The start of summer also marks the beginning of mid-year festival season, especially in Chicagoland. MUBI Fest Chicago and Ebertfest just concluded this weekend, and the Chicago Critics Film Festival is set to kick off in May with a selection of curated films from recent festivals, courtesy of the members of the Chicago Film Critics Association. But one of the most intriguing festivals has got to be Doc10, a small fest celebrating its tenth year of existence from April 30th to May 4th at its usual home, Lincoln Square’s Davis Theater. (Head to their website to get tickets.)

Doc10’s remit is fascinating, and lines up along two crucial criteria: Documentaries only, and only ten films. It’s an elegant way to put on a fest, allowing the Davis (and Doc10’s hosts, the Chicago Media Project) to program only the cream of the crop programmer Anthony Kaufman sees in his work scouring festivals and submissions. What’s more, the docs typically veer away from the celebrity worship and tawdry true-crime fare that often ends up on streaming services towards more issue-driven works: illuminating issues of race, gender, politics, and disability.

Indeed, this year’s slate takes us from the origin of a music style crucial to Black queer culture, to the struggles of veterans to overcome PTSD, to the limitations of the very gaze of the camera in stopping or abetting crime. The war in Ukraine gets two stops in Doc10’s journey, while we also explore the curious customs of Norwegian folk schools or the complexities of infidelity in mainland China. Most every film in the slate is a standout; here’s what to expect with each.

Move Ya Body: The Birth of House (4/30 @ 7pm)

Messy and sometimes steps off the beat a little much for my taste. Still, there’s a pulsing beat at the heart of Elegance Bratton’s crash course on the rise and fall of disco (and asserts that it didn’t die, it was KILLED) and the rise of house music in its wake, that touches on a host of issues relating to Blackness, queerness, and Chicago-ness that I appreciate.

In Waves and War (5/1 @ 5:45pm)

jon Shenk and Bonni Cohen’s profile of three Navy SEALs seeking treatment for their PTSD through psychedelics works less well when it feels like an advertisement for its alternative therapy, and when it leans into the talking-head nature of its documentary. But the animation is staggering, and echoes some of my own struggles with anxiety and depression and post-traumatic hypervigilance.

It’s worth engaging with this subject with compassion for those who’ve gone through unending trauma through military service, irrespective of our feelings on what ends these men have been socialized and indoctrinated to accomplish. Masculinity’s a prison; get on mushrooms.

Ghost Boy (5/1 @ 8:15pm)

Rodney Ascher (Room 237, A Glitch in the Matrix) brings his uniquely Brechtian sense of artifice to the story of Martin Pistorius, a man who fell into a coma at the age of 12, then woke up three years later to find himself paralyzed by locked-in syndrome. It’s a staggeringly empathetic portrait of a man resilient against the complications of his disability, full of delightful touches (like reenactments, unique staging to place the real Pistorius in the mind-palace recesses of his mind) to help us see the world through his unique perspective.

Antidote (5/2 @ 5:45pm)

“n. an agent to counteract the effects of a poison.”

Extremely Gibney-coded James Jones documentary (lots of talking heads, forensic breakdowns of real-time political machinations, slick graphics) on Christo Grozev, the man who broke the story on Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, presumably by Russian authorities and under the command of Vladimir Putin. Consciously positions itself as a companion to that Oscar-winning doc, too, tales of defying Putin’s authoritarian power and le Carre-esque spycraft. That stuff can be riveting in fits and spurts, especially as told through the ominous music and Grozev’s solemn narration, but it also drags quite a bit like a lot of these docs tend to do.

That said, it contains one of the ONLY ethical uses of AI deepfakery I can think of: to hide the identity of a whistleblower and his family in crucial footage.

Predators (5/2 @ 8:15pm)

“I don’t know how the worst day of my life could be something that people are getting snacks for.”

I had a lump in my throat for so much of this; director David Osit weaves a thorny path through the punitive and entertainment nature of NBC’s hit series “To Catch a Predator” and its attendant copycats (the latter of whom are performed by dipshits with anger issues, looking for revenge and notoriety; Skeet Hansen can kick rocks). This one methodically sits us down and shows us the human cost of these kinds of sensationalized shows, the entrapment of it all, how our zeal to protect children can easily tip over into a nifty permission structure to enact our own vigilante fantasies. (The closeup of a Batman bracelet on one YouTube “pedo hunter”‘s wrist tells the whole story in a single shot.)

FOLKTALES (5/3 @ 1pm)

Heidi Ewing’s profile of several kids attending a Norwegian folk school for a gap year is so soothing, healing, and ethnographic. A beautifully sensitive tale of kids trying to find their place in the world, and maybe finding a smidge of it through the pull of nature and mythology. And all in a much healthier, progressive way than the RETVRN folks.

The Siberian huskies with which these kids bond are “just a method” for that education, but GOD they’re cute. Hug your dog as soon as you can after you see this.

The Perfect Neighbor (5/3 @ 3:30pm)

Geeta Gandbhir methodically charts the murder of Ajike Owens, a thirtysomething mother in a working-class Florida suburb, through the slow buildup of tensions between a white woman who constantly calls the police on the neighborhood kids, said exasperated police, and the rest of their neighborhood. It’s heart-pounding, infuriating stuff; the claims of cold objectivism can often teeter into exploitation, especially with the scare music and the COPS-like aesthetics of the bodycam presentation. But it remains a haunting, effective case study of the symptoms of America’s most tumorous diseases: white supremacy, poverty, stand-your-ground laws, police as agents of a deeply flawed justice system.

Deaf President Now! (5/3 @ 6pm)

I love the way Nyle DiMarco and David Guggenheim’s documentary (about the week-long student movement in which Deaf students at a Deaf college protest to instate a Deaf president after its hearing board appoints a hearing candidate) plays with sound. All the little ironies that play out as a Deaf populace screams out to be heard, only for their hearing adversaries to prove incapable of listening. Powerful student advocacy, realistic about the internecine fighting that happens in radical protest action, but ultimately uplifting and hopeful. I’d have a beer with so many of these subjects; they’re so freaking cool.

2000 Meters to Andriivka (5/4 @ 1:30pm)

Mstyslav Chernov spent months in the trenches with Ukrainian forces fighting for inch after inch of a 2000-meter corridor of decimated forest to build this immersive, invigorating doc that puts you in the thick of combat in ways most docs don’t. It’s a literal view from the trenches, with some of the most visceral, harrowing bodycam footage of warfare you’ll ever see. (Alex Garland wishes he could approach this level of verisimilitude in his reenactment in Warfare, warm as I am on that movie.)

Mistress Dispeller (5/4 @ 4pm)

Elizabeth Lo adopts some interesting documentary techniques (for instance, setting up cameras and leaving the room to ensure that her subjects had as much space to speak freely) to chart this case study of a “mistress dispeller,” Wang Zhenxi, who is hired to help a woman manipulate her husband and his mistress into abandoning their affair. Rather than play out in the usual retributive ways we see in Western contexts, Lo’s film lets us see all sides of the story — the slow, patient pain of the wife, the hopeless yearning of the husband and mistress, and the thorny ways Wang’s calculations both work to save the marriage and honor the wants and needs of everyone involved. A brilliantly slow-moving, methodical portrait of the thorniness of modern relationships, and how they clash with Chinese cultural expectations.

Prime Minister (5/4 @ 7pm)

In their portrait of the too-short tenure of the globally admired one-term New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz offer a by-the-numbers profile in courage. It’s brisk and inspiring, but also can’t help but feel like a feel-good trifle about the personal struggles of a fundamentally good woman struggling against the patriarchal expectations of politics. Still, it touches neatly on the battle to be a fundamentally good person in a political system that only incentivizes bad behavior, and the personal toll it takes on those few politicians who possess genuine, compassionate hearts. It entertains and illustrates, but hardly illuminates.