Since the turn of the century, the multi-award-winning director Jia Zhangke has crafted a body of work that has illuminated a country and its people, through some of its most transformative decades. For many film audiences – especially in the West – his films have offered a fascinating window onto China. Much of this examination has been through the fictionalised lives of ordinary citizens but through his documentary works such as Dong (about the painter Liu Xiaodong) and Useless (about…

For two decades, the Enache family has lived on the fringe of society in untouched wetlands next to Bucharest, in a rare urban ecosystem with flourishing biodiversity. Director and cinematographer Radu Ciorniciuc silently observes the combative patriarch Gica, his wife and their nine children as they are forced to reckon with social services and the local city council, who have different very plans for the family and the place they call home.

Observations of this thoroughly off-the-grid family are alternately…

Given we’re currently living through the Golden Age of true crime documentaries, it’s rare that a case as unusual as that of D.B. Cooper should be sitting there, ripe for exploration. John Dower’s documentary feature The Mystery of D.B. Cooper looks at the fantastical true story of a man who in 1971 hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft while flying over the US, extorting some $200,000 USD in ransom – around $1.26M USD today with inflation – before parachuting to freedom.…

“It’s not politics, it’s dancing,” says Merce Cunningham in audio from an archived interview utilised in Cunningham. It’s as simple and complicated as that for the man considered one of the most important figures in modern dance. The American choreographer and performer made countless contributions to the artform through not just his own work, but his unique instruction of others which emphasised the individual and the imperfections of each dance. A multilayered web of media is constructed to show us…