The 28th edition of the Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival takes place in Johannesburg and Cape Town on June 4-16. Here are five films from this year’s wide selection to pique a variety of interests.Elon Musk Unveiled: The Tesla ExperimentElon Musk’s insidious and ruthless attempts to silence victims of Tesla autodriving accidents to prevent reputational damage form the subject of director Andreas Pichler’s investigative documentary. Featuring interviews with whistleblowers, philosophers, AI researchers and journalists, it’s both a damning indictment of Musk’s tyrannical corporate policies and his increasingly psychotic dedication to the pursuance of his white supremacist, transhumanist ideologies and his terrifying rise from online chirper to global policy influencer.Everybody to Kenmure StreetIn 2021, during the Covid lockdown, the citizens of Glasgow showed the power of people’s protest. When immigration officials arrived to arrest two local Muslim men who had been living in the Pollokshields area for a decade, they were met by thousands of outraged community members. Over the course of the day, the organically organised protest — as the documentary shows — became a peaceful, hopeful demonstration of the power of humanity and community to stand up to unjust authority.Eyes of GhanaNow in his 90s and losing his sight from glaucoma, filmmaker Chris Hesse was once at the forefront of Ghana’s Pan-Africanist, postindependence rebirth under Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s. Inspired by his experiences as a student in the US, where he had seen the power of film, Africa’s first black prime minister spearheaded a postcolonial cinema industry in Ghana, with Hesse filming Nkrumah as he travelled through Ghana, the continent and the world. After Nkrumah’s descent into dictatorship and his eventual ousting by a military coup in 1966, what archive remained of his cinematic project was destroyed ― except for about 1,000 cans of film Hesse had helped to whisk to safety in London. The film tells Hesse’s and Ghanaian cinema’s forgotten story.The Hour After MidnightWhen he was found hanged in his cell in John Vorster Square in Johannesburg in the hour after midnight on February 5 1982, Neil Hudson Aggett became the 51st person, and the first white person, to die while under detention by apartheid security forces. His death at just 28 was globally condemned. An inquest at the time found that “no-one was to blame” for Aggett’s death and that he had committed suicide. That verdict remained official until, in 2022, after decades of effort from the Aggett family and their lawyers and an inquest in 2020. Judge Motsami Makume ruled that Aggett’s death had been the direct result of the murderous and torturous actions of former members of the security police. Pat van Heerden and Edwin Wes’ documentary pays tribute to their former friend, the effect of his death on his family, friends and comrades, and the struggle against apartheid.KnifeSuperstar documentary heavy-hitter Alex Gibney uses Salman Rushdie’s 2024 memoir Knife as the basis for his examination of the 2022 stabbing attack that led to the loss of his right eye. Thanks to Rushdie and his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffith’s, grim determination to document everything that happened in the immediate aftermath of the attack, we are confronted with the brutal reality of the price Rushdie has paid for being the unwitting centre of a hate-fuelled battle between the secular and theocratic worlds.More information on the film festival is available here.