Film-maker Tomáš Kratochvíl follows the story of Czech-Mancunian trucker turned activist Štefan Pongo

Centring on an ordinary man with extraordinary determination, Tomáš Kratochvíl’s documentary shows how one simple video can ignite a revolutionary movement. After emigrating to the UK nearly 15 years ago, Czech Roma lorry driver Štefan Pongo built a new life for himself and his family in Manchester. At the same time, the persecution faced by his community never strayed far from Pongo’s mind. After hearing a speech in which Miloš Zeman, then the president of the Czech Republic, claimed that 90% of the Roma people were “socially unadaptable” and resistant to work, Pongo started a viral appeal online where he and countless other Roma compatriots posted selfies of themselves at their workplaces.

The appeal was straightforward, yet hugely impactful. Its aim was to battle harmful stereotypes thrust upon Roma people, which Pongo himself had experienced first-hand from a young age. In one particularly painful anecdote, he mentioned his primary school teacher rubbing his arms in front of the whole class to demonstrate how “dirty” the Roma are. As Pongo took a leadership role in the fight for Romani rights, his activism also translated into real-world actions, organising protest rallies in Brussels, and travelling to rural Slovenia to deliver aid to the most vulnerable in the community.

The latest documentary about the Britpop Monkees finds them reassembling for a stadium gig, though we’ll have to wait to hear complete songs

The Blur fan does not want for documentaries. From the ramshackle Starshaped in 1993, which captured these Britpop Monkees pre-megastardom, to the slick New World Towers in 2015, this is a band that knows what the camera wants: deadpan daftness and onstage hijinks interspersed with melancholic reflections on age and Englishness. The 2010 doc No Distance Left to Run showed the quartet reuniting after a prolonged estrangement: “Let’s get the band back together one more time!” growled singer Damon Albarn. This latest look-back-in-languor can’t do much more than give the concept another run around the block, with added early archive footage. Now the band are back together again after a second prolonged estrangement, and they have a new dragon to slay: Wembley stadium. “The less we do, the bigger we get,” observes drummer and current Mid Sussex Labour candidate Dave Rowntree.

Armed with a new album (The Ballad of Darren), they play assorted warm-up shows – Wolverhampton! Eastbourne! – as well as a homecoming gig in Colchester, Essex. Here, Damon (looking like Albert Steptoe) and guitarist Graham Coxon (sounding like Dudley Moore) find that the music room at their former comprehensive has been named in their honour. Their suggestion that its ambience might benefit from some paisley wallpaper and a bowl of weed is met with muted horror by the head teacher.

When Naissa tells his mother Daniela that he identifies as a trans man she struggles to understand. Through candid personal letters exchanged over three years, Dear Mamma follows Naissa as he stands firmly for his independence and identity, and Daniela as she wrestles with her fear of losing a child. As Naissa embarks on his professional dance career and proudly embodies his gender, his mother also embarks on a journey of understanding and acceptance of her son’s choices

Waad al-Kateab’s documentary Death Without Mercy collects agonising experience from the aftermath of 2023. She reflects on a natural disaster made much worse by politics, and how she is trying to help

Waad al-Kateab has always looked for hope, but when it came to making her latest documentary, Death Without Mercy, the moments were difficult to find. After the nightmarish earthquake shook Turkey and Syria in February 2023, she felt hopeless counting the passing seconds, hours and days from her home in east London as she waited for an emergency visa to visit her family in Gaziantep city, near the Syrian border she crossed years earlier fleeing the Assad regime. “It could have been us,” the film-maker, now a refugee in the UK, tells me with tears in her eyes.

At 32, al-Kateab has a talent for making the devastatingly personal universal. In her debut film, For Sama, she documented life under siege in Aleppo to much acclaim. But when it came to making her third documentary, which follows two Syrian families – her “dear friends” Fadi Al Halabi and Fuad Sayed Issa – over 10 days as they face the devastation wrought by the earthquakes that claimed more than 60,000 lives, the experience was not comparable.

Six years in the making, jaw-dropping new film The Grab shows a secret scramble by governments and private firms to buy up global resources

In 2013, the US food conglomerate Smithfield Foods – the country’s largest pork producer and maker of the famous holiday ham – was sold to a Hong Kong-based company called WH Group in a deal worth $7.1bn. It was the largest ever Chinese acquisition of an American company; virtually overnight, WH Group, formerly called Shuanghui International, gained ownership of nearly one in four American pigs. Such a huge business deal did not go unnoticed; news coverage and an eventual congressional hearing questioned the sale with a mix of good, old-fashioned American xenophobia and reasonable concern for the nation’s food supply. But in the eyes of most people, and certainly most American consumers, the Smithfield Foods sale remained just that: a one-off business deal, if they were aware of it at all.

For Nate Halverson, a journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) out of Emeryville, California, the Smithfield deal was the first point in a much wider and concerning pattern – though the company’s CEO, Larry Pope, assured Congress that the Chinese government was not behind WH Group’s purchase, Halverson found evidence to the contrary on a reporting trip to the company’s headquarters: a secret document, marked not for distribution in the United States, detailing every dollar of the deal, and the state-run Bank of China’s “social responsibility” in backing it for “national strategy”.

Actor Andrew McCarthy’s documentary looks at his time in 80s Hollywood and the pitfalls of living underneath a label

If you’ve ever affectionately referred to Andrew McCarthy and his acting cohort as “the Brat Pack”, just know that they hated that label, which was coined in an infamous and arguably dismissive New York Magazine cover story. That’s what his new documentary, Brats, lays out before turning into something else: an opportunity for McCarthy to catch up with the audience and embrace how the term Brat Pack embalmed them in a seismic and precious pop-cultural moment.

Brats is a personal journey, with camera in tow, for the actor who played the gentle but daft heartthrob opposite Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink and the forlorn one in the brattiest ensemble of them all, St Elmo’s Fire. The audience rides shotgun as McCarthy reunites with fellow Brat Packers like Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy and Demi Moore. They therapize themselves and that moment (Moore is especially good at this), while it dawns on McCarthy what he and his castmates meant to the generation of mall rats from the 80s weaned on Pink Floyd and John Hughes coming-of-age movies.

Britain’s Forgotten Prisoners is a devastating documentary about the ‘public protection’ sentences that can amount to whole-of-life terms for relatively minor offences. Film-maker Martin Read explains his seven-year quest for justice

It’s hardly going to break box office records, but Britain’s Forgotten Prisoners might just be the most important film made in the UK this year. For anybody interested in justice – or rather injustice – it’s unmissable.

Premiering at the Sheffield DocFest on Thursday, Britain’s Forgotten Prisoners tells the story of convicts serving indeterminate sentences, known as imprisonment for public protection (IPP) in England and Wales. It focuses on life after the prisoners have been released and their almost inevitable recall to prison, usually for minor breaches of their licence such as being late for an appointment with their probation officer.

What can a pipe-smoking caterpillar, a few algorithms and a researcher from the year 2042 tell us about the future of learning? The actor turned director explains all the ideas that fed into her thought-provoking new documentary

‘This is a film about learning, full of questions, with not many answers,” announces Tilda Swinton at the start of her new documentary, The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze. “It has been dreamt up by the Derek Jarman Lab between 2016 and 2042, in conversations with thinkers both living and not, a caterpillar and one or two algorithms.”

It’s a useful heads-up that the film, co-directed by Swinton with Bartek Dziadosz, is no conventional piece of storytelling or analysis. The words “dreamt up” are telling too, for The Hexagonal Hive – which premieres at Sheffield DocFest this week – has the floating, freewheeling atmosphere of a dream. It collects ideas about neuroscience, education and the world of work, and creates a sensory collage that includes footage from Scotland, Bangladesh and west Africa, with gnomic captions such as: “What a machine the world is – how to work its gears?” It also features the voices of academics and children, as well as clips from Night of the Hunter and My Neighbour Totoro.

João Rosas’s film, depicting the lives of immigrant construction workers busily gentrifying the Portuguese capital, asks important questions

First conceived in the weeks leading up to the birth of film-maker João Rosas’s first child, this documentary portrait of Lisbon was initially intended to be a memento between father and daughter. What began as a record of private memories, however, soon expanded and metamorphosed, as the film takes in the unsung labour that undergirds a rapidly changing urban landscape. Here is an elegy to a vanishing city, whose history is being erased, brick by brick.

Diaristic in form, Rosas’s camera takes in the day-to-day of a construction site; here nearly all of the workers are immigrants, mostly from Africa and South Asia. Once home to a printing workshop, the building is now being torn down to make way for luxury condos. Flourishing in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the tourist boom, the condo-isation of Lisbon purports to signal an economic rebirth. In reality, such development projects heavily rely on the maltreatment of marginalised workmen, who endure harsh conditions for little pay.

Asif Kapadia co-directs backstage access to a tennis great’s final games that includes much crying but too few questions

The tears of Roger Federer, along with the tears of Rafael Nadal and even the tears of Novak Djokovic, are what finally give some point to what is otherwise a pretty bland, officially sanctioned corporate promo for the Federer brand. This documentary for Amazon Prime – co-directed by Asif Kapadia and video content producer Joe Sabia – has behind-the-scenes access, following the final 12 days in the top-flight tennis career of the legendary champion, from his announcement of retirement in 2022 to his emotional curtain-call appearance at the Laver Cup in London, named after Rod Laver, the starry new Europe-versus-the World team tournament that Federer has done so much to develop.

Federer was bowing out with style like the class act he’s always been and as legends such as Björn Borg, John McEnroe, Andy Murray and Rod Laver himself line up to pay tribute, there is a Niagara of tears. And yes, it is genuinely sad. But compare it to Asif Kapadia’s other films about Ayrton Senna and Diego Maradona – his radical and electrifying mosaics of archive footage, which show passionate lives being played out in public … and frankly this looks disappointing. Of course, Federer is a more demure personality, though even this point is treated rather incuriously. The paradox is that this film’s original footage, in contrast to the vividly repurposed material of the Senna and Maradona studies, weirdly looks less intimate and more guarded. Everything here looks as if it has been approved at the highest level.

The actor takes on an unfamiliar role – as herself – in her daughter Lina Soualem’s film documenting four generations of Palestinian women

Hiam Abbass felt “suffocated” growing up as a Palestinian woman in what had recently become the state of Israel. She was unable to travel to other Arab countries where her own relatives had been forced to live after being expelled during the Nakba of 1948. Feeling at odds with the rest of the world drove her into the arts,
and she enrolled at a photography school in Haifa. Working as a photographer for El-Hakawati theater in Jerusalem was her first step towards acting professionally. “Build a career is not even really the right term,” she says. “What it meant was just to exist, to be what you want to be, without having to give answers at every second of the day to hundreds and hundreds of people.”

Today, Abbass is arguably the world’s most celebrated Palestinian actor. Most recently known for her roles in Succession and Ramy, she has performed for decades in French, English and Arabic across television and cinema.

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