“There is something odd, I suppose, about anyone who betrays their country.” It’s an excellent opening line, particularly when delivered in director George Carey’s nicely querulous narrative voice, for Toffs, Queers and Traitors (BBC Four).

There are, as I’m sure many of you are aware, four key stages of political change. Denial, anger, acceptance and, finally, documentary film-making.

The Viennale is one of the best film festivals in the world and an indispensable part of Vienna’s cultural life. Yet this year’s edition was launched amid trying times.

And so the mini-boom in motor racing movies continues, this time with a look back at the history of Ferrari and the intense on-track battles of the 1950s, a decade in which the Scuderia won four of its 15 Formula One World Drivers Championships.

There was much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary 66 Days (BBC Four) than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provided its immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion.

The much-respected visual artist Isaac Julien made his name as one of the first great black British filmmakers, not least with Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991).

Who is the real Grace Jones? This is the central question that drives Sophie Fiennes’s documentary, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami. After 115 minutes, you might be less sure of the answer than when you go in. The title is Jamaican for a recording booth’s red light and bread, the substance of life. It’s appropriate for a film which juxtaposes the abstract visual feast of Jones’s live show with her modest upbringing in Jamaica.

Chris Packham, who devises and presents programmes about nature and animals, has described himself as "a little bit weird". This autobiographical documentary about himself explained what being on the autistic spectrum meant to him in particular in daily life and beyond.

You might expect a posthumous 90-minute documentary – and that’s before you insert the ad breaks – about one of the biggest stars in British pop music over the last 30 years to shed some light on how said artist became so huge, but also how his career slowed to a crawl and his life came to such a depressing end. Freedom gives you some of the former but absolutely none of the latter.

Director Dan Sickles has known Dina her entire life. He knows her engaging personality, and he knows her tragic past. It’s the former which he and co-director Antonio Santini feel is worth celebrating in this Sundance award-winning documentary.

Dina is a 48-year-old widow who views the world with childlike optimism. Her charm and openness are immediate – traits which have enamoured her fiancé Scott. Together they make a winning team, each growing from the other’s support, love and unconventional nature. Alongside a rolling cast of friends, family and unsuspecting strangers, we watch the couple reach new milestones in their relationship.

The film is a fascinating look at love – one that is not traditional but unarguably unconditional. The leads are admirably open about the issues they face around sex: Scott uncomfortable with physical contact and Dina paranoid about Scott’s disinterest. It's an honest and subtle insight into how people living with autism navigate relationships..

On face value, the film appears to follow two eccentric people as they plan their marriage. Certainly in the first half-hour, there’s a creeping sense that we’re jumping from one awkward social situation to the next with no clear direction. This is deliberate. We begin like the unsuspecting strangers, only seeing the quirks. Sickles and Santini do not spell out Dina and Scott’s history; we get to know them as people first because it means all the more once we find out what they’ve experienced.This is highlighted in the film’s final moments, three gut-wrenching minutes made all the more affecting because they follow 90 minutes of relationship-building. The story here is the people Dina and Scott are, not what they’ve been through or what they’ve been diagnosed with. The approach works: somewhere along the way you begin really caring for these characters.

Each scene in Dina appears carefully composed, as if the directors knew that they just had to frame the shot and the material would come. There must be hours of footage left on the cutting-room floor, but the editing seamlessly compiles sequences together. Much of the comedy (and there’s a lot) is drawn from here, including a montage in which Scott shops for tuxedos while Dina browses an S&M shop.

While it’s rewarding to focus on character and not story, it does mean Dina drags in the middle. After watching the couple catch their 10th bus, you can be forgiven for wondering where this is all going. Perhaps it would reward rewatching once Dina’s backstory has been revealed, although this would defeat the point of not tackling it from the beginning. Dina is really about two people very much in love. Dina’s history is overwhelming, but she hasn’t let that define who she is and neither has the film. As a piece of cinema, it’s a surprisingly poignant treat.

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@OwenRichards91

Overleaf: watch the trailer to Dina