Sheffield Doc Fest opens this year with an activist documentary, Rich Felgate’s second feature We, The Hated, a film bound to provoke strong debate. It depicts Just Stop Oil protestors with an empathy and nuance that you simply just won’t find in mainstream media.
“It’s a film that really invites you to get into their world,” says Raul Niño Zambrano, who has been festival director since 2023. “It’s like ‘please sit down, let’s have a conversation’ – and I think with the climate [debate] especially in the UK but also the world, this is a very important film. Most importantly, this is a film that can really create dialogue. For an opening film, you always want to make a signal and I feel this is very much in line with the films that we are showing and also the films that we received this year.”
Zambrano believes that the documentary will show audiences that “the lives of these protestors are not as romantic as some people may think.” They face curfews and continuous media and legal harassment – and yet they fight on.
There were well over 2900 submissions this year but the International Competition has deliberately been kept very compact. It has eight titles, most of them world premieres.
“I always said let’s get 8-10 titles and that will give us the opportunity to promote individually each of the films. We are really a nurturing festival. We can take care of each of the films and we promise you will not get lost in an avalanche of too many,” Zambrano explains why he favours such a streamlined approach.
The eight films are deliberately very different in style and subject matter. They range from Try!, a feel-good Irish documentary about mixed ability rugby, to Colors Of White Rock, about the travails of a Mongolian female lorry driver transporting coal to China.
Sheffield has a “big team” of programmers who have chosen a very wide selection of films across the festival’s different sections. That, Zambrano says, is just as it should be. “You can find amazing things in investigative journalism, but also in very hybrid and poetic pieces – and everything in between. More than searching for a very specific type of film, I think our responsibility is to show the whole spectrum.”
The festival director will always ask his team if they’ve been ‘hit’ or ‘moved’ by a film – and that will then often determine if it makes the cut or not.
This year, podcasts are again foregrounded through the Podcast Stories programme. Zambrano argues that the old John Grierson definition of documentary – as “the creative treatment of actuality” – applies just as much to audio as well as visual formats. It helps too that there is so much interesting working currently being done in the podcast arena.
“I think documentary can get into different formats. That’s why we have [also] have an Alternate Realities programme and the Storytelling in Gaming: Challenge Lab.”
Together with The Whickers, the festival is this year hosting a “podcast pitch” at which six audio directors are given the chance to present their ideas to commissioners and experts.
Zambrano has noticed increased cross-fertilisation between podcasting and documentary filmmaking. “What we have seen is that people who have been here have been very inspired by this. There are a lot of filmmakers who are now suddenly doing podcasts and also podcasters who are now submitting for the MeetMarket [Sheffield’s pitch forum] or making TV series.” He gives the example of Buried With Michael Sheen (about chemical contamination in South Wales), now a TV series but which originated as a podcast.
Actor and activist Maxine Peake is guest of honour this year. She already has links to the festival, having provided the voiceover for Paul Sng’s Tish, about photographer Tish Murtha, that opened Sheffield in 2023.
“We were always trying to get her invested in the festival somehow. She is very much a northerner, always supporting things that are working class and also that are outside London. When we started the conversation, it became a beautiful match,” says Zambrano.
Peake will be on stage in discussion with Sng to talk about how working class voices are represented in the media. She is also present in different guises throughout the festival. She has programmed certain titles, will give a live reading of her play, Queens Of The Coal Age, and will join Sheffield band The Eccentronic Research Council for a live performance of their work, The Dreamcatcher Tapes.
One perennial challenge for the festival is to be noticed. Is it easy to catch the attention of the UK media and public when a football World Cup is underway and there are so many other events competing for public attention? Zambrano argues that Sheffield’s profile is rising. This process has been helped by its status as a key industry gathering and by its close alliance with heavyweight partners like Netflix, Prime and BBC.
“And we really show the whole spectrum of documentary,” the festival director says. “You will find a film about a celebrity like Katie Price [Katie Price: Nothing to Hide by Paddy Wivell, made by Louis Theroux’s production company Mindhouse] in the line-up. We have a film about singer Jesy Nelson (Life Changing] and one about YouTuber Gary Stevenson [How to Get Filthy Rich with Gary Stevenson]…and we have Andrea Arnold as well.”
British national treasure Miriam Margolyes will be in town for an “in conversation” event. The actor and storyteller may not seem an obvious fit for Sheffield but she has recently been in a BBC documentary, Miriam Margolyes Made Me Me, and its director Simon Draper will be quizzing her about her life and career.
Sheffield is an event where TV personalities like wildlife presenter and environmental campaigner Chris Packham rub shoulders with heavyweight documentary industry figures like new BBC Storyville head Nevine Mambro or top documentary directors like Liz Garbus, Maite Alberdi, Waad Al-Kateab, Mark Cousins and Sara Dosa.
Music docs also feature prominently again in the Rhythms sidebar which includes Questlove’s Earth, Wind & Fire doc (Earth, Wind & Fire [To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World]), as well as The Ballad of Judas Priest, about one of the UK’s greatest heavy metal bands.
Another obvious highlight is Asif Kapadia’s 70 Up: The Final Chapter in which Kapadia picks up the mantle of Michael Apted and other directors to round off the epic documentary series 7 Up, which started following its protagonists as seven-year-old kids in 1964. Now those characters have reached the age of 70 and there is a record of almost their entire lives on screen. This will be the final instalment and several special guests should be in attendance for the Sheffield event.
Sheffield trades not just on its variety but on its northern warmth and hospitality – something you won’t find in festivals in big cities like London or Amsterdam.
“I think, for us, balance is the key word,” Zambrano reflects on how the festival addresses the huge social and political convulsions of the current era while also finding space for lighter fare.
There will be films about Palestine, for example the world premiere of Daniele Rugo’s extremely harrowing Life Support, about doctors breaching the blockade of Gaza. The programme also includes documentaries on Brexit (How Britain Voted Out) and the Maidan revolution in Ukraine (Time Machine Maidan). Other films deal with dance and politics in South Africa (Hip Hop Activism) or political poetry in Nigeria (Hope Is A Word).
Zambrano hopes that audiences will explore the many different strands of the festival, from the most intimate and personal stories to the most investigative and polemical ones.
“When people say oh, that is a really eclectic selection, I take that as a compliment,” he concludes. “I just think that is what documentary is doing at the moment.”
