Mark Adams

A compulsively absorbing and gripping documentary that plays out like a tense political thriller, War Game puts a bipartisan group of US defence, intelligence, and elected policymakers spanning five presidential administrations into a room and gives them just six hours to save American democracy.

A powerful, provocative and ultimately moving film from journalist-turned-filmmaker Shiori Ito, Black Box Diaries charts her brave and determined investigation into her own sexual assault as she attempts to prosecute her high-profile and very-well connected offender, despite a lack of formal interest from the police.

The values, passions and beliefs of poet Nikki Giovanni are celebrated and examined to great effect in Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson’s strikingly immersive documentary which astutely focusses on Giovanni’s opinions and work rather than taking the more customary chronological route through her life story.

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.

French documentarian Nicolas Philibert offers up a typically astute and compassionate view of a perhaps little-known Parisian institution with his eleventh feature, On the Adamant. The film observes life on board the eponymous decommissioned steamship which has been moored at the Quai de Rapée on the Seine since 2010 and which, while classed as a hospital, is more a floating community which caters sensitively for its patients’ creative needs.

There is something primal and movingly powerful about Anna Hints’ gloriously immersive film Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Savvusanna sõsarad) – which took a Special Jury Award for Directing at Sundance 2023. Set against the hot, supportive and immersive backdrop of a southern Estonian smoke sauna in snowy woods, women sit, laugh, talk, sing and relish the profound camaraderie they share.

The final of Copa 71, an international football event billed as the Women’s World Cup and played at Mexico’s famous Azteca stadium in 1971, remains the highest-attended women’s sporting event in history. But since then, the male-centric FIFA has controlled the football narrative, and the tournament was conveniently wiped from history…until now that is. In their documentary, UK filmmakers Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine place the lost tournament exhilaratingly back in the spotlight.

The terrifying ordeal suffered by young Czech woman Martina Putova, who was doused in acid by her ex-boyfriend, causing third-degree burns to the upper half of her body and almost complete blindness, is told with moving bluntness in Jarmila Štuková’s powerful documentary, which screened in Czech Competition.

The notion of love within a relationship is intriguingly explored in Yannick Mosimann’s film Normal Love, in which a couple sign a 365-day contract at the beginning of their relationship that details the duties and rights that each must perform: ones which usually come naturally within the cohabitation of two people. Love may – or may not – come later…

The story of ageing Romanian Constantin Reliu is complex, fascinating and, indeed, cautionary. A man with no documents, personal or pension rights, he worked in Turkey for 25 years and after being deported returns to his homeland only to find that he was presumed dead and has to face up to a system that refuses to formally recognise that he is actually alive.