Mark Adams

In Limbo (W zawieszeniu) is an intimate and insightful look at the war in Ukraine as seen from the viewpoint of a very particular family, and presented in a very personal form. Set against other films from Ukraine which focus on frontline battles, the film is a welcome and moving glimpse into the lives of an ordinary family unit at the onset of the conflict. The film is long-listed for Best Documentary, European Film Awards, 2024.

It has now been some 50 years since one of the most terrifyingly titled of American horror films – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – both shocked unsuspecting audiences and thrilled horror film fans, who grew to appreciate they were experiencing a rather special piece of cinema. Insightful and astute Alexandre O Philippe’s cleverly structured film allows for plenty of thoughtful and balanced analysis, both of Chainsaw and of director Tobe Hooper’s impact on subsequent generations of filmmakers.

The sheer and awful brutality of war is examined in sprawling artistic fashion by filmmaker Amos Gitai in the simply (and appropriately) titled Why War, using as its spine an exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud which dwelled on violence in the name of religion, race and nationality, but which also takes in art, music, performance and literature. The whole is based on Gitai’s notion of embracing the filmmaker or the artist as a healer.

Within a beautifully structured series of artful, dramatic vignettes and provocative, and often haunting, interviews, Errol Morris confronts head-on the frightening and brutal chapter in American history when the Trump administration oversaw (as one interviewee puts it) “state-created orphans” as it set in place a family separation policy that saw illegal migrant families left traumatised as children were forcibly removed from their parents.

Films like Man on Wire and Free Solo pushed the boundaries sky high in terms of portraying dizzying high-altitude adventure-seeking. Now, with the immersive use of drones and GoPro cameras, the terrifying (and highly illegal) practice of ‘rooftopping’ is brought to the screen with the Netflix doc Skywalkers: A Love Story, which – as the title implies – has the added twist of throwing romance into the already spine-tingling mix.

The impact of economic development in rural Ethiopia is brought strikingly into focus in Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan’s absorbing and fascinating documentary Made in Ethiopia, which explores the grand ambitions for a massive Chinese industrial park in a remote farming town as seen – largely – through the eyes of three very different women, all of whose futures will be hugely affected during the future trajectory of the project.

A glorious celebration of the power of cinema – and almost as importantly, of cinemas themselves – Arnaud Desplechin’s intimate and personal examination of what it means to go to the movies takes a meanderingly thoughtful journey through the history of film, delivering a warm, provocative and often thoughtfully enjoyable ‘cinematic hug’ for film lovers.

Catalan Meri Collazos Solà’s passionate, thoughtful and deeply heartfelt documentary tackles medical and societal attitudes toward poor urban air quality, and more specifically how it impacted on her when she discovered her newborn daughter's genetic vulnerability to respiratory illness. The film world-premiered May 9 at DocsBarcelona.

A gently absorbing delve into a family history, Laia Manresa Casals’ Casa Reynal will strike a chord with any viewer who has been drawn into looking into generational history with all of the subtle dramas and intrigues that impact on any family. It is not a film packed with revelations or great incidents, but it is an intimate and warm journey through time.

My Sextortion Diary may only be just over an hour in length, but it is a powerful and provocative real-life story, prescient in reflecting the unhappy reality facing those people who are forced to deal with the awful behaviour of unscrupulous hackers, and handled in moving matter-of-fact style by Spanish filmmaker Patricia Franquesa as she recounts the terrible ordeal she had to suffer.