Misan Harriman was catapulted into a new career after turning his camera to anti-racist demonstrations – though the shadow of more recent criticism looms

This is a documentary portrait of the celebrated British-Nigerian photographer, film-maker and activist Misan Harriman, who has campaigned on Gaza and Black Lives Matter, that was completed before the row in May about some of his social media posts. These appeared to amplify anti-Zionist conspiracy theories about media coverage of the Golders Green attack, and inelegantly quoted Susan Sontag’s comments on the Holocaust in relation to Reform UK’s electoral successes. His supporters said this controversy was a smear campaign – and if the film had been made later, Harriman might have wanted to answer the criticisms levelled against him.

As it stands, Harriman emerges from this film as a talented, self-taught photographer: articulate, fluent and candid about his wealthy and privileged background, which allowed him to witness a certain kind of British overclass racism up close. He was making a good living in the financial world before his picture of an anti-racist demonstration went viral after being retweeted by Martin Luther King III (son of Martin Luther King Jr), an interviewee here. Harriman’s new career was born. His short film The After, starring David Oyelowo, was nominated for an Oscar in 2024 and might well have won, in my view, if Wes Anderson had not been included, somewhat against the newcomer spirit of the short film category.

Vitória Régia imagines rightwing Bolsonaro plot succeeded with US help – and highlights threats facing Indigenous peoples

The year is 2025 and far-right coup plotters have annihilated Brazil’s democracy, assassinating the president, closing the national congress and surrendering the Amazon rainforest and its untold riches to the United States.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Amazon of America,” a thick-accented North American soldier tells a group of journalists being taken on a propaganda tour of an oil refinery in the newly annexed jungle realm. Nearby, a replica of the Statue of Liberty has been carved out of the wilderness to celebrate Washington’s tutelage over more than half of Brazil.

The humour falls flat, the twists are weak, the plotlines are absurd and it’s soaked in booze and gambling. The only thing that saves this film are the actors’ performances

Writer-director Liam O Mochain spent more than three years filming this feature, a package of five narratively self-contained shorts set in various parts of Ireland. That either makes him heroically persistent about seeing his vision through or somewhat inept, as there’s no discernible improvement over the course of the film. Every one of these thudding tales is flatly directed and plays like the script was inspired by true stories from Take a Break magazine – although hopefully there’s nothing true about the would-be comical fourth story which (spoiler alert) ends with a woman (Gail Brady) getting locked inside a “smart” oven that’s about to turn itself on. It’s supposed to be funny because her husband (Matthew O’Brien) is so feckless about technology he doesn’t know how to turn the oven off. Because men, geddit?

The other instalments are a little better, but only by tiny amounts, much the way one flavour of off-brand crisps might be preferable to another. The first one at least has the always watchable redoubtable character actor Marion O’Dwyer playing Carol, a homeless woman still grieving her dead husband (she listens to his voicemail greeting several times a day). She breaks into a restaurant on Christmas Day to host a feast for her rough-sleeping friends. Similarly, a vignette about Molly (Rosemary Henderson) meeting the son she put up for adoption years ago is passable thanks to competent performances, but the O Henry-esque twist is very weak tea.

Portmanteau series’ latest instalment has nice touches with eerily jolly villains and haunted soda, but it could use a bit of an edit

This horror bonanza, the eighth instalment in the V/H/S anthology series, is a mixed bag, with some very high highs and regrettably poor lows. This is essentially a collection of Halloween-themed shorts, and while they’re billed as “found footage” in keeping with the conceit of the original, the idea that you’re watching found footage has been more or less worn away to a nub at this point. The series would in all honesty be better off ditching that element, and simply leaning into the broader idea of a regular horror anthology of unsettling short films.

Among the highlights is a riotous and disgusting chapter called Fun Size, made with grisly flair by Casper Kelly, whose viral masterpiece Too Many Cooks took the internet by storm in 2014 and whose feature film Buddy just premiered at Sundance. Fun Size sees a group of young adults stumble into what might best be described as a wrongness zone where they’re pitted against a villain who comes on like the vicious kid brother of the Ghostbusters Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

Rotterdam film festival
A set of shorts by film-makers from Afghanistan, Iran, Ukraine, Syria and Somalia are shocking, funny and mysterious in equal measure

With considerable chutzpah and elan, and in her capacity as producer and UNHCR Goodwill ambassador, Cate Blanchett has achieved a geopolitical film-making coup. In concert with festival authorities in Rotterdam, she has secured cash and commissioned short films on the subject of displacement from five directors – including Mohammad Rasoulof, now in exile from his native Iran due to his pro-democracy activism, in effect making his first public statement since the recent massacres and apparently expressing his fears that he may never go home again.

The films are far from solemnly earnest – this is an anthology of five brilliant miniature artworks. By turns shocking, funny, confessional and deeply mysterious, this is a tremendous collection; the constituent films of which benefit in some enigmatic way from being shown together. What Ealing Studios’s Dead of Night did for scariness, these films may have done for 21st-century exile.

Lee Knight says accolade for A Friend of Dorothy, based on friendship with neighbour, sends message to never give up

A writer-director from Stanmore in Middlesex whose short film has been nominated for an Oscar has said he feels “utterly overwhelmed” by the accolade.

Lee Knight’s film A Friend of Dorothy, starring Miriam Margolyes and Stephen Fry, is in the running for best live action short.

Tibetan directors, who all live outside Tibet, deliver a quartet of films that explore the pain of separation and migration

The wrench of exile is the theme of this quartet of short films from Tibetan directors, who themselves all live outside Tibet. Their intimate, emotional family dramas tell stories of separation and migration. In two of them, the 90-year-old Dalai Lama smiles out from photographs on shrines, a reminder of the precariousness of Tibet’s future. As a character in one of the films puts it bluntly: will there be anything to stop China erasing Tibetan identity when its rock-star spiritual leader is no longer around?

In the first film a Tibetan man lives in a kind of complicated happiness in Vietnam. He loves his wife, and they both adore their sunny-natured little daughter, but he has mournful eyes. Home is a town on the banks of the Mekong River, which has its source in Tibet. The river is a constant reminder of the region – and of Chinese might too, since Chinese hydropower dams are the cause of drought downstream in Vietnam.