You might think you know what you’re in for with a play by Anders Lustgarten, winner of the inaugural Harold Pinter Playwright’s Award and current go-to political activist for the Royal Court and the National. Listed alongside the plays on his CV is the boast that he’s been “arrested in four continents”.

The story of the 1964 Smethwick election, with its unofficial Tory slogan, “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour,” is well known. The successful Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths, subsequently became MP for Portsmouth North, 1979-97, where he advocated the similarly opportunistic but less controversial cause of the naval dockyards, and died in 2013. What really shocked about this often eye-wateringly revealing documentary was the extensive footage of the caustic casual racism prevalent at the time.

With a similar title to Samuel Fuller’s White Dog, White God, too, is an allegory on racism with a canine slant. Where the 1982 film centred on a dog trained to attack black people, Kornél Mundruczó’s film is set in a Hungary where mixed-breed dogs are rounded up and sent to pounds. An edict from a government which is neither mentioned specifically nor seen, permits only pure “Hungarian” breeds. Mutts have to be reported.

Plays about Muslims in British theatre tend to open a door on a segregated community, a place cut off from the mainstream. But stories that show cultural conflict – between whites, Asians, Muslims, Hindus, Poles and Sikhs – are much rarer. So it’s good that actor-turned-playwright John Hollingworth’s debut play, with a title which alludes to Walt Whitman’s “I am large. I contain multitudes” from Song of Myself, dares to explore conflict between social groups.

As worst-case scenarios go, the prospect of a UKIP government in a little under three months’ time is a frightening but unlikely one – isn’t it? That they have only two MPs, and leader Nigel Farage is yet to find a seat, has done nothing to stop UKIP setting the political agenda, bulldozing its way to centre stage to demand a place in the forthcoming televised election debates.

Wild River blurs documentary and fiction, tackles racism and segregation in America’s south, addresses the predicaments of little people coming face to face with the will of a behemoth of a government, considers the nature of progress and – maybe a minor concern in the light of these – is also an against-the-odds romance. If all that weren’t enough, it was seen in cinemas in über-panoramic CinemaScope. Wild River was ambitious.

Few modern figures can match the towering legacy of civil rights luminary Martin Luther King, and any filmmaker should be rightly intimidated when approaching a biopic. Undaunted, Ava DuVernay has created something remarkable. She pitches her film perfectly, presenting an intimate portrait of a man struggling to live up to his own legend and maintain the momentum of a movement, filtered through the powerful story of a series of initially small, eventually seminal protests in the town of Selma, Alabama.

It’s been quite a journey for Ayub Khan Din. Born in 1961, the acclaimed playwright grew up in a crowded Salford household, the youngest child of a Pakistani father and a white English mother. The cultural clashes he witnessed – as his Anglicised older siblings fought against the straitjacket of Muslim tradition – were the raw material for East Is East. His admired and important play, first performed in 1996 and soon made into a popular film, is back on tour after a run in the West End.

Eastern Boys is a disturbing film. Robin Campillo’s second feature as director catches the often aggressive world of immigrant grifters in Paris – they’re a gang of young men largely from the former Soviet Union – and their interaction with the society that surrounds them, through prostitution and crime. The issue of prostitution itself is given a complex nuance in the film’s central relationship, where control and care, exploitation and protection become uneasily mixed up, before the film’s closing third moves into thriller mode.

In Concerning Violence Göran Hugo Olsson has created an almanac documentary drawing on material from Swedish television archives, filmed by a number of directors in Africa, largely in the 1970s. It’s fascinating footage, covering a number of perspectives on what was happening in the continent over that decade, from the frontline guerilla wars with the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique, to industrial unrest in Liberia, and apparently matter-of-fact interviews with white settlers in Rhodesia and elsewhere.