From across Underwire’s mixed, interesting programmes this year, a selection of some of the best short documentaries included in this year’s festival, some of which are viewable online.

Ruth Grimberg’s Some Will Forget tells the story of one of the UK’s last three active mines, Hatfield Colliery in South Yorkshire, using the plight of one family to examine how the Miner’s Strike and subsequent closures have affected the mining community, locally and nationwide. Simple in execution, using a number of static landscape shots, interviews and observed conversations and a small amount of archive to quietly excise the trauma at the core, Grimberg’s portrait is uncomplicated and old fashioned, but also affecting and humane. Grinberg’s previous short, Across Still Water, is online and well worthing viewing.

Similar, but slightly more refreshing, Chloe White and Will Davies’ atmospheric, elegantly composed The Long Haul follows a woman who works on a lobster boat as she heads out to sea. Detailing the routine gestures of her trade with precision and focus, White and Davies create a vivid visual portrait of her lifestyle whilst the protagonist muses on what she does, the dangers of it, how her gender factors, as well as the appeal and why she continues to do what she does. Simple, unhurried, and compelling, The Long Haul shows a pair of filmmakers who are confident in what they’re doing. White and Davies have made work with The Guardian, BFI and Nowness recently. Whatever they do next will be worth paying attention to.

,Jessica Bishopp’s quiet, contemplative short documentary Platform 1 has a wonderful serenity to it, capturing the sleepy goings on of a suburban North London train platform at daybreak. Recorded from the perspective of the station’s reststop cafe, the film mixes observational footage and talking heads to tell the micro-stories of suburbia, spotlighting the small details and interactions that are present in the commute, but easy to miss. Avoiding grandeur, Bishopp, who has since created work for Random Acts, demonstrates a sensitivity and acuity in documenting the ordinary, or as she puts it, “unearth[ing] the treasures of the everyday.”

A tonal opposite, Taichi Kimura’s hybrid Lost Youth chronicles Tokyo’s underbelly, offering a number of visions of the city that traditional media would choose to ignore. Narrated with personal monologues, Kimura humanises what might be seen as decadence or depravity, and offers voices to marginal characters. Supported by Boiler Room, the film risks lapsing into aesthetic familiarity, but Rina Yang’s bold, vibrant and constantly mobile cinematography disrupts this at each turn through to a confrontational, dynamic conclusion. This film, along with his video for Chase & Status, is likely to attract a lot of attention for Kimura, who works on projects between London and Tokyo.

Also, somewhat different in approach. In her idiosyncratic Perfection is Forever Mara Trifu takes a long, and often slightly off-kilter look at varying beauty standards and interpretations of image and self. In her Hollywood set doc, her two alternate heroes change the way they look and subsequently the way are perceived, one becoming a superhero and the other a stage star. Made of a series of drawn out, unusually composed long takes, Trifu’s doc encourages the viewer to look differently at the world around them by posing new viewpoints on existing images.