What’s on at this year’s Encounters festival

Director Sara de Gouveia takes an intimate look at the extraordinary life and career of struggle veteran, former Constitutional Court justice and art lover Albie Sachs. It ranges from his politicisation as the child of Jewish immigrant workers’ rights activists in Cape Town to his work as a lawyer representing those targeted by the apartheid regime, his arrest, exile and surviving the bomb attack that left him blind in one eye and without the use of an arm, to his return to SA and dedication to the creation and upholding of the constitution. Through it all, Sachs has managed to maintain a fundamental belief in the ability of humanity to persevere and overcome its darkest moments for the greater good.

While billionaire Jeff Bezos jets himself, his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, Katy Perry and other celebrities into space, on the ground in the warehouses staffed by long-suffering Amazon employees, life is far less glamorous. Directors Brett Story’s and Stephen Maing’s bittersweet documentary traces the long and often seemingly Sisyphean struggle of current and former Amazon employees to unionise and secure basic rights for workers at the company’s Staten Island fulfilment centre. Though it won an award at last year’s Sundance Festival, the documentary has struggled to gain distribution in the US, and it’s obvious that is because Bezos doesn’t want people to see the nasty realities it depicts and the nefarious behaviour that Amazon and its lawyers engage in to ensure that its workers don’t succeed in their efforts. Despite this, the film effectively shows that the struggles of its working protagonists are just, fair and driven by a determination and spirit that even Bezos’ billions can’t squash.

The world’s other great billionaire super-villain, Elon Musk, is the more indirect target of director Julien Elie’s otherworldly, quietly observed film that trains its black-and-white lens on the Texas border town of Boca Chica. This is the location of the SpaceX Starbase, home to the towering metallic rockets that hundreds of new space race obsessives and oglers come to see shot into space in test launches. Taking a cool but inquisitive look at the strange new ecosystem that has emerged around the base and the eccentric cast of characters who are either entranced or horrified by the launches and the effects they have had on the social and environmental makeup of the area, Elie’s film makes a strong case for the argument that Musk and the uberrich class his missions to Mars will ultimately serve are so concerned with leaving earth that they have little regard for what damage they may leave behind.

Sir Demis Hassabis has, at age 48, achieved more than most could hope to in a lifetime. As a child, he was an international-level chess prodigy before dropping that and becoming a world-class video game developer in his teens. At 17 he went to Cambridge to study computer science and in 2009 he obtained a PhD in neuroscience to help understand how the human brain could offer new ways to think about the development of what has been, as director Greg Kohs’ documentary shows, Hassabis’ lifelong obsession the creation of artificial general intelligence AGO. It’s his work in this field that has seen Hassabis win a knighthood, a Nobel prize in chemistry, and head the company DeepMind bought by Google in 2014 for £400m. As the film tracks the groundbreaking speed with which Hassabis and DeepMind have managed to solve previously insoluble problems in maths and science, even its subject is surprised by how fast the road to AGI is becoming a reality in his own lifetime. His warnings about the inevitable danger of crossing a threshold he grew up believing was possible but still far off in the future are worth taking note of.

The kidnapping of more than 200 girls from a school in northern Nigeria in 2014 by Islamic fundamentalist group Boko Haram grabbed international attention. A decade later, with more than half of the girls still not returned and the world’s attention long directed elsewhere, director Joel “Kachi” Benson’s tender and inspirational documentary examines the effects of this tragedy on a group of Chibok mothers who, while they hope for the return of their daughters, struggle to survive and ensure that their other children don’t lose hope in the value of education to offer them better lives. While the terrible and traumatic events of a decade before continue to hurt, the stories of these mothers offer a tribute to resilience in the face of unimaginable adversity and the courage that makes them not victims but heroes.

German New Wave pioneer and director Wim Wenders and the subject of his documentary, the celebrated painter, sculptor and installation creator Anselm Kiefer, were both born in 1945. In different ways these two artists have devoted much of their careers to interrogating difficult questions about their homeland’s relationship to and complicity in its horrific Nazi past. As Wenders previously did in his groundbreaking 2011 documentary about German choreographer Pina Bausch, the director here pushes the boundaries of the medium to allow viewers to immerse themselves in the towering size and scope of Kiefer’s work and projects. There is archival footage that provides some thin biographical context but mostly the film is about the art, allowing for some fascinating glimpses into Kiefer’s working process, studio spaces and determined focus on a lifetime of challenging audiences to look deep within the psyche of Germany and its complicated, uneasy relationship with the long shadows of its past.