Arsenal Football Club is responsible for many things, not all of them good — the lack of parking spaces in Holloway on match days, for example. But one of its more unexpected and positive contributions to society is the role it played in shaping Marc Isaacs, one of Britain’s most talented documentary film-makers. Talking ahead of the release of a DVD containing three of his films, Isaacs says: “When I was a kid I travelled all over the country to watch Arsenal play. I learnt a lot about England travelling around to these different towns. Ending up in Middlesbrough when you’re 14 is something special. You look around and go: ‘What the hell’s this?’ That whole experience came back later on to inform what I do now.”

What is it that Isaacs does that sets him apart from most other film-makers? With films such as All White in Barking; Calais: The Last Border and Travellers he has turned his lens on to broad social issues, filtered through intimate, personal stories. His work combines a wry humour with pathos. It combines the patient observation of cinéma vérité with an empathetic emotional engagement that causes his subjects to open their hearts. Unlike the current breed of crusading film-makers Isaacs doesn’t attempt to dictate what we should think, but he does encourage us to ask questions. He believes that behind every stranger’s face is a story, and that every story is worth hearing.

Isaacs’s fascination with the sort of complex and intriguing characters who populate his films started in his teens. “I hit 13 in 1980, and it was a very interesting time because there were riots going on and life was very unstable and fragile. That was the first time that the world seemed not as fixed as I had thought. I also had a job in Petticoat Lane market. And the characters around there were incredible — Jewish market stall traders, skinheads, Bengalis. Growing up in that era was a kind of awakening in terms of being interested in what was going on around me instead of being focused in on your own little street in suburbia.”

Isaacs was born in the East End, but his family soon moved out to “a hellhole called Redbridge [in northeast London]. It’s bleak now, but was really bleak back then. The boredom drove some people into crime — most people into crime in fact — and others into shady areas of documentary film-making.”

Isaacs concedes that his experiences of growing up Jewish in a predominantly working-class community might have shaped his affinity for people on the margins and his interest in the mosaic of cultures that makes up urban Britain. “My parents weren’t religious but they were strongly culturally Jewish. And on Jewish holidays I would have to walk down the street wearing a suit to go to synagogue, feeling like an alien. Both the humour and also the tragedy in my work comes from the Jewish experience. Everything is pessimistic. Your grandma stocks up on washing-up liquid in case there’s another Holocaust.”

The DVD contains three loosely thematically linked films. The 25-minute Lift (2001) was one of Isaacs’s first films, set entirely in the lift of an East End tower block. Isaacs spent two months riding up and down with the residents, and gradually the metal box became a kind of confessional in which people cautiously opened their hearts.

The most affecting of the films is Calais: The Last Border (2003), a portrait of the bleak seaside town and some of the disparate souls who pass through there. Ijaz is an Afghani refugee with a tragic laugh whose optimism is gradually eroded through the course of the film. Tulia, vast, elderly and nearly bankrupt, floats through the grey streets like a giant, pink cruise liner, her mounting desperation masked by a painted-on smile and a gaudy wardrobe. Given the personal tragedies that are shared with the camera, it must be hard not to get emotionally involved with the subjects.

“It was really hard with Ijaz, I connected to him in a big way,” Isaacs says. “And when Tulia and her husband talked about killing themselves it was terrifying. I had to leave really quickly after shooting that scene — I’m asthmatic and they had loads of cats. And when I came back they were nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t until about two hours later that I managed to contact them. Fortunately, they had popped out to have an ice cream.”

Marc Isaacs Collection: Lift/ Travellers/ Calais: The Last Border is out on Second Run

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