Access: Sheffield DocFest

A static shot of paint drying on a brick wall.

The story of sixteen men put on trial during for sadomasochism in the dying days of Thatcher's Britain was told by the police, the prosecution and the tabloid press — but not by those in the dock during the police investigation Operation Spanner.

Narrated by cult teen star Fairuza Balk, Beyond Clueless is a dizzying journey into the mind, body and soul of the teen movie, as seen through the eyes of over 200 modern coming-of-age classics.

Prolific background actor Jill Goldston takes centre stage in this unique portrait. Constructed entirely from Jill’s performances – captured fleetingly in everything from Mr. Bean to The Elephant Man – the film is a lyrical journey through popular culture, and a haunting study of a life lived out of focus.

In the mid-aughts, Dateline NBC's To Catch a Predator drew millions of weekly viewers to watch sting operations: men planning to meet minors for sex would instead be confronted by polished host Chris Hansen, then by the police — all on hidden camera.

A searing look at a day in the life of an assistant to a powerful executive. As Jane follows her daily routine, she grows increasingly aware of the insidious abuse that threatens every aspect of her position.

In the summer of 1990, a teenage filmmaker successfully raises $100,000 to shoot a pioneering horror film. 25 years later, he tells the story of a cult classic that never was.

Against the backdrop of deserted spaces, a filmmaker explores his abandoned Zodiac Killer documentary, delving into the true crime genre's inner workings at a saturation point.

A girl haunted by traumatic events takes us on a mesmerising journey through 100 years of horror cinema to explore how filmmakers scare us – and why we let them.

Sometime in the 1980s, Caspar Salmon's grandmother was invited to a gathering on the Welsh island of Anglesey, attended exclusively by people with fish surnames. Or so he says. Thirty years later, film-maker Charlie Lyne attempts to sort myth from reality.

RICHARD, 15 with learning difficulties, longs to put down roots but his restless and destructive brother, POLLY, needs to keep moving. When the land they live on is bought by a new landowner, and the electricity supply to their caravan is cut, their already precarious living conditions get even worse. Then a chance meeting with the new landowner's daughter, 17 year old ANNABEL (Yasmin Paige), leaves RICHARD besotted; whilst POLLY befriends the guys who run a seedy traveling fair. Richards optimistic view on life becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as Polly's abusive behavior worsens, family secrets are revealed, and he is torn between loyalty to his brother and his first true friend in ANNABEL. For better or worse, Richards life is about to change forever.

Fragments of hundreds of films from around the world bring together an ensemble cast of actors with one thing in common: each is no longer alive. Together, they contend with a fragile existence lived solely through these traces of their work.

A one-take audio-visual poem in which artist Ross Sutherland revisits a twenty-year-old episode of the popular English soap opera EastEnders as a form of self-reckoning.

"A 2015 pilot I made for a BBC webseries, rejected after I got into an argument with the commissioner." - director Charlie Shackleton

A vision of darkness in eighteen films.

In 1970, filmmaker Peter Kubelka designed a movie auditorium in which carefully controlled sight lines and black velvet caused all but the screen to disappear into darkness. He referred to his invisible cinema as “a machine for viewing.” In these adventures in vision, directors Oscar Raby, Richard Misek, and Charlie Shackleton use real-time VR experience, live performance, and video essay to transform the Egyptian theater into “machines for viewing” to explore how we watch films.