Antenna Documentary Film Festival starts this week

CHARM CIRCLE

With shades of Grey Gardens, Charm Circle is a cinéma vérité portrait of an eccentric New York family navigating the chaos that divides them. Winner of Sheffield DocFest’s Audience Award, it's an amusing and unpredictable personal study on the nature of family.
 

THE MUSHROOM SPEAKS

What if the humble fungus could radically change society? Featuring specialists and enthusiasts alike, The Mushroom Speaks ventures underground to listen to what these organisms have to tell us, and invites us to imagine a myco-cultural (r)evolution.

THE REAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN

From the award-winning creative team behind Notes On Blindness and Listen To Me, Marlon comes a contemporary take on cinema’s most iconic figure. For decades he was the most famous man in the world, but who was the real Charlie Chaplin?

THE BUBBLE

Imagine a sprawling city of 155,000 retirees with 54 golf courses, 70 swimming pools and its own news organisation. The inhabitants of The Villages, in Florida, live isolated from the world in a bubble of age-defying leisure. But it all comes at a cost.
 

THE LAKE OF SCARS
 

In a corner of regional Victoria exists a place of astounding natural beauty, archaeological significance and age-old culture. On the verge of being lost forever an unlikely partnership between Black and White people could see it saved.

MR BACHMANN AND HIS CLASS
 

Winner of the Berlinale’s Silver Bear Jury Prize and first ever Audience Award, this sprawling, tender documentary captures the inspiring relationship between an unorthodox German schoolteacher and his culturally diverse teenage class.

SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS

Narrated by Laurie Anderson, Sisters with Transistors is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today.

SILENT VOICE
 

Fleeing Chechnya's homophobic tyranny, Khavaj, a young gay mixed martial arts fighter, finds himself adrift. The shock of exile and death threats cause him to develop psychogenic aphonia, leaving him unable to speak. Will he regain his voice, and freedom?

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOY IN THE WORLD

At Death in Venice’s premiere, Visconti declared 15-year-old star Björn Andrésen “the world’s most beautiful boy”. Now 65, Andrésen opens up about the irresponsible treatment he was subjected to in this devastating meditation on obsession and the cost of fame.

GORBACHEV. HEAVEN
 

Gorbachev. Heaven finds acclaimed director Vitaly Mansky at home with a man who helped to shape the 20th-century. In an intimate setting, he gives his view of Russia then and now. History will judge, but here Gorbachev presents his own, final testimony.