Not all documentary filmmakers are political creatures. As an art form, however, the documentary lends itself to a certain kind of activism: investigation, public education, unearthing hidden stories, upending received wisdom, and bringing attention to marginalised people and places.As the Encounters documentary festival entered its second week in Johannesburg and Cape Town, I watched a range of films that might each be described as “political”, but that vary widely in their methods and moods — and that have different, albeit complementary, ends in sight.Declaring its ideological credentials in its title, Marxism and Period Pains by Mmabatho Montsho makes an urgent case for the recognition of the many ways in which women’s health and women’s labour are simultaneously ignored, taken for granted and exploited under capitalism. Interviewing women who are (among other pursuits) academics, unionists, school learners, athletes, artists and entrepreneurs, Montsho weaves a tale that is both poetic and polemical.Making effective use of stop-frame animation and dwelling cinematically on the Edenic image of Eve’s apple — sometimes ironically and sometimes lyrically — the film rejects the originary patriarchal archetype of menstruation as a woman’s “curse” and challenges the everyday dismissal of dysmenorrhoea. It turns instead to solutions to the clash between “the production of eggs” through “the labour of ovaries” and the “productive labour” women must undertake to secure income: destigmatise women’s reproductive health, introduce menstrual leave, and protect workers’ rights.In Amílcar, the combination of Marxism and poetry takes a different turn. Miguel Eek’s tribute to freedom fighter, farmer and intellectual Amílcar Cabral proceeds in leisurely fashion, splicing archive material with imagistic footage as Cabral’s own words (taken from private letters and soapbox speeches) bring coherence to the picture.Born to Cape Verdean parents on the Guinea-Bissau mainland, Cabral’s great mission was to unite Lusophone West Africans and to liberate them from Portuguese rule. He was assassinated less than a year before Guinea-Bassau’s unilateral declaration of independence. While Cabral has become an icon of pan-Africanism and is seen as a martyr of anticolonial struggle — like Neil Aggett, subject of The Hour After Midnight, another film on the Encounters programme — Amílcar opts for an elegiac rather than a strident tone in treating his life and death.Portuguese conquest is in the prehistory of another anticapitalist, anti-imperialist documentary, Olinda’s Golden Arches (directed by Douglas Henrique). This quirky Brazilian short film does not go that far back, but it does start with a brisk tour through the Cold War and reminds us of one of the symbols of its supposed end: the opening of a McDonald’s in Moscow in 1990, when more than 30,000 Muscovites queued up for tasteless hamburgers.This is necessary context, Henrique argues in his jocular voiceover, for understanding how Brazilian politics in the early 2000s was encapsulated by a mayoral campaign in the coastal city of Olinda. Here, communist candidate Luciana Santos was up against crony capitalist incumbent Jacilda Urquiza. It just so happens that there was also a gastronomic, cultural and economic battle under way, as a McDonald’s franchise was forced on heritage-proud Olinda.In short, as Henrique tells us, “Great minds think alike — and Jacilda’s was aligned with Ronald McDonald.” Santos won the election. Coincidentally, not long afterwards Olinda became “the first city in the world to bankrupt a McDonald’s”. But, like Hydra’s head, two new branches have since grown there.If Henrique makes his point through whimsy and rapid-fire humour, Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman adopt the opposite approach to their subject in Nuisance Bear. This slow, beautiful film immerses the viewer in the snowy scenes of northern Manitoba, Canada, where humans and animals find themselves at odds.Tourists flock to the town of Churchill to go on polar bear safaris. More than 300km up the Hudson Bay coast, Inuit families in the community of Arviat experience polar bears as a daily threat, rather than as the sacred counterparts their forebears hunted and respected. Climate change is pushing the bears south in greater numbers and increasing the likelihood of Avinnaarjuk: “nuisance bears”, adolescents who have been separated from their mothers too early.There is no comforting end to this story. The film’s Inuit narrator, Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, describes polar bears as visitors who come to us from the past. But their future looks bleak.