Five of Screen’s expert critics select their favourite documentaries from 2024.
Fionnuala Halligan
Screen’s executive editor for reviews and new talent. Read her top ten films of the year here.
1. No Other Land
Dirs. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
A filmmaking collective takes us to the Golan Heights, past and present, where a friendship forms between Palestinian activist Adra and Israeli journalist Abraham as the army bulldozes the villages of Masafer Yatta to settler taunts. A shaming documentary elevated by personal archive footage illustrating generational pain.
2. Ernest Cole: Lost And Found
Dir. Raoul Peck
Ernest Cole was a young Black photographer who documented Apartheid in South Africa, choosing exile to publish his revelatory book House Of Bondag e in 1967. Somewhere on the way the images he captured — often more degrading on the streets of New York than in the townships — seeped into his psyche, ruining him. Ernest Cole: Lost And Found is a lyrical, extraordinary documentary.
3. Black Box Diaries
Dir. Shiori Ito
Japanese journalist Ito turns the cameras on herself to investigate her own sexual assault, and attempts to bring her high-profile rapist to justice in a conservative Japan. Raw and fierce.
Tim Grierson
Screen’s senior US critic, based in Los Angeles, and has written for the publication since 2005. Read his top ten films of the year here.
1. My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air In Moscow
Dir. Julia Loktev
Loktev documents the end of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news channel, as Putin prepares to launch his war against Ukraine and crack down on his enemies, including the press. The you-are-there intimacy allows not just for an engaging snapshot of the channel’s vigilant journalists but also the suffocating sense of a brutal regime tightening its grip.
2. No Other Land
Dirs. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
A chronicle of suffering but also hope, No Other Land takes the viewer to Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, where a battle between Palestinian residents and Israeli soldiers has waged for years. Out of that clash came this film, spearheaded by a Palestinian activist and Israeli journalist working together to alert the wider world about these atrocities.
3. Intercepted
Dir. Oksana Karpovych
A formally audacious documentary combining images of everyday Ukrainian life with intercepted audio of Russian soldiers calling family and friends back home. That juxtaposition brings us the horrors of war as narrated by those causing the devastation, who often question their actions.
Allan Hunter
Hunter is based in Edinburgh and has reviewed films for Screen since 1990. Read his top ten films of the year here.
1. No Other Land
Dirs. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
Filmed before the 2023 Hamas attacks, No Other Land documents the relentless demolition of the Palestinian villages in Masafer Yatta. The impossible dream of staying on their own land unfolds in suffering, impunity and the grinding down of hope.
2. Strike: An Uncivil War
Dir. Daniel Gordon
Valuable insight into the 1984 British miner’s strike and the trauma of the brutal showdown at Orgreave in Yorkshire. Former miners and police provide vivid testimony that enhances the archive footage.
3. Sugarcane
Dirs. Emily Kassie, Julian Brave NoiseCat
An eye-opening account of the extensive physical and sexual abuse suffered by generations of Indigenous children at schools funded by the Canadian government. The past is an open wound, as we learn of cover-ups, corruption and the absence of accountability.
Wendy Ide
Ide joined Screen in 2015 as a UK-based critic, and is also the chief film critic for The Observer.
1. Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat
Dir. Johan Grimonprez
The murder of Patrice Lumumba, former prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, postcolonial backroom brinkmanship, the Cold War and the politics of American Jazz — this stunning essay film crackles with ideas and intellectual energy.
2. Dahomey
Dir. Mati Diop
The repatriation from France to Benin of 26 looted treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey is the starting point for this inventive film. Diop’s documentary combines fantasy elements with an interrogation of the significance of an artwork once it has been ripped from its culture.
3. Eno
Dir. Gary Hustwit
A tricky film to include since there isn’t a definitive version, but Hustwit’s innovative, shape-shifting “generative” portrait of the musician, producer and artist Brian Eno is an exhilarating and novel way to capture its mercurial subject.
Jonathan Romney
Romney is longtime contributor to Screen, who also writes for Film Comment, Sight & Sound and The Observer, and teaches at the UK’s National Film and Television School.
1. Dahomey
Dir. Mati Diop
Dahomey is more a political-poetical hybrid that addresses colonial history through the imagined musings of a king’s statue, as it is returned to Benin and welcomed by a young African public eager for debate.
2. No Other Land
Dirs. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
Made by a Palestinian-Israeli co-operative, this exposé of village demolitions in the West Bank was not only revealing, but given events in the Middle East, timely. An award winner at the Berlinale, it caused reverberations that not only affected the festival itself but also intensified debate in Germany and beyond on how to talk about the Israel-Gaza conflict.
3. Apocalypse In The Tropics
Dir. Petra Costa
A thoughtful, often shocking essay on the fundamentalist powers behind the Jair Bolsonaro presidency in Brazil, showing how the rise of evangelist preachers put a new kind of far-right in office — and could portend its eventual return.
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