Reviews

The brutal realities facing the LGBTQ and homelessness communities in modern-day Hungary make for stark contrast to the rather fanciful title of Gergő Somogyvári’s delicate, engaging and rather warm-hearted doc, which follows the unlikely friendship between 19-year-old trans Fanni and the solitary 60-year-old homeless Laci.

The ancient archaeological site of Vinča on the outskirts of Serbia’s capital Belgrade may well be hailed in history books as the cradle of European neolithic culture, but in recent years it has become better known as one of the largest landfill sites in Europe. Nemanja Vojinović’s absorbing and visceral film follows the site’s oddball community of plastic bottle collectors, aka the Bottlemen.

After being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour, filmmaker Kit Vincent sets about enlisting his family on an intimate and darkly humorous journey that he hopes will help them come to terms with his illness. Unsurprisingly, this cinematic journey is more complex, emotional and engagingly offbeat than he might have first intended, and his plan to point the camera anywhere but at himself proves temporary before realising that only he, himself, can be the centre of the film’s story.

As a visceral and immersive piece of front-line war coverage, Ukrainian filmmaker and journalist Mstyslav Chernov’s film 20 Days in Mariupol presents a savage and often desperately bleak portrait of a city under siege, and reflects on the bravery of those struggling to survive within it.

A thoughtful and evocative tribute to the life – and talent – of British photographer Tish Murtha, Sheffield DocFest’s opening night film Tish, directed by Paul Sng, traces the life of this innately skilled and driven artist, and details her commitment to fighting for the communities such as the one she grew up in. The film celebrates a woman whose work deserves to stand alongside considerably more acclaimed practitioners of the craft.

Polish artist Agata di Masternak channels her crippling illness into creativity as a way of understanding how other people have coped with their own physical traumas. Małgorzata Kozera’s intriguing film Faces of Agata astutely examines di Masternak’s masterful balancing of art and pain, with the artist herself an engaging narrator of her own challenging 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.

In this fascinating behind-the-scenes examination, world-premiering in Krakow, members of the legendary Workcenter theatre collective founded by Jerzy Grotowski – acclaimed as one of the 20th Century’s most influential theatre practitioners - speak frankly for the first time about their experiences related to the work methods he devised, and which were developed by his apprentice and Artistic Director Thomas Richards.

This year, a visitor to Cannes could be forgiven for thinking the war in Ukraine had already ended. War fatigue may be understandable for an audience which is not itself under occupation, but it’s not an option for the Ukrainian population. Which is why need films like Maciek Hamela’s In the Rearview; to rekindle the flame of empathy, to stimulate ongoing conversation and awareness and, as the director warned at the Cannes screening, to remain ever vigilant.

‘We don’t measure how much silence hurts until the day we speak,’ filmmaker Asmae El Moudir says at the end of an emotional and painful search for the truth about tragic events in the year of 1981 in Casablanca, Morocco. This personal quest, beautifully presented using figurines in a model set, may lead to emotional breakdown as it reveals the intricate relationships in her family, but provides much needed catharsis.