Best documentaries

Here are five documentaries worth catching up on, while new productions are still mothballed:

13th

With academic precision, director Ava DuVernay’s 2016 film traces a historical line from slavery in the US to the mass incarceration of African Americans now. Her focus is on racism in general, but also on the role of the 13th Amendment, which outlaws involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime, allowing private firms to profit from inmates’ unpaid labour. On Netflix.

The Up series

Every seven years since 1964, Michael Apted has revisited a group of people he first filmed when they were seven years old. The US critic Roger Ebert wrote that the series “penetrates to the central mystery of life”, exploring the question of why each of us is who we are. On

Amazon Prime.

Pina

The choreographer Pina Bausch died of cancer in 2009, just as production was starting on this film about her career. Director Wim Wenders and her dancers went ahead with shooting nonetheless. It’s a beautiful record of her work, often transplanted from the theatre into the outdoors, to great cinematic effect.

On Curzon Home Cinema.

The Act of Killing

In this disturbing take on the Indonesian genocide of 196566, some of its perpetrators – still in power in the country – gleefully recreate their crimes for the camera. The sense of evil and its banality is terrifying. On Amazon Prime.

Hoop Dreams

Released in 1994, this Oscar-nominated epic follows two teenage basketball players recruited from inner-city Chicago to a suburban high school, with hopes of graduating to the NBA. It’s the drama of their lives off the court that makes the film so compelling. On Curzon Home Cinema.