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Thanks to Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s lilting and memorable words and cadence, there is an artistic flourish to this film project that could otherwise have been profoundly depressing. Review by Mark Adams.

The ICFR and its founding institutions, the European Film Academy, IDFA and IFFR, together with 22 other leading global festivals and film institutions, have called on Myanmar authorities “to immediately and unconditionally release filmmaker Ma Aeint.”

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 European public and the members of the European Parliament have voted Collective by Alexander Nanau the winner of the first LUX Audience Award. The prize, said Nanau, was for the victims of the nightclub fire in Bucharest in 2015, and for their families, and underlined how “we want to fight corruption and we want a free press.”

Director Alex Infascelli won the €5,000 audience prize June 9 for his biopic of the Roma football icon. “This is unbelievable!! Out of all the awards possible, this is the most important: the crowd. I am grateful to everyone who has opened their hearts to our film!” said the director.

Swipe Films announced June 9 that it has concluded “significant sales” on the feature length documentary Sparkling: The Story of Champagne, including North America acquisition by Gravitas Ventures and ITV/BBC joint venture Britbox for UK (excluding theatrical rights), and others.

We may all want to forget the past year, but Songs For The River (with its strapline of ‘Reflections on a Pandemic’) serves as an important and unique, and at times hopeful, record of these dark times.

To coincide with the June 8 ‘UK Commissioners: Looking Ahead’ session at Sheffield DocFest, Clare Sillery, BBC Head of Commissioning, Documentaries, History and Religion announced four new series and a 1x60’ film “that bring audiences new stories and perspectives from across the UK and showcase exciting new and diverse talent on and off screen.”

The BFI Doc Society Fund has partnered with FWD-Doc: Filmmakers with Disabilities to create an industry resource aimed at ensuring disabled-accessible and disabled-inclusive doc filmmaking and exhibition. Engagement Pack launches with ‘Reimagining Disability in Documentary’ talk at Sheffield 8 June (7pm today).

The gentle melancholy that permeates this documentary about a 90-year-old Welsh man stoically planning the end of his days is balanced quite perfectly by the beautiful voices of the male voice choir he is a member of.