2025 British docs to look out for in 2026

As we near the end of 2025, we wanted to flag a couple of placing working class communities at their heart, which will be screening in the new year.

First up is Iron Ladies, a rousing, inspiring doc championing the women at the heart of the miners’ strikes that will resonate today.

Given where we are today, it’s unsurprising that many people think back to the miners’ strike of 1985 with a sense of resignation and defeat. Daniel Draper’s doc Iron Ladies attempts (quite successfully) to shift that narrative. The film champions the spirit and tenacity of the women that sustained the fight for a whole year. "It were a win for women", one of the featured "Ladies" shares with Daniel. The strikes were triggered by Margaret Thatcher’s government’s pit closure plans, which were inevitably going to lead to mass unemployment and poverty, the effects of which are still being felt today.

Through (incredibly entertaining) talking heads, archive footage, and rousing music, Iron Ladies presents us with a global and in-depth appraisal of the strikes and their impact. Daniel speaks to women from the North to the South of the country - Durham, Yorkshire, South Wales, Kent... The film highlights the nationwide character of the strikes and their inspiring community spirit. It also delves into the sacrifices and hardship that the miners and their families had to endure. Crucially, the doc really drives home the remarkable fight that these women put up, in spite of the usual sexism they faced (“my mum told me I wasn’t fit to be a wife or a mother”) and the wider pain and misery caused by the pit closures and police brutality. The doc doesn’t shy away from revisiting the violence of episodes like the Battle of Oregraves and is scathing about media complicity and framing - "Police didn’t clash with the miners. They attacked the miners". I’m mildly inclined to agree with The Indiependent’s reviewer in that the film doesn’t harness the opportunity to bring up the ways in which the events resonate in today’s context. But... I would argue that audiences will invariably be thinking of the current UK political landscape: from the doctors’ strikes to police repression and brutality, or the most recent starker echo: the first hunger strikes in the UK since 1981.

The second doc also champions working class voices, this time in the film industry. Rather, it unpacks the many ways in which they are actively and intentionally kept out of - at least - the higher echelons of film and TV. Again, through talking heads from industry stakeholders and famously vocal figures such as Maxine Peake and Paul Laverty, as well as concrete data, Scottish filmmaker Mark Forbes offers a fairly exhaustive account of the elitism that plagues this industry. This is a surprisingly rare doc about an issue that is so widely known and accepted. There’s a distinct feeling that producers, funders, those with the keys to success all wax lyrical about theoretically platforming underrepresented voices but are not prepared to properly address the very material barriers that exist. Mark’s film underlines the way exclusion really starts from birth. Access to the old boys’ type networks is absolutely key - then followed over the years by successive hurdles: access to money, to cities and spaces where it all happens, ability to sustain high living costs and low pay or no pay... Let’s hope industry "people" watch it and genuinely address the points it raises.

Here’s an interview with Mark Forbes with The Canary: