Reviews

A truly heart-warming story of love, family and the desire to have a child, August B Hanssen and Even G Benestad’s engaging documentary Fatherhood (Tre Fedre) follows Kristopher, David and Sindre, all in their thirties and living in a loving multi-partner relationship, and who are expecting their first child. The additional spin here is that Kristopher is the birth father and one of Norway's trans pioneers.

The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, held in Helsinki in 1975, gathered world leaders as part of the détente between the Warsaw Pact and NATO countries. Arthur Franck’s archival documentary is fascinating, relevant and exciting - especially now, fifty years on, as Russia and the West are once again at war. But it is less in need of irony than director Franck may think…

The remarkable insights from the ever-measured and thoughtful Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot and command a NASA Space Shuttle, help make Hannah Berryman’s documentary Spacewoman a highly watchable film. As well-balanced as its subject – Collins’s own daughter says that her mother is “serious and procedural” – it beautifully explores the dangers of her chosen profession as well as the pressures it had on her family life.

Over a period of twenty years, filmmaker Tova Mozard gathered material on Russ Kingston as he tried to make it in Hollywood. From this material she has created a glorious, multifaceted, touching monument to an extraordinary extra that should (and will) touch the hearts and cinematic souls of audiences everywhere. “Yes, I like to pretend and make believe,” says Russ Kingston somewhere in the middle of the wonderful film in which he finally stars.

Ai Weiwei’s Animality offers a global overview of human-animal relationships in the age of industrialisation, from circus animals in China to the culling of mink in Denmark. Documenting without judging, Ai’s often beautiful, often hard to watch panorama quietly forces us to rethink our own opinions. That Ai Weiwei manages to raise so many questions without ever asking them is a testament to the effectiveness of his wide-ranging approach.

A languid and rather plaintive documentary about grizzled miners clinging to their dreams of finding gold in the remote outdoors, Juho-Pekka Tanskanen’s The Last Misfits by the Golden River is a warm and elegant homage to a unique way of life as it follows the last group of prospectors searching for riches deep in the Finnish wilderness.

An engagingly oddball and gently philosophical examination into the relationship between humans and animals, Sally Jacobson and Tuva Bjork’s breezy, thoughtful and amusing Unanimal muses on how we have looked at animals over the years. Ironic, amusing and gently insightful, Unanimal offers an alternate way to look at how we share the planet with them.

Clashes between long-held traditions and modern-day practices are by their nature common-place, but this powerful new documentary examines the harsh reality of life on the Indonesian island of Sumba where slavery is still an abominable fact of life. History and culture still play their part, with society structured into clear classes - the nobility (Maramba), commoners (Kabihu), and slaves (Ata) – but despite legal abolition, for some the practice of slavery continues.

In her remarkable debut feature, Kazakh filmmaker Zhanana Kurmasheva films the invisible, and in the process achieves true cinema. In combining the endless steppe and the whispering wind with her striking montages, she manages to suggest the horror of the radiation still haunting the people living near the massive Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, which was closed – but not closed-off – in 1991.

What is a witch? In this warm, cinematic and atmospheric documentary, Danish filmmaker Emil Nørgaard Munk portrays Andrea Hejlskov, a self-proclaimed witch, writer and public debater. It is an exciting and informative film about the spiritual world, driven by a very striking score and offering insight and understanding into why Hejlskov is so sensitive to the signs and gifts of nature…and why she so desperately wants people to listen to her.