As one year draws to a close, we're looking ahead to 2024. With 2023 festival favourites making their way to our screens, and new films from Steve McQueen, Johan Grimonprez and more, there's lots to be excited for next year. Read on to find out which docs we're looking forward to in 2024.
The Taste of Mango
Chloe Abrahams has made waves with her personal debut feature, which explores family relationships and untangles the knots between three generations of women.
An enveloping, hypnotic and urgently personal meditation on family, memory, identity, violence and love. At its centre are three extraordinary women: the director’s mother, Rozana; her grandmother, Jean; and the director herself. Their stories, by turns difficult and jubilant, testify to the entangled and ever-changing nature of inheritance, and the ways in which we both hurt and protect the ones we love.
When can we see it? TBC, but since its UK premiere at London Film Festival in Oct 2023 (where it won the Documentary Audience Award), we’re quietly confident we’ll see it on the big screen in 2024. More info.
An astonishing piece of non-fiction filmmaking...gorgeously nuanced and textured
Criterion Cast
Occupied City
Oscar- and BAFTA-winning filmmaker and Turner Prize winning visual artist Steve McQueen is a chameleon of film genres and styles. This four-hour non-fiction opus with its dual, overlaid narratives is an extraordinary accomplishment.
A mesmerising and monumental excavation of how the past haunts our precarious present. In Occupied City, a searching camera sweeps through a vibrant contemporary Amsterdam while, at the same time, the film summons people and memories of the past under Nazi occupation within the city’s map and woven into the fabric of its streets and buildings.
When can we see it? Occupied City screens at Bertha DocHouse on Sunday 11 February, followed by a live broadcast satellite Q&A with Steve McQueen and writer Bianca Stitger. Book here.
★★★★★ Monumental film is a vast survey-meditation on the wartime history and psychogeography of his adopted city
The Guardian
Rojek
Canada’s Best International Feature entry to the Oscars makes for disquieting viewing to say the least, as Kurdish-Canadian director Zaynê Akyol conducts interviews with ISIS members detained in prison camps in Syria.
Putting a face to the often disembodied threat of Islamic State (ISIS), Akyol encounters dozens of detained IS fighters, men and women, who share a common dream: establishing a caliphate. Confronted with their fundamentalist beliefs, Rojek attempts to trace the beginning, rise and fall of ISIS through their personal stories. These up-close interviews are set against a decimated, post-war Syrian Kurdistan, creating an intimate, uncomfortable gaze at a complex, unknown reality, and pointing to an ideological war that extends well beyond the ‘fall of ISIS.’
When can we see it? Rojek plays daily at Bertha DocHouse from Friday 19 January. Book here.
Motherland
Hanna Badziaka and Alexander Mihalkovich provide a critically acclaimed insight into military conscription and service in Belarus and the consequences it has on the wider population. Expansive in subject yet also intensely personal, Motherland is a reflection of a country’s people in revolt.
Motherland explores the decades-old “tradition” of violent bullying, torture and murder as a means of control over Belarusian military conscripts, creating generational trauma that is deeply embedded in the country’s present-day culture and identity. It is a snapshot of a troubled, modern-day Belarus through the real-life experiences of mothers and new conscripts, overlaid with the raw voices of those who have gone before them.
When can we see it? After making a splash on the festival circuit last year – including winning Best Film at CPH:DOX – Motherland will make its way to Bertha DocHouse in Feb 2024, date TBA. Watch this space. More info.
Tense, essential filmmaking… a textured, layered documentary that builds into a multi-faceted portrait of a country
Screen Daily
Four Daughters
Kaouther Ben Hania’s Cannes 2023 Best Doc winner has garnered praise during its festival run for its powerful intimacy and hybrid structure. We think that Tunisia’s entry for Best International Feature at the 2024 Oscars will cause a stir on its UK release.
The life of Olfa, a Tunisian woman and mother of four daughters, oscillates between light and shadow. One day, her two eldest daughters leave to fight for ISIS in Syria. To fill their absence, director Kaouther Ben Hania calls upon professional actors and sets up an extraordinary film mechanism to unveil the story of Olfa and her daughters. An intimate journey full of hope, rebellion, violence, intergenerational transmission and sisterhood, which will question the very foundation of our societies.
When can we see it? Four Daughters will be released by Modern Films on Friday 22 March. More info.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État
We’re pleased and intrigued to see Belgian artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez’s latest film in the line-up for Sundance 2024, where it competes in the World Cinema Documentary competition. From Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (2007) to Shadow World (2016), Grimonprez’s work is always inventive and unforgettable.
In the early 60s, the USA sent its greatest jazz musicians to Congo to distract attention from a CIA-backed coup unfolding in the country. But as more and more jazz ambassadors perform alongside covert CIA operations, the likes of Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Melba Liston face a painful dilemma: how to represent a country where racial segregation is still law of the land? Music, civil rights and decolonization meet in this forgotten episode from the Cold War.
When can we see it? Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat will have its World Premiere in Jan 2024 at Sundance, so watch out for it at festivals throughout the following months. More info.
Orlando, My Political Biography
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, philosopher, author and filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has created a wildly inventive and scintillating documentary that brings together 26 trans and non-binary people to explore the trans experience.
Through the authentic voices of other young bodies undergoing metamorphosis, Preciado retraces the stages of his personal transformation through a poetic journey in which life, writing, theory and image merge freely in the search for truth. Every Orlando, he says, is a transgender person who risks his, her or their life on a daily basis as they find themselves forced to confront government laws, history and psychiatry, as well as traditional notions of the family and the power of multinational pharmaceutical companies.
When can we see it? Orlando, My Political Biography will be released by Picturehouse Entertainment on Friday 19 April. More info.