Film/Documentary tip top 5

Every issue we publish a tip top 5 of documentaries and films that we think are worth watching. In this issue five films selected by Chris Belloni, one of the founders of Supernova cinema and film festival director of the International Queer & Migrant Film Festival Amsterdam. If available we share the content on our Youtube channel.

Hive  
Director: Blerta Basholli
Release: 2021
Topic: Feminism
Watch: Festival circuit
Fahrije’s husband has been missing since the war in Kosovo. She sets up a small business to provide for her kids. Challenged by a patriarchal society that does not support her, she is left to make a crucial decision.

Taxi
Director: Jafar Panahi
Release: 2015
Topic: Documentary
Watch: Berlinale website
Filmmaker Jafar Panahi is banned from making movies by the Iranian government, he poses as a taxi driver and makes a movie about the social challenges people face in Iran. Panahi is associated with the Iranian New Wave film movement.

The act of killing
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Release: 2012
Topic: Documentary
Watch: IDFA online
Exploring the extremes of the human mind, Oppenheimer’s acclaimed film, which he describes as “a documentary of the imagination,” earned him a European Film Award, a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination. More than merely documenting the atrocities committed by the film’s main protagonist Anwar Congo, a member of the powerful paramilitary organization Pemuda Pancasila, the film highlights the impunity with which he—like the various political leaders who also appear—can flaunt his role in the persecution of communists in present-day Indonesia.

Enjoy poverty
Director: Renzo Martens
Release: 2009
Topic: Documentary
Watch: IDFA online
For two years, Dutch artist Renzo Martens traveled around Congo, from the capital of Kinshasa to deep inside the country. With camera in hand, Martens makes his way around the poverty-fighting industry in the post-civil war country, regularly appearing on screen himself

Honeyland
Director: Ljubomir Stefanov
Release: 2019
Topic: Documentary
Watch: IDFA online
For three years, a small crew followed Europe’s last female wild-beekeeper, Hatidze Muratova. She’s as pure as the honey she gathers from her wild hives, and her surroundings are as bountiful as they are rugged. In a deserted mountain village, with neither electricity nor running water, she looks after her bedridden mother. In this extraordinary setting, Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov produced a stunningly filmed, intimate portrait, in which the protagonists often seem to behave as if they’re unobserved.