. The film is one of two documentaries selected for Berlinale Competition in 2024.

In this early highlight of 2024, Belgian archival maestro Grimonprez dissects the links between jazz and colonial politics during the Western sabotage of Congo’s newly won independence in 1960. With superb sound design, brilliant editing and hard-hitting political analysis (as well as great music), the film is as intellectually satisfying and physically irresistible as a great jazz performance.

His parents used to regret how much time their terminally ill son Mats spent gaming. But after his death, they found that Mats, as ‘Private Detective Ibelin’, had been a much-loved member of a large and deeply loyal online community. Sure to be a crowd-pleaser, Ibelin is an accessible and moving account of the freedom, love and consolation that can be found in a digital world – especially for those of us in need of support in an offline world of sorrow and grief.

For 13 years, director Lea Glob filmed her friend Apolonia Sokol, who was to become a globally renowned painter. What starts out as a portrait of a charismatic young artist ends up, through the magic of longitudinal documentary, as a much more far-reaching picture of the art world, the struggle against patriarchy – and life. And it’s a film you don’t want to see come to an end.

Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters masterfully uses the intricate complexities of self-conscious re-enactment to intimately explore the lives of a mother and her four daughters – two of whom have disappeared and are therefore portrayed by actors. In so doing, Ben Hania’s film joins the ranks of masterpieces, such as Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet.