Mark Adams

The imposed necessity of the nomadic lifestyle for many seniors (especially female) in the US is examined in Belgian filmmaker Sebastien Wielemans’ film Nomad Solitude, which follows three ageing women whose house on four wheels is the only economically affordable option facing them.

A clever balance between magical realism and formal fly-on-the-wall documentary, Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík’s striking Photophobia is an examination of life within Ukraine’s Kharkiv metro, where men, women and children live a strange underground existence as they escape the bombardment of the city.

Set against the stunning backdrop of Kyrgyzstan’s vast plains, Janyl Jusupjan’s ironically titled feature doc follows the enterprising and warm-hearted Atirkül as she attempts to carve a place for herself in the intensely masculine traditional team sport of buzkashi, in which horse-riders battle to steal the trophy - in the form of a dead goat - from the rival team of riders, all the time on horseback.

The joyous self-sufficiency of elderly French woman Suzanne Claudel is celebrated in generous style in Stéphane Manchematin and Serge Steyer’s absorbing documentary Suzanne From Day to Day, which follows her throughout a year – and across all its various seasons – as she goes through her daily rituals in her isolated family home on the edge of a forest in the Hautes-Vosges.

In this humorous and heart-warming documentary, the relationship between a 103-year-old mother and her mentally challenged daughter (62), who have lived together for years in a Belgian care-home, must be refashioned as their health begins to fail. Bye Mom is, at heart, a charming mother-and-daughter love story.

A fascinating and impressively mounted delve into a long-forgotten piece of Communist history, El Shatt – A Blueprint for Utopia tells the story of El Shatt in Egypt where, in 1944, and based on a deal between the Yugoslavian partisans led by Tito and the British allies, a piece of desert became not only a refugee camp for the families of anti-fascist fighters from Dalmatia, but also where a model was created for the future Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The astute, elegant and insightful observational gaze of Austrian documentary-maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter is focussed on Covid-1 and lockdown in his new film The Standstill (Stillstand). The documentary offers a haunting and thoughtful examination on this dark and challenging period as it impacted on his home country of Austria, and Vienna in particular.

The final of Copa 71, an international football event billed as the Women’s World Cup and played at Mexico’s famous Azteca stadium in 1971, remains the highest-attended women’s sporting event in history. But since then, the male-centric FIFA has controlled the football narrative, and the tournament was conveniently wiped from history…until now that is. In their documentary world-premiering in Toronto, UK filmmakers Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine place the lost tournament exhilaratingly back in the spotlight.

The doc, which world-premiered at Venice, charts Capra’s fascinating life in great detail as it unpicks his complex relationship with his adopted America. Extensive and astute use of archive footage – mainly from his films, but also a scattering of home movie material and footage from television interviews– is balanced with interviews with film historians, archivists, writers and filmmakers, even a film studio head…

The brutal realities facing the LGBTQ and homelessness communities in modern-day Hungary make for stark contrast to the rather fanciful title of Gergő Somogyvári’s delicate, engaging and rather warm-hearted doc, which follows the unlikely friendship between 19-year-old trans Fanni and the solitary 60-year-old homeless Laci.