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Selected for the festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition, Calendar Girls is an effortlessly charming, generous and joyous look behind the scenes into Southwestern Florida’s number one dance group for women aged 60-plus.

Insightful, continually engaging and shot in cinéma vérité style, the young Mormon missionaries of Salt Lake City attempt to convert, of all people, some of Europe’s most non-religious and sceptical people to their faith. Welcome to Finland.

Documentaries about rock’n’roll bands are hardly the rarest of movies on the festival circuit, but Sirens is something rather special, charting the story of the Middle East’s first all-female thrash metal band and set against the fragile political landscape of Lebanon.

In a fascinating and often quite moving insight into the life and music of iconoclastic Irish singer Sinéad OʼConnor, what shines through is both her immense talent and passion but also her vulnerability and determination to be true to herself.

Doclisboa has unveiled the first retrospective of its 20th edition, which will take place 6-16 October 2022. “The festival proposes a focus on the colonial past of France and Portugal, two countries that waged wars in Africa around the same period, whilst hiding behind benign narratives, and, since then, resisting confrontation with their own history,” write organisers.

DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival has announced the festival programme that can be watched online from 31 January to 6 February 2022. The opening film is Susanna Helke’s Ruthless Times – Songs of Care. Eight docs selected for national competition, eleven for international competition.

An unsettling and powerful examination of both the background to long-held rumours of a large-scale massacre that allegedly happened in the Palestinian village of Tantura in 1948 when Israeli forces took over the village and the plight of graduate student Teddy Katz whose research into the incident for his thesis was rubbished, his reputation left in tatters.

EDP is a Prague-based co-production, funding and distribution platform tailor-made for Central and Eastern European documentaries, every year connecting filmmakers and decision makers - producers, broadcasters, distributors and festival programmers - from around the world. The Platform is organised by the Institute of Documentary Film in cooperation with One World IHRDFF.

Prague-based sales agent Filmotor has acquired world rights for two debuts directed by female directors focusing on life in contemporary Russia; Tolyatti Adrift, directed by Laura Sisteró and produced by Barcelona based production Boogaloo Films, and Nastia Korkia’s GES-2 (Venice 2021) which follows one of the biggest art reconstructions of our age, unfolding in Moscow.

Rithy Panh’s Everything Will Be Ok in Main Competition, three world premiere documentaries in Encounters and six docs in Berlinale Special section, including Lucrecia Martel’s Terminal norte (North Terminal) and a world prem of Andrew Dominik’s This Much I Know To Be True, with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.