Whether it’s physical peril or financial risk, dissident filmmaking has its dangers. Pick any of the topics covered at this year’s Just Film Festival­—the Syrian conflict, U.S. support of Israel, indigenous land rights in Peru, the fate of the B.C. coast, Canada’s shadier international mining interests—and you’re encountering the kind of work that can ruin a career or even cost a life.

While he’s encouraged that these movies are being made at all, festival committee member Don Wright adds that he’s grateful that we still have places to show them—in this case the Vancity Theatre, which hosts the Just Film Festival from Thursday until Saturday (March 30 to April 1).

“To actually be in a room with other people is very powerful in itself,” Wright tells the Straight. “It deepens your engagement, because you’re mindful of others who are also interested in the issue or maybe even connected to the issue.”

There are nine features and a slew of shorts playing at this year’s fest. Here are three of the Straight’s picks. More information is at the Just Film website.

On The Bride’s Side

(Italy)

A caper film with real-life consequences, this amazing doc embeds the viewer inside a fake wedding party as it makes the hazardous journey from Milan to Stockholm with a mix of five Palestinian and Syrian refugees concealed within its ranks (including one rapping 11-year-old boy).

Sometimes they’re forced to use exotic routes established by human smugglers, like an ad hoc footpath across the mountainous French-Italian border. Other times they brazen their way through checkpoints in tuxedos and gowns. Oscillating between tension, euphoria, and moments of unspeakable sadness and horror, this might be the best antidote to the anti-refugee spew on your sister-in-law’s friend’s dad’s Facebook feed.

Vancity Theatre, March 30 (7 p.m.)

Burden of Peace

(U.K.)

As the first female attorney general of Guatemala, Claudia Paz y Paz accomplishes miracles in a criminal state hollowed out by corruption and haunted by the U.S.–backed genocide of the ’80s. The number of prosecutions skyrockets under her watch, climaxing in the arrest and trial in 2013 of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (whose wealthy defenders are reduced to calling the state prosecutor “fatty”).

What happens next is both amazing and heartbreaking, although Montt’s jovial contempt for the rule of law and the media support he enjoys point to the deeper realities Paz y Paz is up against. Aside from its obvious virtues, Burden of Peace provides a timely look at the culture and mechanics of political impunity as our neighbour to the immediate south emerges as the biggest banana republic of them all.

Vancity Theatre, March 31 (7 p.m.)

The Queen of Ireland

(Ireland)

It’s possible that nobody did more to swing the Irish in favour of same-sex marriage than a cross-dressing cabaret comedian called Pandora Panti Bliss.

The Queen of Ireland offers a peek inside the Panti, as it were, getting up close and personal with Rory O’Neill, the actor who found himself at the centre of a national scandal after denouncing media homophobia on a Saturday-night talk show. Sixteen months and much public debate later, the Marriage Equality referendum yielded its historic result.

While amiable and light as a feather, The Queen of Ireland also subtly reminds us that the establishment we’re handed is often woefully poor at recognizing the desires and beliefs of its citizens (to take the generous view).

Vancity Theatre, April 1 (9:55 p.m.)