Reviews

The meandering reflectiveness of The Rhine Flows to the Mediterranean Sea very much suits the nature of this intimate low-budget documentary as filmmaker Offer Avnon offers up images and conversations with people in Germany, Poland and ultimately in Israel to discuss pain, memory and traumas that are still explicitly linked to the Holocaust.

In her wonderfully structured and edited archive film, Garbus allows the late Jacques Cousteau’s innate passion, enthusiasm and even optimism to be its major driving force. The film won the Grierson Award in London Film Festival's documentary competition.

Where the World Ends looks at the absurdity of bureaucratic procedures by highlighting a few individuals on both sides of the Belarus/Lithuania border.

The troubled coming together of borders and migrants is brought into sharp and fascinating focus in Tiha Gudac’s engrossing and at times gently provocative documentary The Wire which heads to the edge of Eastern Europe to detail the impact a steel fence with razor wire has had on the beautiful Kupa region and the River Kupa itself which acts as a border between Slovenia and Croatia.

An intriguing, passionate and thoughtful exploration into how racism has been entrenched in film culture through the essential technical tool of filmmaking itself, and looking closely at how the lighting for movie cameras has long been calibrated for white skin.

An astute and gently insightful observational film that edges into anthropological examination at times, Tea Lukač’s Roots (Koreni), screening in the East of the West Competition at Karlovy Vary, cleverly presents a layered and at times provocative look at contemporary Serbia, all shot from the back seat of a moving car.

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 infectious cinephile enthusiasm of Mark Cousins and the gentle, modest cinematic passion/knowledge of producer Jeremy Thomas merge perfectly as the pair take a road trip to the Cannes Film Festival and use the opportunity to rightly shine a light on the latter’s maverick and independently-minded work over the past 40 years.

An absorbing and at times seductive film that will delight fans of the music and those intrigued by the super cool era in which they operated.

Filmmaker Mark Cousins updates his expansive 15-part series The Story of Film: An Odyssey some 10 years on, examining the impacts, themes and innovations in cinema that have helped define the highly eventful period between 2010 and 2021.