Encounters that will change what audiences think they know

The 25th edition of the Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival is under way. This year’s selection offers more than 50 films that explore stories from around the world, challenging audiences to re-evaluate what they think they know and to learn about what they don’t know. These recommendations shine a light on dark corners of the past and ask difficult questions about the uncertainties of the present. They demonstrate the resilience of the human spirit.

20 Days in Mariupol

Harrowing and heartbreaking, Associate Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov and photographer Evgeniy Maloletka’s immersive documentation of the siege of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol in the early days of the Russian invasion of the country brings home the realities of the war's effects on ordinary citizens. The filmmakers record a litany of war crimes carried out on camera by Russian forces and the Kremlin’s insistence that they were staged for propaganda purposes only makes the bravery of what’s recorded more significant. It shows the world the truth of the on-the-ground realities and heartlessness of Russia’s lies about its actions.

All That Breathes

Director Shaunak Sen’s moving story about two brothers in Delhi who devoted their lives to running a makeshift sanctuary in their basement for kites and other birds of prey was nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar this year. The brothers use their self-taught knowledge about the birds to help combat suffocating air pollution and threats to the birds' survival. Outside their basement walls, the terrifying realities of anti-Islamic sentiment stirred up in the streets by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist hate-mongering of the BJP threaten to destroy the brothers’ worthy enterprise.

Bobi Wine: People’s President

An intimate fly-on-the-wall documentary about Robert Kyagulanyi, better known by his pop-star moniker Bobi Wine, who rose from the slums of Kampala in Uganda to become a national celebrity before entering the political fray as the main opposition candidate in the 2021 elections. Wine offered hope to millions for a real chance of change after three decades of tyranny under President Yoweri Museveni. Harassed, beaten but undeterred, Wine made a valiant attempt to lead his country into a new era of hope against the odds and at great risk to himself and his family.

Dancing Pina

A decade after her death, this film reminds dance lovers of the vision and groundbreaking innovations of celebrated German choreographer Pina Bausch by documenting two performances of her work. The one takes place in Bausch’s homeland and the other is staged by dancers in Senegal. Both are tributes to the challenges of Bausch’s revolutionary interventions in one of art’s most demanding mediums.

Don’t Worry About India

A charming, personal film that follows the return to his country during the 2019 elections of a young, middle-class Indian raised in Europe. There, he gently probes his politically reticent parents and countrymen about what Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “New India” means. In doing so, he finds the ideals of a democratic, secular, inclusive India that he and others were raised on are fast becoming a murky memory in the face of increased sectarianism, corruption and violence.

Dorpie

The “dorpie” in question is the savagely unequal, gender-based-violence and drug-addiction-plagued town of Bredasdorp in the Western Cape. Most well-known to outsiders as the site of an increasingly horrifying series of rapes and murders, it’s also a town whose bleak realities have been carved by generations of structural inequality. The film follows the determined attempts of community worker Lana O’Neill to provide a place of safety for vulnerable young women and offers a complicated, heartbreaking but optimistic vision of ways problems might be overcome if people stepped in and did what those in power have failed at. 

Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen

A nostalgic but lovingly rendered film-history documentary about director Norman Jewison — who’s not Jewish — and his quest to bring the hit Broadway musical to screen in his Oscar-winning 1971 adaptation. Featuring interviews with Jewison and the surviving members of the cast, including Israeli actor Topol, who died earlier this year, it’s a warm, humorous account of the journey to the big screen of a classic.

Merkel

A thorough portrait of the life, times and political challenges of Germany’s first woman chancellor, who ended her four terms in power in 2021. It features extensive archives of Angela Merkel’s career, interviews with global political heavyweight colleagues, friends and German reporters and commentators. It is a fitting tribute to her impact on the world stage and the influences shaping her approach to politics.

Milisuthando

Milisuthando Bongela’s personal, meditative cinematic essay about identity, history, race and belonging makes its South African debut. It chronicles the director’s childhood, constructed under the machinations of the apartheid regime, and her growing awareness of the evils and schizophrenic psychological trauma that the system wreaked on black identity and self-worth. It’s an original reflection on burning questions that still haunt the national psyche almost 30 years into democracy.

Money, Freedom

Katy Lena Ndiaye’s contemplative documentary explores the legacy of colonialism and economic enslavement by investigating the complex economics of the history and use of the CFA franc currency in West Africa. The French government used it as a tool of economic control over its former colonial territories to try to keep post-independence nations in the grip of their former master. This ensured the inequalities of economic interaction that worked to the benefit of France during the colonial period were maintained, to the detriment of Africans.

Out of Uganda

The film is a devastating indictment of the deadly homophobic policies of Yoweri Museveni's Ugandan government. It follows the bleak but hopeful journeys of four LGBTQ+ youths who've escaped the threats and social stigmatisation experienced in their homeland by seeking asylum in Switzerland. There they wait in limbo as their fate is decided by a slow-moving, dismissive Swiss bureaucracy.

Reflections in a Broken Mirror

An overview of the challenges and achievements of Afrikaans theatre in the wake of the end of apartheid. Focusing predominantly on the history of the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees and featuring interviews with former festival organisers and legendary director Marthinus Basson, the film highlights several key productions from the recent history of Afrikaans theatre to examine the inventive, often controversial ways that Afrikaans artists faced the burning questions of their role and identity in a country they savagely ruled.

Seven Winters in Tehran

The film uses secretly filmed videos made by family members and smuggled out of Iran at pain of death to make a searing indictment on the misogynist violence of the Iranian regime. In 2007, 19-year-old Reyhaneh Jabbari was convicted of murdering a politically-connected doctor she stabbed in self-defence after he lured her to a flat in Tehran and tried to rape her. The film chronicles the seven-year struggle of Jabbari and her family to try to save her from being hanged for her crime. It offers terrifying insight into the ruthlessly patriarchal Iranian society, which is constructed to ensure the impossibility of equal rights and justice for females. It's also a tribute to Jabbari and her family’s courage.

A Story of Bones

The film follows the journey of Namibian environmental impact assessment officer turned activist Annina van Neel. While working for Basil Read as part of the airport construction project on the remote island of St Helena, she was horrified by the lack of action after the discovery of more than 300 bodies of “liberated slaves”. Determined to seek dignity and recognition for the bodies, Van Neel tried to force the British government to make amends for its slave-trading history and recognise the humanity of dead black people in the same way it did white citizens, among them the island’s most famous resident, Napoleon Bonaparte. His empty tomb is a tourist attraction on St Helena.

This is National Wake

In the oppressivek days of apartheid, a white Joburg student, Ivan Kadey, and two musically gifted brothers from Soweto, Punka and Gary Khoza, were thrown together by shared passions and outrage at the regime in a musical collaboration, the legendary South African punk outfit National Wake. Their story is told by surviving member Kadey using archive documentation filmed during the period by his wife, and interviews with family members and those who found themselves caught up in the Wake’s anarchic attempt to break down the barriers of separation.

Theatre of Violence

At the age of nine, Dominic Ongwen was recruited into the cultish nightmare of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Decades later, Ongwen became the first former child soldier to be indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. This provocative documentary follows the attempts by his defence team to argue that Ongwen, in spite of being responsible for committing heinous atrocities, never had another choice. He was brainwashed into obedience by Kony’s spiritualism and mythmaking that, though incomprehensible to a Western court, were fundamental in destroying his innocence and turning him into a cold killing machine. It raises questions about the unequal power relations that govern the mandate of the ICC and keep Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni free from prosecution for crimes committed by his government’s forces during the war in Uganda.

• The Encounters Film Festival is on in Cape Town and Johannesburg until July 2. For more information visit encounters.co.za.