Encounters Film Festival is streaming its excellent doccies online for free

The 22nd edition of the Encounters International Documentary Film Festival has responded to the challenges of this bizarre year by making all the films in this year's line-up available online and free of charge from August 20 to 30.

Here are some of the highlights:

INFLUENCE

The festival's opening film - journalists Richard Poplak and Diana Neille's Influence - takes us on a wide-ranging journey into the history of the nefarious PR firm Bell Pottinger. This is the firm that meddled in the affairs of SA on behalf of its clients, the Gupta family.

The film reminds us that Bell Pottinger was a well-established firm with a long history of messy and ideologically questionable dealings in several of the world's historical hot spots - from Thatcher's Britain in the 1980s to Pinochet's Chile and the complicated world of Middle Eastern political relations in the era of the Second Iraq War in the early 2000s.

Framed by a suitably noirish central interview with the chain-smoking villain of the piece - Lord Timothy Bell, who died last year - Influence details the existence and influence of PR giants like Bell Pottinger.

It shows these firms as logical extensions of the aspirational advertising boom of peak-era capitalism in the 1980s. They met their match in the popular protest movements and social activism of South African citizens and journalists who helped bring their rule to a crashing end.

BELLINGCAT: TRUTH IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD

The power of citizen journalism and activism is explored further in Hans Pool's film Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World, which examines the successes of the Bellingcat group of data journalists who, using publicly available information on the internet, have exposed the truth behind many fake-news stories and propaganda campaigns. They particularly focus on the ongoing war in Syria and the underhanded espionage and political assassinations carried out by the Putin regime in Russia.

It's a timely reminder of the power available to ordinary people in the digital age to question official versions and use available tools to dig deeper and expose the truth behind the stories.

THE KINGMAKER

Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, who is 91 years old, isn't willing to let the truth stand in the way of her self-deluded story of maternal love for her people. She's determined to continue peddling her own version of the world in artist Lauren Greenfield's fascinating and often cringe-inducing portrait The Kingmaker.

Long after the death of her husband, notorious Cold War-era dictator Ferdinand, and in spite of public protests and testimonies from the victims of his regime, Marcos continues to make grand appearances, dressed in her expensive designer gowns and infamous shoes.

She doles out money to the poor and works to ensure the continuation of what she sees as her family's predetermined destiny as political rulers of the Philippines through her support for her son Bongbong's unsuccessful vice-presidential campaign.

It's a sad and frustrating portrait of an ageing, failed and self-proclaimed empress who refuses to acknowledge that she's not wearing any clothes and whose terrible legacy can be seen in the brutal regime of the current president of the Philippines, Marcos supporter Rodrigo Duterte.

AFRICAN STORIES

The questioning of official narratives and redress of the public historical record is a strong motivation for several of the festival's South African offerings.

Sifiso Khanyile's A New Country takes a stringent look behind the façade of the myth of the Rainbow Nation to reveal a broken and disappointed country in need of a recalibration if the glaring inequalities and divisions within SA, 26 years after the advent of democracy, are ever to be properly addressed.

Eric Miller and Laurine Platzky's Hutchinson: SHUNTED takes a more bottom-up, fly-on-the-wall approach to examining the history and the present of a small Northern Cape town once fuelled by its position on the railway network of apartheid-era SA. The town is now left to fend for itself in a world that's long moved beyond it, leaving its residents behind.

Teboho Edkins's quietly observed Days of Cannibalism uses an even more dedicated observational mode to paint a picture of the expansion of Chinese influence in Lesotho.

Finally, Ramadan Suleman's By All Means Necessary chronicles 50 years of the liberation movements of Africa from Algeria to SA, shedding light on a significant part of pan-African history of collective struggle and support that helped to bring an end to centuries of colonial rule.

ARTISTS

There's also a wide selection of films that focus on artists, both well-known and tragically underexposed. These films remind us of the power of art to transcend and unite.

They include Timothy Greenfields-Sanders' intimate portrait of the life and work of the late American literary giant Toni Morrison in Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am; Seamus Haley and Laurent Richard's examination of the world's favourite and best-known street artist provocateur in Banksy: Most Wanted; cinematic maverick and pioneer Agnés Varda's posthumously released self-examination of her career and inspirations in Varda by Agnés; and the little known tragic story of South African jazz impresario Gideon Nxumalo in director Glenn Ujebe Masokoane's long-in-the-making tribute Listen to my Song.

As always there are too many films and not enough space but this year, instead of having to finesse schedules and sacrifice choices due to the physical impossibility of occupying two cinemas at the same time, you can have a broader, more satisfying Encounters experience. It may force you to question what you think you know, while simultaneously expanding your horizons.

The Encounters festival demonstrates the continued commitment of documentary filmmakers from SA and the rest of the world to making sense of others' experiences and confounding preconceptions of the world around us.

• The 22nd Encounters South African International Documentary Festival takes place online from August 20-30.