Documentary is often thought of as exceptional, as alternative or adjacent content – counterprogramming to stand apart from the fictional fare audiences more regularly escape to. Sheffield Doc/Fest is a growing festival for a growing industry. Way beyond the biopic, Doc/Fest showcases how this incredibly rich mode resists easy definition, transcending niche concerns to challenge our perception and experience of reality. Here are five which must be seen to be believed:

AUTHOR: THE JT LEROY STORY

Laura Albert – you’d be forgiven for not recognising her name – could never be a ‘hip young writer’, and so, when the publishing world didn’t want her, she gave them what they never knew they wanted: Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, her “gay ‘it’-lit boy” persona, the avatar Albert infamously invented but quickly lost control over. LeRoy is not reducible to a mere pen-name, pseudonym or moniker; LeRoy is an alter-ego and one that is detailed, lived-in, thought-through.

Author… is a thrilling documentary on the fickle nature and strange, incalculable semi-existence of fiction, one that answers few (if any) of the difficult questions it raises. Do we have a god-given right to play God? Can we draw on and implicate others in our ever-more-elaborate webs of fiction? Though Albert is guilty of a certain amount of careless appropriation in her character-building (she was not homeless or trans, nor did she contract Aids in her teens), we do see that she is not the mastermind behind ‘the greatest literary hoax in a generation’. As her LeRoy is ushered into the inner circle of the admiring art world – collaborating with Gus Van Sant, hooking up with Michael Pitt and Asia Argento – Jeff Feuerzeig’s film charts a very real struggle with disorder and dysphoria, counterposing the complexity of identity politics and the comparatively absurd scenario of (literary) celebrity.

BEHEMOTH

Zhao Liang’s disturbing, demonic Behemoth documents the working conditions of exploited Chinese migrant workers literally moving mountains in Mongolia. Mining coal, chiselling endlessly at finite resources living on-site and repeating a routine of wiping powdered soot from their faces – Liang depicts their labour through prism or kaleidoscope, as a symbology or even occult ritual to endlessly perform. They work just to destroy, to feed some insatiable beast as we prepare for apocalypse.

Liang’s considerable style has him maintain an interesting amount of distance from his subjects, his poetic voiceover – borrowing the skeleton from Dante’s Inferno – replacing any attempt at address, conversation or interview. Without dialogue, either, Behemoth is mostly one banal, controlled, far-off explosion after another. Eventually, it ventures into its startling, standout sequence: a conjuring of the world via underground railway, haphazard ropes, pulleys and cords. As an impressionistic, cerebral freak-out – with a doom and dread reminiscent of There Will Be Blood – Liang completes his total dehumanisation of the labourers, abstracting them into figures, lemmings painted black-on-red. After its strange detour into the hot rock of hell, Behemoth allows its subjects to pick the hard skin off their hands, shaping up into a more traditional polemic on the body as an instrument of labour, and labour as an instrument of evil.

FLOTEL EUROPA

In 1992, documentarian Vladimir Tomic fled war in Sarajevo and, in time, had his sexual awakening in a temporary refugee centre – a ship converted by the Danish Red Cross that, for a time, floated along Copenhagen’s canals.

Assembled from around 20 hours of archive and VHS footage (shot in lieu of letters home), the formidable Flotel Europa sees Tomic return to this time at this bleak beach house with two decades of distance. Partially reconstructing these unique sets of circumstances in retrospective voiceover, our subject rarely remembers correctly or synchronises specifically with the moving, fleeting image that surfaces from the white noise.

This viewing experience, akin to immersion inside a microwave or old-timey television, is the splendour of Flotel Europa. As a throwback to classic documentary newsreel, and as an innovative exploration of the limits of representation, the film is a provocative document of access autobiography. As well as tackling how we understand and experience time (in a merciful 71 minutes), Tomic’s film is a tender reminisce on the follies of youth, adolescent innocence and teenage talk. Its flickering, melancholy light disperses, but just as quickly dissolves and dissipates, memory throbbing and transmitting like TV fuzz.

NO HOME MOVIE

Chantal Akerman committed suicide on October 5, 2015, and her obituary writers took no time to level blame at the tepid reception of No Home Movie’s premiere in the Swiss city of Locarno a few weeks earlier. The film, an almost uncomfortably intimate mother-daughter drama, is a little like Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell. While both examine death and domesticity, Akerman’s pared-back documentary does not reach nearly as far back as childhood – only delving briefly into any broader context (Nathalie describing the Nazis coming to Belgium “like a knife through butter”), No Home Movie rarely moves past the patio.

Documenting their conversations, and what were to be the final weeks of Akerman’s suddenly ailing mother, we are made to understand their relationship through how the former frames the latter. Sometimes shot with a Blackberry, sometimes via Skype, the camera’s gaze is distant, and space narrow – the subject given just a brief, cracked-open corridor or pin-light threshold to cross, briefly come and go, drift in and out, enter and exit. Juxtaposing confined, enclosed scenes with stark emotional landscapes, contemplating how Chantal Akerman could rewatch, sift through and stitch together this footage after her mother’s death so soon after the fact, is astonishing.

THE SEASONS IN QUINCY: FOUR PORTRAITS OF JOHN BERGER

Embracing the essence and ethos of a film festival (that is, overstimulation and exhaustion), these four shorts – a quick succession of several styles and alternating aesthetics – together form a fitting tribute to art critic John Berger. Known for his four-part Ways of Seeing series, a rare TV-to-book adaptation and by now a key text in the study of visual arts, Berger surrenders himself as subject to some close friends and colleagues, their different lenses bringing different elements of the man into different degrees of close-up.

That some of these experimental films might be more successful than others is inessential. Instead, the invitation to compare what’s pulled from this mixed bag, a pick-and-mix of pop philosophy, proves The Seasons in Quincy’s best quality. The first, “Ways of Listening”, is an informal sit-down, Berger chatting candidly about his childhood while Tilda Swinton peels apples. Colin MacCabe’s contribution, “A Song for Politics”, is less of a sketch, restaging a roundtable and panel debate to argue in favour of public service broadcasting as a tool for social democracy. “Spring” and “Harvest” we can also conveniently pair, sharing more self-conscious visual languages to approach Berger’s body of work.