As 2024 draws to a close, there's plenty to look forward to in 2025. Featuring new work from master filmmakers Victor Kossakovsky and Raoul Peck, as well as upcoming festival favourites, we've compiled a list of docs we're excited to see on the big screen in the new year.
Architecton
Following a foray into the minutiae of a pig’s world in Gunda, Victor Kossakovsky returns to epic scale with his ode to stone, Architecton.
This film is massive not just in its monumental shots, but in the way it approaches the passage of time, giving us (extensive) pause for thought on humanity’s place on the planet, and the lifespans of the structures we build – from ancient stone edifices to crumbling concrete high-rises.
When can we see it? Architecton is released in cinemas on Friday 10 January. Alongside daily screenings at Bertha DocHouse, don’t miss the first two films of the trilogy that Architecton completes: ¡Vivan Las Antipodas! (2011) on 11 January and Aquarela (2018) on 12 January.
Whether gazing in rapt widescreen across wondrous ancient structures, ruined recent cityscapes or the oceanic shift and shake of a stone quarry in action, this is blatantly dazzling, epic-scale filmmaking that nonetheless invites viewers to consider the implications of our awe.
Guy Lodge, Variety
Holloway
Directed by Daisy-May Hudson (Half-Way, 2015) and Sophie Compton (Another Body, 2023), Holloway was co-created with its six participants: women with different backgrounds and circumstances, all former inmates of Holloway Prison.
Their participation in the filmed women’s circle – which takes place over several days in the prison’s former chapel – feels like a quietly radical way to explore and understand women’s experiences of prison. The resulting film is both resonant and moving, as attested by it winning the audience award for best documentary at the London Film Festival in October 2024.
When can we see it? Nothing has been announced yet, but stay tuned for the first half of 2025.
My Stolen Planet
When Fahranaz Sharifi’s personal essay about her life, and the lives of thousands of women living in Iran, won the International Competition at Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival (as well as the FIPRESCI award,) it was described by the jury as “a well-crafted and moving first-person essay that brilliantly confirms that every political reality has a sub-reality and that resistance comes in many forms, not least among them in the private realm.”
Sharifi was born during the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, and finds her life divided between a public world of silence and submission, and the domestic world that she shares with other women behind closed doors. Using her own home movies and a trove of collected 8mm archive, this beautifully-constructed film diary captures the joy, music and defiance of this hidden life, navigating the contrast between unseen freedom and external oppression.
When can we see it? My Stolen Planet plays daily at Bertha DocHouse from 17 Jan. Book tickets here.
Bogancloch
British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers returns to Bogancloch in the Scottish Highlands, the home of Jake Williams, who featured in his 2011 film Two Years at Sea.
How much has the world changed in the past 13 years? And how much has Jake’s existence changed? Living a life connected with his environment, simple but not without pleasures, Jake is captivating to watch through Rivers’ patient lens, and Bogancloch feels like a filmic window onto a different way of being in the world.
When can we see it? After a UK premiere at Edinburgh Film Festival in August 2024, we’re hopeful for Bogancloch to appear on screen in the not too distant future.
2000 Meters to Andriivka
When Mstyslav Chernov accepted the 2024 Best Documentary Oscar for 20 Days in Mariupol, his harrowing depiction of the siege of the city in the early days of the war in Ukraine, he noted that he wished he had never made the film. Now, almost three years on from the full-scale invasion, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and director has completed another film in Ukraine.
Amid the failing counteroffensive, a journalist follows a Ukrainian platoon on their mission to traverse one mile of heavily fortified forest and liberate a strategic village from Russian occupation. But the farther they advance through their destroyed homeland, the more they realize that this war may never end.
When can we see it? 2000 Meters to Andriivka will have its World Premiere in January 2025 at the Sundance Film Festival, so watch out for it at festivals in the following months, and we hope to see it in the UK later in the year.
The Flats
Winner of the top award at CPH:DOX in 2024, The Flats is a fascinating work on several levels. Created by an Italian director, Alessandra Celesia, who has been a long-term resident in Belfast, The Flats is a formally inventive exploration of the ongoing impact of the Northern Ireland conflict on the residents of the New Lodge housing estate.
Moving in and out of creative reconstruction, mixing anecdotes from the Troubles with their contemporary experience, time somehow concertinas in The Flats and we find that the past isn’t very far away at all. With so much unresolved pain and violence, this haunting film conveys how the residents of New Lodge still live with their ghosts.
When can we see it? Sheffield DocFest present a director Q&A of The Flats at Bertha DocHouse as part of our ‘Spotlights’ strand on Tuesday 28 Jan. Regular screenings from Friday 31 Jan. Book tickets here.
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
Following an exhibition of the South African photographer’s groundbreaking work at The Photographer’s Gallery in London last year, legendary filmmaker Raoul Peck’s latest documentary takes Ernest Cole’s work to the big screen.
Ernest Cole was the first Black freelance photographer in South Africa, whose pictures revealed the horrors of apartheid for a global audience. Narrated by Lakeith Stanfield (Sorry to Bother You) and featuring Cole’s rich photographs, Peck’s Cannes-winning film is poignant tribute to a photographer who risked everything to expose the injustices faced by his people.
When can we see it: Ernest Cole: Lost and Found will be released by Dogwoof on Friday 7 March, 2025.