Reviews

A puzzling documentary thriller… On the surface, it’s about French director Armel Hostiou trying to uncover who in Kinshasa set up a false Facebook profile in his name. But by digging up layer after layer of fakery, the film itself ends up looking suspiciously unreal, but in a most interesting way...

Performance art and moving image interweave - and often collide - in Norwegian artist Sille Storihle’s intriguing and provocative doc which uses role-play to examine where performance begins and ends. Debate around performance art always tends to provoke an intense response, and this film pushes all the buttons as it seeks to examine the limits of artistic boundaries, if indeed they exist at all.

The world of freediving is, in equal part, terrifying, haunting, balletic and magnificent, but the possibility of death always accompanies the fame and glory that comes with breaking new deep diving records. Laura McGann’s immersive and wonderfully shot The Deepest Breath is an exhilarating love story that has enough twists-and-turns to make it a totally absorbing experience.

The lines and layers between doc and drama are well and truly blurred (if not obliterated) in Ane Hjort Guttu’s film Voice, about a docmaker from Norwegian TV who meets resistance when she contacts a group of media-making activists to tell their story. Whatever it actually is, the film certainly delivers some astute commentary on what happens when you have to bring everyone into the editing room in the name of co-creation.

Life-affirming and gently moving, director/editor/cinematographer Jella Bethmann’s highly watchable Mrs Hansen & The Bad Companions manages to restore our faith in humanity within a world that seems determined to sideline society’s waifs and strays.

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 Leon, world-premiering at Thessaloniki, Wojciech Gostomczyk manages wonderfully to balance gentle but keen insight into a sometimes tormented and fragile artist with the life-affirming love story of two men whose lives defy both convention and compartmentalisation. The other man in question is none than the late fashion icon, designer Manfred Thierry Mugler.

Family histories can be strange and unbelievable, but the life story of New York legend Chelly Wilson is stranger and more unbelievable than most. A Greek Jew who raised her children as Christian, a lesbian who loved her husband and a woman who escaped Athens on the eve of World War II only to end up running a series of porn cinemas in Manhattan, Chelly was the very definition of ‘larger than life.’

There have been previous documentaries about the Colombia Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group FARC-EP (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army), but director Joris Lachaise’s film takes an alternative view as it delves into the links between trans activists as they stand with disarmed FARC fighters at demos in Bogotá’s red-light district and in FARC camps in the mountains.

Is the Klezmer Project a failed movie? Because, in essence, it doesn’t feature a lot of klezmer (Yiddish folk) bands. And it is definitely not a straightforward documentary on music or musicians. What it is, nevertheless, is a smart, funny, personal and at the same time universal document of an almost erased culture, an honest, analytical self-reflection on identity and traditions…and a tragic love story.