Mark Adams

The lines and layers between doc and drama are well and truly blurred (if not obliterated) in Ane Hjort Guttu’s film Voice, about a docmaker from Norwegian TV who meets resistance when she contacts a group of media-making activists to tell their story. Whatever it actually is, the film certainly delivers some astute commentary on what happens when you have to bring everyone into the editing room in the name of co-creation.

Life-affirming and gently moving, director/editor/cinematographer Jella Bethmann’s highly watchable Mrs Hansen & The Bad Companions manages to restore our faith in humanity within a world that seems determined to sideline society’s waifs and strays.

A disturbing and brutal delve into the dark and violent underbelly of military conscription in Belarus as seen from the perspective of the country’s much put-upon youth, Motherland offers a striking – and deeply prescient – analysis of a system of bullying and abuse borrowed from neighbouring Russia, and how it is reflected in the country itself.

In Leon, world-premiering at Thessaloniki, Wojciech Gostomczyk manages wonderfully to balance gentle but keen insight into a sometimes tormented and fragile artist with the life-affirming love story of two men whose lives defy both convention and compartmentalisation. The other man in question is none than the late fashion icon, designer Manfred Thierry Mugler.

Family histories can be strange and unbelievable, but the life story of New York legend Chelly Wilson is stranger and more unbelievable than most. A Greek Jew who raised her children as Christian, a lesbian who loved her husband and a woman who escaped Athens on the eve of World War II only to end up running a series of porn cinemas in Manhattan, Chelly was the very definition of ‘larger than life.’

There have been previous documentaries about the Colombia Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group FARC-EP (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army), but director Joris Lachaise’s film takes an alternative view as it delves into the links between trans activists as they stand with disarmed FARC fighters at demos in Bogotá’s red-light district and in FARC camps in the mountains.

In an absorbing, challenging and beautifully shot film, a passionate tight-knit group of young Syrian women embark upon on a radical and perhaps controversial project, producing a play that details and exposes the culture of misogyny and sexual abuse that has been part of the everyday lives of women in their country for generations.

Combining diaristic film footage of society/nature with 3D scanner images, Czech filmmaker Viera Čákanyová playfully and provocatively explores the potential of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence to deal with complex global problems. Notes from Eremocene (Poznámky z Eremocénu) world-premieres in Berlinale Forum.

The stunning scenery of the Austrian Alps acts as the perfect backdrop for Bernhard Braunstein’s absorbing doc about acclaimed ski boarding school Stams, where top young skiing talent chase their dreams. For these fresh-faced youngsters it is all about the possibility of making the Olympics, but their journey also includes strict exercise, academic lessons as well as battles with the dangerously icy slopes.

Winner of the Grand Prix at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, director Arthur Thomas-Pavlowsky’s engagingly immersive The Struggle is the End (La Lutte est une fin) takes a refreshing and astutely provocative look behind-the-scenes of the pugilist Collectif Boxe Massilia near Marseille, France.