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“In a no man’s land between warm love and Cold War, a refugee matchmaker fights to heal her divided homeland — one couple at a time.” So reads the logline for North South Man Woman, a film getting its world premiere at the 32nd edition of the Sheffield DocFest on Friday.

Having escaped from North Korea to affluent South Korea, Yujin Han has worked her way up to run her own matchmaking agency, called Lovestorya, as CEO. The company sets up new female arrivals from the North with South Korean men. Morten Traavik (Liberation Day) and Sun Kim spent five years shooting their documentary about her, the agency, and the relationships between men and women, as well as North and South Korea.

An old Korean proverb — nam nam, buk nyeo — says that the most beautiful women are in the North, and the most handsome men are in the South, we learn from the film,...

Celebrated for its documentary filmmaking, especially for the “Poetic New Wave” of the 1960s, the Baltics are pushing for larger visibility for today’s talented directors and producers from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

“There is a momentum with our Oscar for the animated film “Flow” and documentaries can most certainly build on this trend,” said Dita Rietuma, head of the Latvian Film Centre.

The Baltics are making their debut at the Marché du Film’s Cannes Docs, where three high-profile producers will attend the Co-Pro Social Club session May 17: Estonia’s Marianna Kaat, Latvia’s Uldis Cekulis and Lithuania’s Ruta Adelė Jekentaitė.

By spotlighting the Baltic countries for the first time, head of Cannes Docs Pierre-Alexis Chevit says his goal is to highlight “the vibrant role of Baltic production companies in ambitious international co-productions of creative documentary films” and the long tradition of homegrown doc filmmakers exploring nonfiction...

Billy Idol, female war field medics on the frontlines in Ukraine, a marriage agency matching North Korean women and South Korean men, a whistleblower in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the aftermath of Brexit, and Indian sex workers who begin making short films – those are just some of the topics to be featured in documntaries screening during the 32nd edition of Sheffield DocFest next month.

Overall, the festival in the north of England will screen 116 films, 82 features and 34 shorts. It will feature 51 world premieres, 16 international premieres, eight European premieres, and 39 U.K. premieres from 68 countries of production.

Among big names, Billy Porter will attend as executive producer of I Was Born This Way, Sam Pollard and Daniel Junge’s celebration of the life of Carl Bean, from a tough childhood through to his musical success and queer rights advocacy.

It will feature in the Sheffield fest’s Rhythms section, along with...

Tense documentary follows the perilous ‘underground railroads’ defectors need to take to escape from the totalitarian state

The toxic anti-Shangri-La of North Korea continues to provide a rich seam of material for film-makers: the late Claude Lanzmann recounted his personal experiences there in the 1950s in Napalm and Werner Herzog discussed the North Korean reverence for Mount Paektu in Into the Inferno. There are many more, including Álvaro Longaria’s The Propaganda Game, Ross Adam and Robert Cannan’s The Lovers and the Despot, Morten Traavik’s Liberation Day and Ryan White’s Assassins. So far no documentary film-maker to my knowledge has tackled one of North Korea’s strangest events: Kim Jong-un’s summit meeting in 2018 with Donald Trump, the man who’d threatened him with “fire and fury”. Oddly, this otherwise excellent documentary about North Korea doesn’t mention that, despite it coming within its timeline.

Beyond Utopia...

New projects from Cherien Dabis, Anders Thomas Jensen and Ameer Fakher Eldin have also been awarded

Ariane Labed’s feature-directing debut Sisters is among the 33 projects to receive funding from Eurimages second wave of 2023 co-production funding.

The French-Greek actor’s feature directing debut received €350,000 from the €9.7m pot. The Ireland, UK, Germany and Greece co-production is produced by Ireland’s Element Pictures. An English-language adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s gothic novel of the same name it follows two sisters who move to the countryside with their maniac depressive mother. Labed previously directed short film Olla which won three awards at...

Andrejs (Igors Selegovskis). Ugis Olte: 'They say that Christianity was brought here 800 years ago by Germans, but I feel that they haven't succeeded yet because we have a lot of this pagan mindset' Latvian director Ugis Olte makes the shift from documentary to mythical-inflicted fiction with his latest film Upurga - which has its world premiere today at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Andrejs (Igors Selegovskis) has experienced the danger of the forests at first hand due to a tragic accident and is now a stickler for health and safety. He gets more than he bargains for when he heads out into the woods with a social influencer and a film crew to shoot a vegan sausage advert. The woods hold secrets that tap into both primal urges and fears as well as an eclectic mix of locals including a mute cabbage fermenter and his wife (Ugis Praulins and...