We teamed up with Doc Weekly to highlight our 10 favourite short documentaries from Sheffield Doc/Fest. Read on!
Launched on June 10th, the 2020 Sheffield Doc/Fest showcases online over 115 documentaries from 50 countries, including feature films, shorts and immersive or interactive works.
After enjoying the rich selection of short documentaries featured by the festival, we’ve teamed up with our friends from Doc Weekly, an Official Partner of this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, to pick our 10 favourite short documentaries. Here they are!
Uproar (Dir. Moe Najati)
Deep in the poorest neighbourhood of Havana, you will find Rumba Morena; a band of nine drummers and singers performing with astounding passion and fervour. Whilst it is not unusual to hear Rumba drifting from back alleys in Havana, Rumba Morena is different – they are all women. Cuban Rumba is traditionally played by men only, and Rumba Morena breaks the mould. Uproar explores the complex intersection of religion, music and gender dynamics of Rumba Morena – and the roots influencing the male resistance to it.
Wellspring (Dir. Fergus Haughton)
A double portrait of two women whose lives have been shaped by a shared passion for homemaking and hospitality. Over the course of the film we see Rosemary and Nancy in their cottage in Yorkshire, where they have settled in retirement. We hear them speak about the project they embarked on together, which saw them shelter and re-house over five hundred families in Massachusetts over a thirty year period, as well as providing a personal and historical context to their story.
Everyday Greyness (Dir. Clara Kleininger)
Magda is twenty six years old and has just left the closed rehabilitation centre where she spent a year, healing from an addiction to drugs and alcohol. The therapy there is based on community and work. She is not quite ready to leave this magical, closed off space and her peers, so she devises a workshop to go back and teach them the art of photography. Harsh reality and imagination mix in this space derived from the rules of daily life, as the patients try to portray what surrounds them and transform it into art.
Concrete Forms of Resistance (Dir. Nick Jordan)
Filmed in Tripoli, Lebanon, Concrete Forms of Resistance is a documentary centred upon the city’s abandoned ‘Permanent International Fair’, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the mid-1960s. Progress and crisis, labour and capital, material and memory, are reflected through a very intelligent rhyme between image and sound. The touching voice and words of Niemeyer as a call for life, and the beautiful camerawork as a weaving of ghosts in the present landscapes.
Untold Chaos (Dir. Giovanni Buccomino)
At the end of his presidency, Obama said his worst mistake was failing to plan for the day after the intervention in Libya. Filmed over seven years, this is a unique window into life in a country now in the hands of warlords, with no clear political path, a proxy war and a failing international peace process. An observational untold mosaic of besieged cities and vast deserts, ancient languages, diversities and divisions. Yet amongst the chaos we glimpse a quest for democracy and a thirst for reconciliation, from those who are often unseen and unrepresented.
The Washing Society (Dir. Lynne Sachs, Lizzie Olesker)
When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. With a title inspired by the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses, The Washing Society investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of the film, through interviews and observational moments. With original music by sound artist Stephen Vitiello.
Karabash (Dir. Ilya Komarov)
Karabash is not just a town on the brink of ecological catastrophe; we enter this town through the story of Volodya, a twenty-year-old factory worker who spends his spare time in the universe of Warhammer games. He hates change. Volodya belongs to the first generation that grew under Putin’s regime and doesn’t remember or know any other times, and he is okay with that. Volodya considers this to be his motto: “In the sinister darkness of the distant future, there is only war.”
‘Dark tourism’ has been defined as travel to places historically associated with death or tragedy. In Belfast, Northern Ireland, this industry is booming. A new phenomena of tourists now travel to visit the working class streets of the city where the majority of the conflict took place and three thousand six hundred people died during The Troubles, the colloquial name given to a thirty year period of political dispute and violence (1968-1998). Long-term residents begin to feel like they are part of the attraction, their testimonies give strength to this disastrous mass tourism.
Stolen Fish (Dir. Gosia Juszczak)
In the smallest country of continental Africa, Gambia, fish are now being powdered by Chinese corporations and exported to Europe and China to feed animals in industrial farming. As a result, Gambians are being deprived of their primary source of protein while overfishing is depleting marine ecosystems. The film follows three Gambians who share intimate stories of daily struggle, anger, hope and longing for their loved ones in the midst of difficult migration routes. A good example of how the global fishmeal industry impacts the lives of local people of one of the poorest countries in the western coast of Africa.
Isle of Us (Dir. Laura Wadha)
In 2015, Syrians were being relocated by the UN across Scotland. After hearing that some families were homed on the remote Isle of Bute, filmmaker Laura Wadha decided to make a film about Mounzer, a Syrian barber who settled in a little Scottish village with his family. Haunted by the ghost of war, he is trying to build a home for himself and his children. The barber shop welcomes locals and soon the community adopts them.
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