Mark Adams

Andrei Kutsila’s powerful, moving and engrossing film When Flowers Are Not Silent looks at the aftermath of protests in Belarus against the country’s long-standing leader Alexander Lukashenka - who in 2020 claimed more than 80% of all votes - after the European Union, local opposition and a large part of the population called foul on the election results.

The meandering reflectiveness of The Rhine Flows to the Mediterranean Sea very much suits the nature of this intimate low-budget documentary as filmmaker Offer Avnon offers up images and conversations with people in Germany, Poland and ultimately in Israel to discuss pain, memory and traumas that are still explicitly linked to the Holocaust.

In her wonderfully structured and edited archive film, Garbus allows the late Jacques Cousteau’s innate passion, enthusiasm and even optimism to be its major driving force. The film won the Grierson Award in London Film Festival's documentary competition.

Volkan Üce’s story of two young Turkish men trying to settle into jobs at the all-inclusive Nashira Resort makes for an engaging and insightful documentary that perfectly encapsulates the eternal culture clash between the haves and have-nots.

Where the World Ends looks at the absurdity of bureaucratic procedures by highlighting a few individuals on both sides of the Belarus/Lithuania border.

The troubled coming together of borders and migrants is brought into sharp and fascinating focus in Tiha Gudac’s engrossing and at times gently provocative documentary The Wire which heads to the edge of Eastern Europe to detail the impact a steel fence with razor wire has had on the beautiful Kupa region and the River Kupa itself which acts as a border between Slovenia and Croatia.

An intriguing, passionate and thoughtful exploration into how racism has been entrenched in film culture through the essential technical tool of filmmaking itself, and looking closely at how the lighting for movie cameras has long been calibrated for white skin.

An astute and gently insightful observational film that edges into anthropological examination at times, Tea Lukač’s Roots (Koreni), screening in the East of the West Competition at Karlovy Vary, cleverly presents a layered and at times provocative look at contemporary Serbia, all shot from the back seat of a moving car.

Factory to the Workers (Tvornice Radnicima) is an engrossing fly-on-the-wall documentary about the struggles of a collectively owned Croatian machine tools factory trying to deal with new economic realities within a changing world.

The infectious cinephile enthusiasm of Mark Cousins and the gentle, modest cinematic passion/knowledge of producer Jeremy Thomas merge perfectly as the pair take a road trip to the Cannes Film Festival and use the opportunity to rightly shine a light on the latter’s maverick and independently-minded work over the past 40 years.