Mark Adams

An arrogant egotist driven by a love of cinema or a malicious fascist who took any chance he could to rise to the top? Drawing on previously unpublished interviews, journals, family film footage, archival material and propaganda films, Luuk Bouwman’s The Propagandist tracks the rise and fall of the Dutch filmmaker Jan Teunissen, with particular focus on his time as head of the Dutch Nazi Party’s film department during World War II.

An intriguing and absorbing glimpse behind the scenes at a high end hotel in the Italian Dolomites, Carmen Trocker’s Personale follows often-exhausted staff as they set about folding towels, stripping beds, cleaning bathrooms, precisely fluffing pillows and – yes – cleaning up vomit, all in the name of creating a pristine room ready for the next guest. Day-after-day and hour-after-hour they must help create the image of hotel perfection.

There is something genuinely feel-good, warm-hearted and touching about Alexandra Sell's documentary Ice Aged which follows six men and women ‘of a certain age’ for the best part of three years, tracking their training at local ice rinks through to their competing at the World Hobby Figure Skating Championships at Oberstdorf in Bavaria.

This enticing and intriguing documentary about Polish climber Wanda Rutkiewicz, the first woman in the world - and the first person from Poland - to climb the two highest peaks on Earth, offers tantalising hints of possible intrigue and mystery as it tells the story of a remarkable woman who entered the very masculine world of mountaineering uninvited - and seemingly paid the highest price for it.

The tangled complexities of the crypto currency and blockchain worlds are strikingly and economically explained in Bår Tyrmi’s documentary, Lie to Me, which details the rise and fall of OneCoin, the company that sold itself as the ‘BitCoin killer’ but which – surprise, surprise – turned out to be one almighty scam that drew in millions of victims.

A fascinating delve into the life of Vitaly Panasyuk, an intense (and desperately idiosyncratic) supporter of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Happiness to All offers a non-judgmental look at Russian life on the fringes, where memories of the ideals of the USSR are still entrenched, and where the West is still blamed for many issues facing modern-day Russia.

A beautifully immersive examination of the cycle of grasshopper harvesting in Uganda, Grasshopper Republic works both as an analysis of a ramshackle and potentially dangerous makeshift industry and an intimate examination of the life of the grasshopper. Elegantly shot in cinemascope, the film offers a fascinating glimpse into an industry that is both mesmerising and brutal.

On the eve of its demolition, six former inmates return to London’s Holloway Prison which stood for some 150 years in the middle of the city. When it closed in 2016 it was the largest women’s prison in Europe. For the six women the return is part-catharsis and part self-examination as they once again serve time (albeit voluntarily this time) for several days in the building that shaped their much of their lives.

The Whanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand is the first river in the world to be recognised as a legal person - as a living and indivisible being – and this engaging and informative documentary might well be the first film where a river receives a shared on-screen ‘created by’ credit along with filmmaker Petr Lom and his producer partner Corinne van Egeraat.

A moving, immersive and prescient documentary, No Other Land, longlisted for the European Film Awards, details the eradication of the villages in the Masafer Yatta area on the Southern West Bank over a period of years, as seen from the perspective of Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist/journalist brought up in Masafer Yatta, and Yuval, an Israeli journalist who supports him in his efforts to bring attention to what is happening to the community.