First look at the hottest festival docos

A scene from the movie Deli Man.

From the packed line-up in the festival, Peter Calder picks five of the best he's previewed.

Deli Man (USA, director Erik Anjou)

A cholesterol-soaked valentine to a dying American institution. Four authentic kosher Jewish delis survive in New York - barely 150 in the entire US - but the film provides a moving social history, by way of period photos and the memories of ageing deli devotees including Larry King and Jerry Stiller, of the heyday when there was one on every corner in the Big Apple. Vegetarians should approach with caution; everyone else should eat before going.

Garnet's Gold (USA, Ed Perkins)

The quixotic search for a cache of treasure in the Scottish Highlands introduces the most improbably likeable documentary subject since the Inuit sewage collector in Sarah Gavron's 2013 The Village at the End of the World. Garnet Frost is probably an undiagnosed depressive with a pretty tenuous grip on reality, and his mum is a character you couldn't make up, but this is an eerily beautiful and touching film.

Night Will Fall (UK, USA, Israel, Andre Singer)

The warning about the (sparingly used) footage from the Nazi death camps is apt, but this is a must-see for any documentary-lover because it's a remarkable film about a remarkable film. The footage gathered by a British Army film unit broke new ground, not least because it assumed evidentiary value in war crimes trials. The story of its making, its well-meaning but misguided suppression and its restoration is less one of horror than of triumph.

The Yes Men Are Revolting (USA, Laura Nix, The Yes Men)

If you've never seen a Yes Men film, the third instalment in the adventures of the culture-jamming activists, who may or may not be called Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, is a great place to start. The rest of you will presumably already have booked for this one, in which they announce that an industry lobby group is backing a carbon tax and get defence contractors at a Homeland Security summit dancing in a circle. Just brilliant.

Tomorrow We Disappear (India: Jimmy Goldblum, Adam Weber)

You don't have to have been seduced by the wild impossible beauty of India to appreciate this film about a slum colony of street performers forced to make way for urban renewal, but it helps. It's an intimate and immediate view of a strange, magical world of acrobats, puppeteers and magicians and captures a way of life under threat because capitalism has no time for beauty.

- TimeOut