Antenna Documentary Festival

The Antenna Documentary Festival returns for its second year, once again proving a highlight of the Sydney cinematic calendar with is array of fearsome documentaries. The Ambassador kicks off proceedings, finding shit-stirring, situationist-minded satirist Mads Brügger using bluster, bribes and blackmail to buy his way into corrupt African diplomacy and, in turn, the blood diamond trade; this like some colonialist critique by way of Borat. We Are Legion also shows those who use monkeyshines as social crusade, chronicling the collective of hackers who turned from smart-arse trolls to mobilised political force, their devotion to freedom-of-expression making them active players in the Arab Spring.

Five Broken Cameras is a work of stark, direct-cinema humanism etched with defiant political sedition: five cameras handed out to West Bank residents, and turned into a frill-free citizen's portrait of the cold realities of life for those Palestinian residents living alongside the construction of a new dividing wall. Putin's Kiss dwells in the ever-widening divide between Russian politics and its populace, trailing a buxom poster-child for Putin's Hitler Youth-esque Nashi corps who experiences a crisis of conscience in the face of the increasing totalitarianism in her beloved homeland.

Colombianos has the intimacy of a family drama at it follows a pair of Swedish-Colombian brothers who repatriate back to Bogotá, one out to start an Internet business, the other going through detox; these bros both the best of friends and the worst of rivals. Tropicália is a wild, colourful, crowd-pleasin' portrait of the Brazilian psychedelic epoch, chronicling the social circumstances that gave birth to one of music's greatest-ever moments, and coming blessed with a raft of eye-opening, ear-pleasing archival footage of Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa et al. Mongolian Bling looks at a far-less-interesting musical sub-culture: Mongolian hip hop. Yet, what it lacks in interesting sounds, the film makes up for in its window-onto-another world; Benj Binks' portrait of youth culture in Ulaanbaatar a side of Mongolian culture effectively never before seen on screen.

Detropia surveys the savaged remains of Detroit chronicling the Motor City's demise from birthplace of the middle-class to America's poorest major city. It takes onthe unenviable task of following Florence Tillon's transcendent Detroit Wild City, a series of remarkable landscapes that felt like a window onto humanity's shared post-oil-collapse future and, in comparison makes Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's film feel mediocre, its interest in Detroit only 'human interest'.

Into The Abyss looks at a familiar cinematic subject — prisoners on death row and, thus, the very idea of capital punishment — but, oh, it's really all about the man doing the looking: Werner Herzog. The impishly inquisitive cinematic titan sounds positively overjoyed to be chewing the fat with a couple of hardened crims and asks the kind of questions only Werner would. God bless him.

Another legend of the documentary form, Agnès Varda, is hailed in an incredibly tiny retrospective: a three-film arc from her landmark breakout 1962's Cléo From 5 To 7, a near-real-time drama both playful and profound, to her best-known film, 2000's The Gleaners And I, an amiable essay on scavanging, and, finally, a self-eulogising memoir of her cinematic career, 2008's kinda-silly The Beaches Of Agnès. It's, of course, anything but thorough (the absence of Vagabond means it's barely even a survey of her highlights), but it's a fine introduction for those who've never made Varda's acquaintance.