The latest cinema stories

A map of Gaza, drawn in white on a black floor. Nine Palestinians stand within it, carrying with them the memory of neighbourhoods, families, work, music and lives interrupted. In Who Is Still Alive, Nicolas Wadimoff strips cinema back to its most essential gesture: listening, long enough for testimony to become a human presence rather than another image passing across a screen.

Nearly two metres tall as a teenager, with a deep voice and a body everyone seems eager to interpret before she has spoken, Ulya could have been the subject of a film about difference. Viesturs Kairišs makes something more interesting: a film about looking. Shot in black and white and an almost square frame, Ulya first traps its heroine inside other people’s definitions before slowly allowing her to outgrow them.

At eighteen, Anna requests medical assistance in dying. Brigitte Poupart could have made that decision the centre of an argument. Instead, she does something more uncomfortable and more human: she watches the shockwave. Où vont les âmes is about death, certainly, but even more about what death forces the living to confront before time runs out.

In Alex Camilleri’s Le Chant des oliviers, tiny Malta becomes the unlikely setting for a road movie in which nobody can quite escape. Between a young woman determined to leave, an old singer whose moral compass has acquired a certain Mediterranean flexibility, and a folk tradition that stubbornly refuses to behave itself, the film turns inheritance into something far more troublesome than property.

Why should a documentary from OFF Investigation  a newsroom born for browsers, phones and YouTube  suddenly need a cinema? Because Fini de rire! is ultimately less about comedians than about the democratic space still afforded to insolence. When a society begins disciplining its clowns, it may be revealing what it fears most: the mirror.