Mark Adams

The mild-mannered demeanour of acclaimed German photographer Michael Reutz might make him seem almost inconspicuous, but his skill, creativity and knack for being there with his camera at the right time, make him a modest but also marvellous, sometimes radical, chronicler of post-2WW German history.

The deep-rooted relationship between psychiatrist Ivan and Marvin, a graphic designer by day and writer of queer fiction by night, is the beating heart of Sona G. Lutherová’s compassionate and gently watchable doc A Happy Man. Marvin, formerly R, came out as a transgender man in 2018 and officially applied for a gender change the following year. How this couple and their children deal with that journey is a story both compassionate and uplifting.

A brutally moving examination of the destruction Russia is leaving behind in Ukraine, When Spring Came to Bucha sees filmmakers Mila Teshaieva and Marcus Lenz enter the small Ukrainian city to film the devastation and optimism that defines the community after 35 days of siege and brutal combat that ended after the Russian military withdrew on March 31 2022.

Benjamin Bucher & Julia Bünter’s film gently offers up an alternative and more human-orientated spin on the subject of the testerone-fuelled world of car racing and Le Mans, with attention placed more on the inner workings of the drivers (or ‘pilots’ are they are called here) than the super-sophisticated and ultra-technical engines and vehicles.

A powerful and desperately moving story of terrible abuse at a Catholic children’s school, Clémence Davigo’s The Lost Boys of La Belle Étoile is both revealing and cathartic as it goes about offering three men the opportunity to break their silence over what happened to them and to discuss how they still feel unseen and unacknowledged by the Church.

Pascale Bourgaux’s documentary in VdR National Competition tells the harrowing story of children born to Yazidi women who were kidnapped and presented as trophies to jihadi fighters in Syria. The insightful film explains how the children, “the bastards of Daesh,” as they became known, are nowadays all but invisible with no official records of their births.

The painful and often tragic stories of refugees seeking to make their way to places of safety make for familiar documentary viewing, but Juliette de Marcillac’s striking Nightwatchers (Veilleurs de nuit) dwells more unusually on a snowy Alpine border where many migrants make a perilous night-time trek through the cold and snow to try and cross from Italy into France.

The conjoined storylines of a local construction worker and a Chinese engineer, both involved in building a bank in the Central African Republic and both with major issues concerning their personal lives, provides a fascinating – and beautifully shot – insight into day-to-day existence in a country where circumstances are tough and where rumours of civil war are rife.

Performance art and moving image interweave - and often collide - in Norwegian artist Sille Storihle’s intriguing and provocative doc which uses role-play to examine where performance begins and ends. Debate around performance art always tends to provoke an intense response, and this film pushes all the buttons as it seeks to examine the limits of artistic boundaries, if indeed they exist at all.

The world of freediving is, in equal part, terrifying, haunting, balletic and magnificent, but the possibility of death always accompanies the fame and glory that comes with breaking new deep diving records. Laura McGann’s immersive and wonderfully shot The Deepest Breath is an exhilarating love story that has enough twists-and-turns to make it a totally absorbing experience.