The 10 best films we saw at Sheffield Doc/​Fest 2017

Packed screen­ings, a vil­lage fête vibe, impact­ful brand­ing, diverse pro­gram­ming, a great cen­tral hub, the takeover of a por­tion of a city – all these vital com­po­nents are what make Sheffield Doc/​Fest one of the UK’s best and most beloved film fes­ti­vals. We trekked north for a long week­end to sam­ple a lit­tle of what doc­u­men­tary cin­e­ma has to offer right now, and as you’ll see from our top 10 below, the hits mas­sive­ly out­weighed the misses.

This cute but eth­i­cal­ly trou­bling and eeri­ly clin­i­cal doc takes as its sub­ject 48-year-old spin­ster Dina Buno, who announces ear­ly on that her nick­name is ​‘Kan­gapooh’ on account of her love of kan­ga­roos and Win­nie the Pooh. She’s chat­ty and very open emo­tion­al­ly. She also suf­fers from a smörgås­bord of men­tal health issues and is haunt­ed by a for­ma­tive tragedy from which she was lucky to survive.

Anto­nio San­ti­ni and Dan Sick­les’ film seeks to doc­u­ment her return to rel­a­tive roman­tic nor­mal­cy as she gets hitched to the emo rock-lov­ing shy guy, Scott, who is also ​“on the spec­trum”. The film skates a very thin line between empa­thy and exploita­tion, as each chuck­le arrives with a sharp pang of self-loathing. The moti­va­tions behind some of the cre­ative deci­sions – includ­ing the use of one par­tic­u­lar­ly tone-shift­ing piece of audio – are very tough to sec­ond guess.

Flip­ping the time-hon­oured eco advo­ca­cy doc on its head, film­mak­er Mark Grieco uses a cam­paign to save the endan­gered pink dol­phin, found in var­i­ous stretch­es of the Ama­zon, as a way to ques­tion the self­ish moti­va­tions of doc­u­men­tary mak­ers fight­ing for a noble cause. Richard Ras­mussen is a prime­time wildlife expert and self-styled Dr Doolit­tle (with facial tats) who goes under­cov­er to film local fish­er­men killing these dol­phins and using them as bait. The footage sparks under­stand­able out­rage across Brazil, but then Gre­ico decides to take a clos­er look what part the fish­er­men played in the whole sor­did affair. It’s an inter­est­ing if over­stretched film which gets decent milage from the supreme­ly media savvy and image con­scious Rasmussen.

One of those docs which begins as one thing and ends up as some­thing quite dif­fer­ent, and the less you know the more you’ll enjoy it. Cham­pi­on cyclist and healthy liv­ing advo­cate Lance Arm­strong got away with dop­ing for years despite being sub­ject to around 500 drug tests. Direc­tor Bryan Fogel uses him­self as a test sub­ject to dis­cov­er whether it would be pos­si­ble for him to win an ama­teur cycle race while doped up to the gills.

Amer­i­can anti-dop­ing offi­cials don’t want any­thing to do with his crack­pot scheme, but an loopy Russ­ian named Grig­o­ry Rod­chenkov is only too hap­py to assist. When we find out that Grig­o­ry is Russia’s fore­most anti-dop­ing sci­en­tist and mem­ber of offi­cial body WADA, mat­ters get a lit­tle more com­plex. Fogel’s film is slick, hyper­bol­ic and even a lit­tle pre­ten­tious, but when you’ve got char­ac­ters and a sto­ry this com­pelling, there’s very lit­tle you can do to foul it up entirely.

Chi­nese teenagers are cur­rent­ly being forced to tramp all man­ner of strange routes into the job mar­ket, and 17-year-old Ying Ling has found her­self hun­dreds of miles from home work­ing as a trainee mor­ti­cian. Her job involves clean­ing and prepar­ing corpses while orches­trat­ing sen­ti­men­tal cer­e­monies for griev­ing fam­i­lies. This could eas­i­ly have been a low key and mean­der­ing pro­file of a strange, cul­tur­al­ly remote insti­tu­tion, but direc­tor Car­ol Salter strikes gold with her char­ac­ters – apa­thet­ic teens who just want more from life but know they’re going to have to accept their lot. And despite all the macabre humil­i­a­tion Ying has to endure, the film ends on a pos­i­tive note, sug­gest­ing that some of the low­er rungs of the employ­ment lad­der are more slip­pery than the ones high­er up.

The world is hav­ing a democ­ra­cy prob­lem, as glob­al lead­ers attempt to cor­rupt what the pub­lic define as free­dom. Dem­a­gogues and pop­ulists grab pow­er, and then offer the peo­ple the chance to be eco­nom­i­cal­ly lib­er­al – they have choic­es to buy cer­tain prod­ucts – but lose the chance to select those who are shap­ing the polit­i­cal sys­tem from above. Rupert Rus­sell trav­els the plan­et look­ing for case stud­ies where the essen­tial prop­er­ties of democ­ra­cy have been erod­ed to the point where they’ve become indis­tin­guish­able. Some­times it’s down to fun­da­men­tal­ist reli­gion, or polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, or maybe even gov­ern­ments who crush dis­sent with max­i­mum force. It’s a well argued and cogent film, even the illus­tra­tive ani­mat­ed inserts are bearable.

Tim­o­thy George Kelly’s film begins off bril­liant­ly as an affect­ing tableaux of peo­ple stand­ing in front of his cam­era, framed against the land­scape. They then talk about why they vot­ed either to remain or to leave in the 2016 ref­er­en­dum on Britain’s mem­ber­ship of the Euro­pean Union. The stark black and white pho­tog­ra­phy, added to the fact that Kel­ly allows these con­fes­sions to run on with­out the inter­rup­tion of edits, makes this as much a film about the nuances of human self-expres­sion as it does the fail­ure of a bina­ry polit­i­cal deci­sion to con­nect to com­plex per­son­al desires. Then the impact of the film’s first sec­tion is dulled with an adden­dum draw­ing on the ideas of ​“experts”, which makes you think that Kel­ly doesn’t actu­al­ly have any faith in the pub­lic to under­stand the rea­son behind their impuls­es. Still, the first hour is great.

The pro­ce­dur­al boil­er­plate of Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line is used for Yance Ford’s chill­ing, atmos­pher­ic Strong Island, in which the direc­tor glances back to the mur­der of his broth­er in an attempt to uncov­er why the killer was acquit­ted with­out tri­al. The details of the case are fas­ci­nat­ing in and of them­selves, but Ford also off­sets the inves­tiga­tive ele­ments with a por­trait of a fam­i­ly which fell to pieces on the back of this trav­es­ty of jus­tice. The title refers to a prison unit that Ford’s late broth­er had applied to work in, but could also refer to the pow­er of mem­o­ry when it comes to log­ging ter­ri­ble alter­ca­tions that have the pow­er to destroy lives.

On paper, it sounds like pun­ish­ment, but the real­i­ty is some­thing quite dif­fer­ent. Pol­ish direc­tor Pawel Lozin­s­ki takes a bold approach to chron­i­cling the slow and com­plex heal­ing of a dam­aged rela­tion­ship between a moth­er and daugh­ter. Three cam­era angles, each a sin­gle a close-up of a face, cap­ture the con­fes­sions of moth­er, daugh­ter and a male ther­a­pist who fires out the ques­tions and light­ly inter­prets the answers. The result is immer­sive, inti­mate and reveal­ing. The film – named after a line uttered by the blub­bing moth­er – oper­ates as a loud endorse­ment for diplo­ma­cy when it comes to human rela­tions, and it’s also a paean to how, even when we can’t find the words to match our sen­ti­ments, there’s are always alter­na­tive and round­about ways com­mu­ni­cate our true feelings.

Life comes at you fast, as the old Twit­ter meme goes. Jonathan Olshef­s­ki dis­proves this sort-of-the­o­ry with his slow cooked opus Quest in which he doc­u­ments the dai­ly strug­gles of the Rainey clan of North Philadel­phia. Ini­tial­ly intrigued by their base­ment music stu­dio which gives a voice to local hip-hop artists, the film spi­rals out into an all-encom­pass­ing and intense­ly empa­thet­ic por­trait of fam­i­ly sur­vival in pre­car­i­ous eco­nom­ic times. There’s no real nar­ra­tive through-line, as Olshef­s­ki just cap­tures events as they hap­pen and allows for any deep­er themes or mes­sages to emanate from the mate­r­i­al nat­u­ral­ly. Despite cov­er­ing the full gamut of life’s harsh tri­als, it’s a film pow­ered by pure pos­i­tive vibes.

Very lit­tle at Doc/​Fest (that we man­aged to catch) messed with tried and test­ed doc­u­men­tary for­mats and modes of sto­ry­telling. All except the bril­liant Rat Film by Theo Antho­ny, that is, a film that is at once famil­iar in its admon­ish­ment of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal rot and whol­ly rad­i­cal in the way it express­es its bare­ly con­cealed sense of out­rage. Tak­ing the city of Bal­ti­more as a blue­print, this daz­zling film makes intri­cate con­nec­tions between town plan­ning, vivi­sec­tion, vir­tu­al real­i­ty, exper­i­men­tal music, extreme pover­ty and eugenics.

In just 80 curt min­utes it delves fur­ther and fur­ther down the prover­bial rat hole, tak­ing wild swerves and expand­ing its purview by the minute. A cold, instruc­tive voiceover empha­sis­es the cold­ness of its cen­tral theme, which is the the fact that urban pover­ty is in fact a man made machine that can’t be bro­ken rather than an issue to be solved by politi­cians in the present.