Film Programme

The Opening Night film of Sheffield DocFest 31st edition is the World premiere of Kevin Macdonald's portrait of former heavyweight boxing world champion and current Mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko.

Special screening of the Sheffield DocFest Audience Award Winner: Strike: An Uncivil War

History leaves scars. In these four inspiring works, bodies act as archives: holding memories, keeping traditions and harbouring the seeds of change. Refusing erasure, the protagonists of these films use dance, language, song and poetry to keep their cultures alive.

Encompassing vastly different realities, these two films throw us headlong into big existential questions. Whether living in a mountain cave in China or a fancy hotel in Denmark, the protagonists of these films each strain to build a meaningful life.

Figures from the past return, archive images are reborn and centuries-old conversations are resurrected. In these four films time takes on an ambiguous quality, letters flow freely from the present to the past and forgotten voices speak again.

Dysfunctional relationships and eternal love. The everyday and the transcendental. These four films speak of the ties that bind us. Family, flaws, faith and fealty. Visually striking and rapturously intimate, these films play in the mind long after they've ended.

What to do when words fail us? Across Venezuela, Iran, Japan and the Netherlands, these films speak of the power of language and its limits. From a heated debate about the power of song, to a song that transcends words, these films each speak in their own unique voice.

The paranormal and the unconscious are close to the surface in these captivating films. Aliens, ancestors, spirits, dreams and nightmares – each transforming the living and the landscape.

Weaving threads across histories and through present crises, these three films speak of unexpected intimacies, of unlikely kinships, of community-building and a deep need for compassion across difference.