Throughout his increasingly compelling and significant career, Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda has focused on the mechanics of modern family life. In the process, he has been hailed as the heir to such classical masters as Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse. But, while I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013). Our Little Sister (2015) and After the Storm (2016) examine how unconventional family units overcome quirky twists of fate, Shoplifters comes closer to the masterly Nobody Knows (2004) in showing how disparate individuals forge ties that bind them together to survive in the face of economic hardship and societal neglect. Having won the Palme d'or at Cannes, this exquisitely scripted and impeccably played saga confirms Kore-eda as the key chronicler of the troubled times that have witnessed a radical reassessment of what constitutes a family. 

Returning home from a shoplifting expedition to the local supermarket, Osamu Shibata (Lily Franky) and tweenager Shota (Kairi Jyo) see five year-old Yuri (Miyu Sasaki) alone and shivering in a dark ground-floor apartment. As it's freezing cold, Osamu decides to take her back to the home he shares with partner Nobuyo (Sakura Ando), her half-sister Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) and grandmother Hatsue (Kirin Kiki). While everyone tucks into a meal of croquettes and noodles, Hatsue notices that Yuri's body is covered with scars and bruises and Osamu and Nobuyo decide to give Yuri a bed for the night after they hear her mother involved in a blazing row when they try to take her home. 

Osamu works on a building site, while Nobuyo puts in long hours at an industrial laundry. But they don't insist on Shota going to school and, when Hatsue receives a visit from a snooper who thinks she lives alone, he slips out of the cluttered house to wander around the rundown Tokyo neighbourhood with Yuri, who refuses to tell him how she got the burn marks on her arms. Aki has misgivings about caring for Yuri, but Nobuyo notes that nobody has come looking for her and Hatsue concurs that she would be better off with them until her mother decides to reclaim her. 

Having injured his leg at work, Osamu is helped home by a colleague who is surprised to discover that he has a family. Shota takes Yuri out shoplifting and promises to teach her the tricks one day. He also suggests that she forgets about the dead grandmother who was so kind to her because she can no longer help her. Meanwhile, Aki takes Hatsue to collect the pension she keeps claiming on behalf of her late husband and is amused when the old lady discovers that she uses her sister's name, Sayaka, to perform at a sleazy peepshow, where she has a regular client known as Mr 4 (Sosuke Ikematsu).

In order to cut back on wages, the laundry puts Nobuyo into a workshare scheme and Osamu uses the phrase to explain to Shota that Yuri is now part of the team and that he should regard her as his new sister. She pulls the plug on the door at a tackle shop so that Shota can steal some fishing rods, but he likes being the baby of the family and resents the fact that Osamu keeps trying to get Yuri to call him `papa'. Despite being devoted to Osamu, Shota refuses to use the term, either. But he agrees to consider Yuri as his new sibling and asks Osamu if they can go fishing together before selling the rods. 

A short time later, Shota sees Yuri on the TV news and realises that her name is actually Juri. Her mother is being questioned by the police about her disappearance and Nobuyo decides to cut her hair short to make the child less recognisable and rename her Lin. She also takes her on a shoplifting trip to find new clothes and Yuri is particularly taken with a new yellow swimsuit. While the others are out, Aki asks Osamu if he ever sleeps with Nobuyo and he claims they no longer need a physical relationship because they are connected by the heart. Hatsue makes a similar remark to Nobuyo, as they ponder whether Lin will have a stronger bond with her new family because she has chosen it rather than being born into it. 

Yuri likes her swimsuit so much that she wears it in the bath, where she notices that Nobuyo also has a burn scar on her arm. She is happy they are together and calls Shota her brother when they go on a cicada hunt. But Nobuyo pays the price for taking Lin, as a workmate threatens to tell the police that she has stolen the girl unless she quits the laundry to allow her to retain her full-time job. With Osamu ineligible for injury compensation, the family needs money and Hatsue pays a visit to Yuzuru (Naoto Ogata), the son sired by her husband with his second wife. They are Aki's parents and we see her teenage sister on her way to school, as her mother, Yoko (Yoko Moriguchi), fibs that Aki is working in Australia (as they have no idea where she is). As she leaves, they give Hatsue a small gratuity and she complains to herself about their stinginess. 

While mooching around a corner shop, Lin steals a rubber ball and the aged shopkeeper (Akira Emoto) gives Shota some popsicles in warning him not to lead his sister off the straight and narrow. They arrive home in a downpour and nearly catch Osamu and Nobuyo in a rare moment of intimacy. She has purchased some new underwear with her severance pay and she seduces him over a lunch of cold noodles. Aki also snatches some physical contact when Mr 4 agrees to meet her in the peepshow chatroom and they cling to each other when she discovers that he is mute and hits himself as a form of self-punishment. She arrives home to tell Nobuyo and finds Osamu doing magic tricks to amuse the kids. They hear fireworks going off near by and a top shot looks down on their faces, as they peer upwards from beneath the sloping roof.

The idyll continues with a day at the seaside. Osamu notices Shota staring at Aki's bikini and reassures him that his curiosity about women is entirely natural for someone his age. As they watch Aki holding Lin over the incoming tide, Hatsue tells Nobuyo that she has a pretty face. She covers the age spots on her legs with sand and repeatedly whispers `thank you' because she has been given a second chance of security and contentment with her adopted family. 

During the night, Lin loses one of her milk teeth and Shota is tossing it on to the roof under Osamu's instruction when Aki realises that Hatsue has died in her sleep. As they don't want to draw attention to themselves, they decide to bury her in the back garden and Osamu tells Shota that he has to forget she existed and remember that there has only ever been five people living in the house. After he has finished digging, Nobuyo helps Osamu shower and they mention the fact that this isn't the first corpse they have buried. 

The next day, Nobuyo clears out Hatsue's bank account and Osamu finds some money she had hidden away in her belongings. Shota looks on, as though trying to work out his feelings for the couple who have raised him. While out with Nobuyo, he had asked why she had never been concerned about him not calling her `mother' and she jokes that she is different from Osamu, who likes feeling paternal. But the boy remains perplexed and he questions why Osamu is breaking into a parked car to lift a handbag when he had always told him that it's only okay to steal from shops because the goods on the shelves don't belong to anyone. He also inquires whether Osamu had really rescued him from a car or had snatched him during a robbery and he is only half convinced by the answer. 

Shota's doubts increase when he discovers that the old shopkeeper has died. But he has not forgotten the value of loyalty he has learned from Osamu and Nobuyo, as he sacrifices himself to prevent Lin from being caught stealing sweets in the supermarket and breaks his leg in jumping off a walkway in order to escape from the pursuing shelf-stackers. Osamu comes to the police station when he learns that the boy has been injured, but Nobuyo drags him away before he can say anything they might regret. However, as they pack up to do a midnight flit, they are apprehended and taken for questioning. 

While being quizzed by Takumi Maezono (Kengo Kora) and Kie Miyabe (Chizuru Ikewaki), Lin draws a picture of the trip to the beach and remembers not to include Hatsue. However, the cops convince Shota that his makeshift family was about to abandon him when they were stopped and they also inform Aki that Osamu and Nobuyo's real names are Shota Enoki and Yuko Tanabe and that they were charged with the murder and burial of her first husband, only for the judge to rule that they had acted in self-defence after being caught in a love affair. 

Under questioning, Osamu insists that Nobuyo had brought Juri home and that they had agreed it wasn't kidnapping because her home life was such a nightmare. However, Nobuyo takes the blame for burying Hatsue, even though she knows she will face jail. Meanwhile, Miyabe tells Aki that Hatsue had been taking money from her parents and suggests that she had only invited her to live with her because it made it easier to extort money from her guilt-ridden father. 

Maezono shows Shota the hostel where he will be staying and inquires whether he is looking forward to going to school. He asks after Juri, who is back with her mother, Nozomi Hojo (Moemi Katayama), who is sporting a fresh bruise on her face after another altercation with her husband, Yasu (Yuki Yamada). She snaps at the girl for poking at her cheek and quickly loses patience when Juri refuses to speak to her. Nobuyo is missing her and, when Miyabe asks whether she abducted her because she couldn't have children, she responds that giving birth doesn't automatically make a woman fit to be a mother. 

Aki returns to the house to find it empty, while Shota goes fishing with Osamu, who has been released without charge. They visit Nobuyo in prison and she tells the boy that they found him in a car outside a patchinko parlour and tells him the name of his birth family, so he can meet them if he so desires. It snows when Shota comes to spend a night with Osamu and they build a snowman under the streetlights. As they share a bed, Osamu admits that they were going to flee without him and, the next morning at the bus stop, Shota reveals that he allowed himself to get caught shoplifting. Hurt by the remark, Osamu runs after the bus to tell the boy that they planned coming back for him and Shota whispers the word `dad', as he turns to see him chasing after the vehicle. 

As the film ends, Juri is left to play alone on the balcony of the Hojo apartment. She climbs on a toy box to peer over the ledge and the film cuts to black, as we are left to wonder how these desperately sad characters are going to cope without each other. We are not told how long Nobuyo will be inside or whether Osamu stands a chance of finding another job. Similarly, we don't get to learn whether Aki returns home or tries to find Mr 4. But the sheer number of imponderables only increases the fascination that this exceptional piece of film-making exerts. 

All six members of the Shibata family are superb and it's such a shame that Kirin Kiki passed away in early September. As always, Kore-eda coaxes wondrously natural performances out of his juvenile actors, with Miyu Sasaki being adorably trusting as she comes to realise she's better off with strangers than her parents and Kairi Jyo struggling with his first feelings of curiosity and rebellion. Mayu Matsuoka also feels tempted to spread her wings, but remains out of loyalty to her grandfather's ex-wife, who she believes is protecting rather than exploiting her. But the rapport between Lily Franky and Sakura Ando is particularly poignant, as they cling together in a bid to forget their past and make the best of their calamitously ill-conceived situation. 

There's a hint of Setsuko Hara in the way Ando pauses in the doorway before returning to her cell and the spirit of Ozu clearly pervades proceedings. But the fact that the female characters are all prepared to make sacrifices to help loved ones brings to mind the masterly gendai-geki melodramas of Kenji Mizoguchi, in which mothers and sisters became geishas to help feed their families. This link is reinforced by the intimacy achieved by Keiko Mitsumatsu's cosily cluttered interiors and the gentle probing of Ryuto Kondo's camera that contrasts with the more challenging interjections of the score composed by Haroumi Hosono of the famous Yellow Magic Orchestra. 

But the picture's brilliance lies in Kore-eda's writing, direction and editing, which enables him to let vital information slip out through small gestures and expressions and half-guarded words that cause the viewer to double-take and question their precise meaning. Yet, even when the full truth is known, Osamu and Nobuyo remain eminently empathetic and one is left to recall Jean Renoir's famous maxim about everyone having their reasons. Kore-eda is known to admire Ken Loach, but this unpatronising depiction of life in the margins knocks spots off anything he has done since the early 1990s. This is what political humanist cinema should look like.

Expanded from a short of the same title, Toia Bonino's Orione is showing this week at The ICA in London. At its core is a commemoration of a young gang member who was gunned down by the police. But in capturing the sights and sounds with which Alejandro Robles would have been familiar, Bonino seeks to piece together a mosaic of everyday life in the Barrio Don Orione in her native Buenos Aires. 

Before showing us the soulless concrete blocks that make up the bulk of the housing in this part of the Claypole district, Bonino takes us into the kitchen of Alejandro Robles's mother, Ana Loza, whose hands alone are seen as she prepares her ingredients for a cake. She describes how Ale had been struggling at night school and that she had started escorting him to night classes to ensure he got his grades. On the one occasion she had to stay home with back ache, however, her son was busted by the cops and she had to go down to the station and collect him. 

Ale seems an ordinary kid in the home movie footage showing him enjoying a beach holiday with his family in January 1996. He is a handsome lad and he is clearly the apple of his mother's eye and she was crushed to discover that he was a member of an unnamed street gang involved in stealing cars so that they can be gutted for parts at a chop shop. She reveals that one of the people Ale worked for was an informer, who remained at liberty in return for betraying his friends. A snaggle-toothed man with a beard and a baseball cap concurs that it's impossible to tell who is an undercover cop because they are so good at blending in and because they understand street life and know exactly how to behave. 

Following footage of the fire brigade extinguishing a burning car, we hear a small boy describing to the police how his father was abducted from his van at gunpoint by the occupants of a red car. No older than 10, the child seems calm and cogent, as he gives his account of what must have been a traumatic ordeal. A man picked from a police line-up seems equally sanguine, as he is led away in handcuffs and deposited in a cell. 

As Ana Loza puts cream between the layers of her cake and chocolate frosting on the top, she recalls how Ale used to go out car-jacking with his pals. On one occasion, a lawyer and his wife fought back and one of the gang and the lawyer were wounded in the crossfire. Another raid had them force a judge back to his house to collect a ransom for the son who was being held in his car. When they realised that their victim was a bigwig in the judiciary, they ordered him to tell a colleague who kept bad-mouthing the gangs in Don Orione on television to shut his yap. However, their careless remarks gave the cops an idea where to search for them. 

Over images of a raid on a rundown property, we hear Ana Loza reliving the time the police searched her home. However, Ale was living with his pregnant girlfriend. Moni, and she was able to play dumb. As she kneads and rolls some green icing for the cake, she admits to feeling ashamed that her home had been turned upside down and that complete strangers had rummaged through her underwear draw. But she also felt impotent, as Ale was 21 and she could no longer control him by slapping him across the face, as she had done when he gave her cheek as a boy. 

Scenes from a fairground and a morgue follow before Ale's last letter to his mother is typed up on screen. In it, he apologises for not being the son she wanted and implores her not to blame herself for the way he turned out. He also asks her to look after Moni and their unborn son because they will need her strength if anything ever happens to him. She had always hoped that Ale's brother Leo would help her with Agustín, but he has always accused her of pampering the lad and complains that he needs toughening up if he is going to survive in their dog-eat-dog neighbourhood.

We are shown Agustín as a baby in 2005 and Moni dotes him, as his grandmother films him with her camera. Cross-cut with these baby pictures are shots of Agustín playing table football with his mates and footage of a 2001 party, as a shirtless, pony-tailed Ale celebrates with his parents and pals. Working on some white piped icing for the top of the cake, his mother recalls how a snitch nicknamed El Gordo tipped off the cops during a car chase and Ale was shot through the head by a marksman, as they always aim for the driver to bring the vehicle to a halt. 

A news report outlines how two kidnappers were killed and three cops were wounded in a shootout, as Ana Loza describes how he had been twitchy in the days before his demise. She places goal nets at either end of the cake and arranges players in the colours of Boca Juniors and River Plate on the icing pitch, as she reflects on the agony of hearing sirens outside the house and being refused permission to see her son's body after she had been told of his death. We see footage of the funeral before returning to the tenements, where kids are playing in a paddling pool, a father is standing over a barbecue and a man is smoking at an upstairs window. As it must, life goes on. 

Devastating in its directness and discretion, this is a deceptively simple, deeply moving and acutely perceptive study of one family's experience that is illustrated with specially recorded and found footage that testifies to the fact that they do not grieve in isolation. Serving as her own cinematographer and editing in conjunction with Alejo Moguillansky, Bonino not only takes us into Ana Loza's world, but also into her heart, as she ponders the waste of a life she had striven so hard to nurture. Despite Ale's pleas, she clearly blames herself for his straying off the straight and narrow and has no intention of failing the son he entrusted to her. 

It's never always clear whether the news clips relate directly to Ale's case. But Bonino shrewdly uses the combination of generalisation and specifics to highlight the fact that similar stories could be told on every housing estate on society's margins across the globe. It's a sobering thought and one our own politicians need to start addressing and soon.

If ever two films need to be shown in a double bill, it's Erika Cohn's The Judge and Jean Libon and Yves Hinant's So Help Me God. The former arrives in cinemas this week, while the latter will be shown under the Dochouse banner in a fortnight. It's unlikely that the Palestinian Kholoud Al-Faqih and the Belgian Anne Gruwez will ever meet. But those fortunate enough to see these documentary profiles will readily appreciate that they would have much in common and a great deal to talk about.

Opening captions define Shari'a as a path relating to religious law and a Muslim's moral code. It is derived from the Qur'an and the Sunna, which are the sayings, practices and teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. Until 2009, however, women were forbidden from handing from handing down judgements in the Shari'a courts of the Palestinian Territories. But that all changed with Kholoud Al-Faqih and Asmahan Al-Wahidi were appointed to the bench by chief justice Sheikh Tayseer Al-Tamimi. Al-Wahidi does not appear in the film, but Al-Faqih does and she makes quite an impact. 

Women had been judges in Palestinian courts since the 1970s, but they had been prevented from sitting on cases relating to women and the family because they came under the jurisdiction of the Shari'a courts. As a lawyer from Beit Rima on the West Bank, Al-Faqih had specialised in defending abused women and felt it was time to cast a stone into the stagnant waters. 

We see Al-Faqih adjudicating in a case in Birzeit, in which a woman is claiming financial support from her ex-husband to raise their children. She lays down the law firmly, but fairly to three men representing the absent spouse and they accept her ruling with good grace. During a meeting of women activists in Ramallah, she proves equally forthright, as she declares that it's time women were treated as equals and that Islamic texts depicting women as a source of sin should be revised.

Such is her cogency and conviction that Sheikh Al-Tamimi was persuaded by her argument when she pointed out that there is nothing in the Hanafi school of Islam that is practiced in the Palestinian Territories to prevent women from serving as Shari'a judges. No sooner had he made his announcement, however, than conservative scholar Husam Al-Deen Afanah denounced his ruling as pernicious and stated that historical precedence should not be overriden on the whim of a reformist chief justice. 

In canvassing ordinary Palestinians on the streets, Cohn discovers that opinion is divided and not necessarily along gender lines. One woman claims that her sex tends to let their hearts rule their heads, while men are better at keeping their emotions in check. However, two women with uncovered hair sharing a hookah at a roadside café hold diverging views, as do some of the men interviewed. Afanah insists that women are capable of doing certain jobs, but seems to imply that they are disqualified from others because they bleed once a month. He also complains that allowing women on to the Shari'a bench forces men to associate with them and he sympathises with those who feel this is an imposition.

Lawyer husband Yaqoub Shawwa backed Al-Tamimi's decision, however, and is proud that the mother of his four children opened a door that he hopes can never be closed again. She dispenses swift justice in a case involving a wife who has been left with no financial support by a husband who has disappeared to work in the United States and his relatives accept her monthly sum of 1000 shekels. Lawyer Imad Ahmad avers that many of his male colleagues had misgivings about Al-Faqih being up to the job. But she has proved herself to be strong and assertive and female lawyer Reema Shamasneh is delighted that she shattered the glass ceiling. However, she agrees with legislator Hanan Ashrawi that it's a shame there are still only two women judges in the Shari'a system. 

Ashrawi explains that Palestine has always been an oasis of enlightenment and tolerance within the region, as its laws have been shaped by competing historical forces. Thus, Jordanian laws operate in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, while the West of the city follows Ottoman and Israeli tenets. The Turkish influence is also evident, along with Egyptian traditions, in Gaza. This makes the law cosmopolitan and complicated and helped the patriarchy exclude women on the pretext they were intellectually inferior and unable to appreciate the nuances. 

Her goat farming father insisted Al-Faqih had a fine education, however, and he is fiercely proud of all 12 of his children. He sees no reason why his daughter couldn't be the Palestinian Hillary Clinton, but she has enough to do raising her own brood to add politics to the mix. Besides, as we see when Cohn eavesdrops on the male lawyers in their Birzeit common room, she still has a good deal of prejudice to overcome, with one complacent middle-aged man proclaiming that wives are never satisfied and that no Muslim husband would ever make his spouse unhappy. 

As Shamasneh reveals, however, 80% of cases that come before the Shari'a courts are brought by women who have suffered violence at the hands of her partner or his family. Yet, as noted by Tahreer Hammad (the first female marriage officiant in Palestine), all unions begin happily and she describes how woman are permitted to dictate the terms of their own wedding contracts. Indeed, even though Shari'a law allows a man to have four wives, a woman can insist that he requests her permission to marry again without a divorce. 

We see Hammad preside over a ceremony with wit and warmth. She also prevents another man from taking a second wife without informing his existing spouse of his decision. But Afanah had issued a fatwah against his former student, as he felt it was iniquitous for women to dictate marital terms to bridegrooms. Revealing she is still single, Hammad wonders whether she would allow her husband to remarry or whether it would be simpler to shoot or poison him. While accepting that polygamy serves a purpose in Shari'a Law, Al-Faqih concedes that she has refused to let Shawwa take a second wife, although Al-Tamimi has three and cites the Qur'an in stating that such arrangements are much more moral than non-Muslim men having one wife and many mistresses. 

Al-Faqih references the case of a man who wanted to divorce a second wife who had born four children to her first husband because her body was not as desirable as that of his childless first wife. She asserts that modern society can no longer by bound by 10th-century rules and wishes that the Arab culture of shame can be overcome, as so many women are too embarrassed to speak about domestic problems in public. Abuse prosecutor Dareen Salhiyeh concurs that violence should cease to be considered as a private matter between a husband and his wife and wishes to overturn the Shari'a contention that abusive behaviour during sex does not constitute rape. Shamasneh is also dismayed by the fact that accused killers often hide behind the Honour Code to escape with a lighter sentence because gossip starts and sympathy drifts towards the husband the moment doubt is cast over a wife's behaviour.

A year after he appointed Al-Faqih and Al-Wahidi, Al-Tamimi was forced to resign and he was replaced by the conservative Yousef Al-Dais, who removed all cases from the small and insisted they were heard in the already over-worked court in Ramallah. This demoted the women judges to an administrative role and Al-Dais also overturned Al-Faqih's ruling in the case of a potentially dangerous bipolar husband. Court employees Sumayya Irhaimeh and Mustafa Shrateh describe how the husband stabbed his wife to death while waiting for their appointment with Al-Faqih and she was furious with Al-Dais when he went on television to state that he would punish those responsible for the crime when his pig-headedness had been directly responsible. 

Anti-corruption lawyer Bilal Barghouthi reveals that Al-Dais was a frontman for a group of conservative zealots and he launched an investigation into Al-Faqih's cases after she joined other judges in filing a complaint against his incompetence and conflicts of interest. Eventually, he was replaced by Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who not only restored her to the bench in 2016, but also confided that she could well become chief justice one day. However, she knows progress will be slow and closing captions inform us that it wasn't until 2011 that Somoud Al-Damiri became chief prosecutor and 2017 that Al-Faqih's protégée, Sireen Anabousi, passed the legal exam imposed by Al-Habbash and became a Shari'a judge. 

The proud beam on Al-Faqih's face while presenting Anabousi with her sash of office speaks volumes and ends this well-intentioned, but fitfully frustrating profile on a positive note. Clearly Cohn only had periodic access to her subject, as there are huge gaps in the timeline that are only patchily covered by talking-head recollection and low-key reconstruction. The murder of the petitioning wife is a case in point, although re-enacting this brutal crime would obviously have added an unwelcome element of sensationalism. But a good deal happens off camera, while Cohn rarely lingers long enough during the hearings to give the audience a full insight into either the evidence or Al-Faqih's role in proceedings. 

During her interviews, Al-Faqih comes across as a woman of immense intelligence and common sense and her logic will strike many as irrefutable in the face of the naysaying of scholars like Dr Afanah. But Cohn is so keen to extol Al-Faqih's many virtues that she occasionally adopts a simplistic approach to problems that are deeply rooted in the Arab and Muslim cultures and in the political realities of the wider region. Lessons might have been learned from watching a couple of Kim Longinotto documentaries, Divorce Iranian Style (1998) and the Cameroon-set Sisters in Law (2005), which she respectively co-directed with Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Florence Ayisi. But, despite its flaws, this remains a compelling study of a truly remarkable woman.

With political extremism on the rise in Eastern Europe, Catherine Lurie's Back to Berlin provides a timely reminder that Germany was not solely responsible for the slaughter of the Holocaust. Following 11 bikers, as they make their way across the continent to the 2015 Maccabiah Games in the 1936 Olympic Stadium, this unflinching documentary combines archive footage with personal testimony to warn against the dangers of allowing politicians to use prejudice to deflect attention away from the social and economic problems they are incapable of solving. 

The brainchild of Yosef Yekutieli, the first Maccabiah Games were held in Tel Aviv in 1932. Their purpose was to give Jewish athletes an arena in which to compete at a time when a wave of anti-Semitism meant that they were increasingly being excluded and persecuted, As a publicity stunt, 11 motorcyclists were sent across Europe in 1930 to recruit sportsmen and women from a range of disciplines and some 400 competitors from 18 countries lined up at the Maccabiah Stadium in March 1932. Despite the objections of the  British Mandatory government then ruling Palestine, a second edition was held in April 1935. But a third Maccabiah was postponed in the spring of 1938, as the authorities feared an exodus of illegal immigrants and both the Shoah and the foundation of the State of Israel had taken place by the times the Games were eventually staged in 1950.

As narrator Jason Isaacs reveals, a group of 11 bikers set out to carry the Maccabiah torch to Berlin for the 2015 Games in tribute to the trailblazers of 1932. Among them was architect Gal Marom, whose grandfather, Solomon, had made the original ride to summon the dispersed tribes. Also saddling up are 78 year-old Holocaust survivor Yoram Maron and his son, Dan, a press photographer who is keen to learn more about his father's experiences. 

Isaacs explains that the venue is of huge significance, as the Olympicstadion hosted the Games that Adolf Hitler had used to promote his Aryan ideals. He had even revived the torch procession to symbolise the transfer of legitimacy from Mount Olympus to the Third Reich. Moreover, he had tried to prevent any Jewish athletes from competing and many nations had sought to appease the Nazis by excluding them from their teams. The United States, for example, dropped Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller from the 4x100m relay quartet - although they replaced them with Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, who were both African-American and had won the gold and silver medals in the 100m final.

In recreating the 1930 odyssey, the Maccabiah XI quickly discover that flying the Israeli flag on Greek soil attracts adverse attention. However, art dealer Kobi Samuel is determined to visit Thessaloniki, which had been home to his grandmother, Angel Margo, before she was dispatched to Birkenau to form part of a road gang. She briefly recalls the exhausting nature of the work before we join Samuel in a cattle car in a siding at the old station, where the heat is so intense that fellow rider Gili Shem Tov (whose grandfather was Israeli politician Victor Shem Tov) has to leave. In all, 45,000 Jews entrained from these platforms between 4 March and 2 August 1943. Yet, while Margo was among the 2000 Thessalonians to survive the war, she was detained by the British when she attempted to relocate to Palestine and spent a prolonged period in a displacement camp in Cyprus that provided chilling reminders of her recent experiences in Auschwitz. 

Heading north, the group reaches the Bulgarian town of Samokov, where Victor Shem Tov had been born. She visits the ruins of the synagogue, which is the only reminder of the once-thriving Jewish community, and recalls how Kiril, the local Orthodox bishop, had intervened to prevent the Jews from being deported in March 1943. However, the country still sent 48,000 people to the death camps and, as the bikers cross into Romania, Isaacs reaffirms that the Germans were not alone in persecuting the Jews in this period.  

In the Central Synagogue in Bucharest, Marco Katz describes how his grandfather and uncle were dragged into the streets and tortured by Legionnaires of the Iron Guard. The convoy visits the cells at Jilava Fort No.13 before Katz takes them to the Jilava Forest, where his Uncle Isidore was stripped naked and shot in the head. He also reveals that 13 others were taken to an abattoir and suspended from hooks with the words `kosher meat' written on their bodies. 

Surgeon Yaron Munz also wants to see the places where his parents once lived. They survived the Holocaust, but refuse to discuss their experiences and he tells Katz how his grandfather was only spared execution by an earthquake that destroyed the Iron Guard barracks where he was being held. A caption notes that over 400,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were murdered on the orders of dictator Ion Antonescu between 1941-43. 

Such was the international awareness of Hitler's Jewish policies that the Évian Conference was convened in July 1938 at the suggestion of American president. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Delegates from 32 countries attended, but they failed to agree a strategy to deal with those seeking sanctuary and the bikers are given a stark reminder of how Europe still struggles to deal with the issue of migration when they witness clashes between the police and Syrian refugees on the Serbian border with Hungary. 

The Nuremberg Laws restricting Jewish rights were promulgated while the 1935 Maccabiah bikers were riding and Isaacs mentions how they were later expanded to include homosexuals, travellers and the disabled. Keen to make the younger generation aware of what their forebears had endured, the 2015 riders visit a Jewish summer camp in Hungary and receive an enthusiastic welcome. Among them is Hila Fenlon, a farmer whose Lithuanian grandmother had met the original bikers before moving to Palestine to escape the growing tensions in her homeland. None of her relations survived the massacre that followed and Fenlon empathises with those seeking a fresh start after fleeing poverty and warfare.

Arriving in Budapest, Alexander Rosenkranz and his daughter Talia make Shoes Memorial on the banks of the River Danube, where between 15-20,000 Jews and Romanis were killed by members of the Arrow Cross between 1944-45. Rosenkranz's mother had been rounded up and was sitting in a truck waiting to be shot when a German officer was so taken by her beauty that he reprieved her and sent her home. She would later be sent to a labour camp (from which she escaped) and a caption informs us that 437,402 Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau during a 33-day period in 1944.

Requiring a police escort to the main synagogue, the bikers plan their detour from the 1930 route to visit Auschwitz. They meet up with Yoram Maron and fellow survivor Joe Gottdenker at a nearby hotel and discuss how emotional it feels to be so close to such a symbol of evil. Maron remembers arriving in a cattle car and his mother throwing him out to safety after another man had been crushed under the wheels. They had evaded Gestapo machine-gun fire and made their way to Ukraine, where they had spent a month hiding in the forest before reaching the relative safety of the ghetto. He breaks down, as he recalls his mother (who had saved 24 lives) saying goodbye for the last time, as she went along a sewage pipe to search for food. 

When they tour the camp the next day, Maron wonders whether he has made a mistake in bottling up his emotions for 70 yeas, as he states that the crime he witnessed are still vivid in his mind. Samuel tries to call Margo, but she's asleep. However, a cutaway shows her reliving the moment her work detail marched through the woods without the Germans making any attempt to stop them and they were greeted by some Russians in an autobus. 

Moving on to Sandomierz, Gottdenker explains how his mother had entrusted him to a Polish couple who had raised him as their own until she could come back and claim him. He wonders whether he would have the courage to take the same risk and is deeply grateful to them for their sacrifice (although, even though we see a photograph, he doesn't mention their names). Footage shows people being forced into the Warsaw Ghetto before a caption reveals that 300,000 residents were dispatched to the Treblinka extermination camp in the summer of 1942. A small band of those who remained attempted an uprising in January 1943, only for the ghetto to be razed to the ground and its inhabitants butchered. 

While this was going on, British and American delegates met in Bermuda in April 1943 to discuss what to do about the Jews Question at the end of the war. They reached no conclusions and didn't even issue a public condemnation of what they knew to be happening in Occupied Europe. The bikers light the Maccabiah flame at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto before motoring on to Lodz, where they visit the ghetto buildings in which inmates had produced goods for the Nazi war effort. They are moved by a long tunnel whose walls bear lists with the names of those who had perished having been crossed out in red ink. 

Crossing into the Czech Republic, the bikers reach Terezin, where the Germans had built the ghetto-cum-camp known as Theresienstadt. Among the occupants were 500 Danish Jews and, in 1943, when the Red Cross had requested access to them, the Nazis turned their visit to this `model' institution into a propaganda triumph by filming the occasion and its centrepiece football match in front of a cheering crowd. Within weeks, however, the majority of those who had been captured by Kurt Gerron's camera were dead. Captions note that of the 140,000 Jews who were held in the camp, 33,430 were murdered within its fences, while another 87,000 were transported to the death camps.

After 23 days and 2783 miles, the convoy reaches Berlin and rides to the Brandenburg Gate along roads that had once staged Nazi rallies. Dan Maron acknowledges his father as a hero for having come through so much and they ride into the Olympiastadion the next day with enormous pride. They pass the torch to Anne Stoller (the cousin of Sam Stoller), who hands it to Marty Glickman's daughter, Nancy, who lights the cauldron wearing her father's 1936 Team USA vest. 

This is a striking moment at the end of an often harrowing journey. But, as London-based journalist Caroline Lurie makes an appearance during the credit sequence to explain why she made the film, one feels torn between admiration and frustration. The concept is strong and Lurie rightly uses the expedition to draw parallels between the treatment of the Jews in the Holocaust era with that of the modern migrants who are also detained in camps with barbed wire fences, as right-leaning nationalist governments refuse to let them cross their borders. However, Lurie has a tendency to rush things, with the result that the full horror of some of the stories is lost and the audience is denied an opportunity to contemplate what they have learned before being whisked off to another scene of tragedy. 

She also presumes a good deal of pre-knowledge and doesn't always label sites that need identifying, such as the Shoe Memorial in Pest. It might also have been worth including any instances of overt hostility to the bikers and mentioning the fact that the Elie Wiesel lines read by newscaster Larry King come from the much-vandalised Holocaust memorial in Athens, as such desecration flies in the face of their sentiments about honouring the dead and saving them from `dying again, in oblivion'. 

Nevertheless, this is an informative and doughtily accusatory film that leaves one needing to know more about the Évian and Bermuda conferences (it really is time someone produced a Holocaust chronicle along the lines of The World At War). The footage is cogently edited by Andrew Quigley and Julian Rodd, while cinematographer Eyal Ben Yaish capably conveys the air of desolation that hovers over so many of the places en route. However, Michael Stevens's emotive score often feels intrusive at times when ambient silence might have been more effective.

Somewhat surprisingly, Back to Berlin didn't feature in the 22nd UK Jewish Film Festival, which comes to an end this weekend. Sadly, given the generosity of previous years, access to the film programme has been somewhat restricted this year. Nevertheless, mention should be made of two more documentaries on the Holocaust. 

Accountability and the need to keep the memory of the six million alive are the subjects of Matthew Shoychet's The Accountant of Auschwitz. During the war, Oskar Gröning had tallied the confiscated possessions of those bound for the gas chambers before being transferred to a combat unit in the Ardennes. Having spent time in Britain as a forced labourer, Gröning had returned to Germany to work as a personnel manager for a glass company. However, he had been so dismayed by the claims of Holocaust deniers that he voluntarily testified to what he had witnessed in the BBC series, Auschwitz: The Nazis and `The Final Solution' (2005). 

When he was charged with being an accessory to murder in September 2014, not everyone agreed that Gröning was complicit in the crimes against humanity committed under commandant Rudolf Höss. But the trial proceeded and Gröning was found guilty and sentenced to four years in July 2016. He died in March this year at the age of 96 before he could be taken into custody and the debate was re-ignited about whether there was anything to gain from punishing old men for acts committed nearly eight decades ago. 

As Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz contends in this provocative, but admirably balanced overview, society owes it to those who perished to honour their memory by prosecuting their persecutors. Others declare that such cases reassure survivors that their suffering has not been forgotten by younger generations for whom the Second World War is rapidly becoming a distant historical event. Yet, there are those who think the time has come to stop scapegoating petty functionaries and, while Shoychet scrupulously avoids reaching any concrete conclusions, this is a timely reminder of the fact that genocide has not been consigned to the past. However, it also reveals that only 124 convictions were secured in the immediate aftermath of the war, despite 60,000 former members of the SS being charged with murder.

The theme of culpability recurs in Ruth Beckermann's The Waldheim Waltz, which centres on the revelations about the war record of Dr Kurt Waldheim that emerged when he ran for the presidency of Austria in 1986. While serving as Secretary General of the United Nations between 1972-81, Waldheim had promoted himself as the man the world could trust. He had admitted to having been drafted into the Wehrmacht following the 1936 Anschluss that had seen Austria become part of the Third Reich. But Waldheim had always insisted that he had been wounded in 1941 and had been invalided out of uniform so that he could concentrate on his studies. 

In 1985, however, journalist Humbertus Czernin challenged Waldheim's version of events in an article in Profil magazine. Moreover, the following March, the World Jewish Congress in New York presented documentary and photographic evidence placing a uniformed Waldheim in Thessaloniki at the time that 60,000 Jews were deported from Greece's second city in 1943. Incensed at being exposed, Waldheim fell back on the old maxim that Austria had been the first victim of Nazi aggression, while allies within the Austrian People's Party claimed that he had been set up by Zionist zealots who had not forgiven him for inviting Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, to the United Nations in New York.

Employing a tactic later used to equally unscrupulous effect by Donald Trump, Waldheim depicted himself as the most slandered candidate in democratic history and succeeded in persuading the electorate to vote him into office. But, as Beckermann suggests, this says as much about the mindset of his compatriots as it does about Waldheim's mendacity. As in The Dreamed Ones, her stylised account of the relationship between writers Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, Beckermann (who includes some of her own vox pops from the time) proves an incisive observer and her narration is unstinting in its contempt for both Waldheim and the sense of denial that he exploited. Despite the narrowness of her focus, the beam she casts gets into some unexpected corners, with the footage of Republican Congressman Tom Lantos giving Waldheim's son Gerhard the third degree being particularly compelling, in view of what is currently happening in the United States.