Playlist
<p>In Brazil exists an underground culture of illegal hot air balloon gangs. The film follows two gang members belonging to two of the most infamous balloon gangs in Brazil, through five of the most dramatic years in recent Brazilian history.</p>
<p>Armenia is a small country in the heart of the Caucasus. It is also my homeland. Like many Armenians in France, my great-grandparents lived in present-day Turkey and emigrated to France during the Armenian Genocide of 1915. I have been immersed in this culture since childhood. Ten years ago, I traveled to Armenia for the first time, in order to discover this country that I still knew so little about. Since then, I have photographed this territory extensively. In 2016, a few weeks after the “Four-Day War,” I discovered the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which literally means the “black garden.” It is a contested and landlocked region of the South Caucasus, which has witnessed nearly 30 years of armed conflict between Armenia (of which Nagorno-Karabakh was a former province) and Azerbaijan.</p>
<p>A cinematic journey into the mind of Eileen Gray. The Irish designer built a refuge on the Côte d'Azur in 1929. Her first home is a discreet, avant-garde masterpiece. She calls it E.1027, a cryptic combination of her initials and those of Jean Badovici, with whom she built it. When Le Corbusier discovers the house, he is fascinated and obsessed. He covers the walls with murals and publishes photos of them. Gray describes these paintings as vandalism and demands their return. He ignores their wishes and instead builds his famous cabanon directly behind E.1027, which still dominates the narrative of the place today. A story about the power of female expression and men's desire to control it.</p>
<p>New Lodge: seven 12-storey towers each stuck in the heart of Belfast. One of the areas that were the most severely affected by the Northern-Irish conflict during three decades. One of those where the number of casualties per inhabitant can make your head spin. Today, this small Catholic neighbourhood is marked by some kind of social abandonment. Yet, a touch of madness and hope, even idealism, still floats around, supported by the humanity and caustic humour of the locals.</p>
<p>Director Max Kestner explores the essence of life, questioning the human connection to other species and delving into the profound interconnectedness of all living matter. How does the killing of a giraffe challenge notions of empathy and self-understanding and what are the philosophical implications for our existence?</p>
<p>At 38, I found myself single, pregnant and broke. Decades later, I’m still single, still broke, but happy to have spent the last 18 years raising my son Jim alone. Unable to combine the life of a freelancer with raising a child alone, I let go of my career in TV. But I never gave up filming, and over the intervening years I collected a vast archive of photos and videos, capturing each twist and turn of Jim’s life, from the thumbs-up he gave me during my first scan to Jim’s first day at college.<br /> <br /> Key stories include reconnecting with Jim’s absent father after over a decade, my breast cancer diagnosis, and the challenges of living with Jim in a small London flat during a global pandemic. MOTHERBOARD is the first feature documentary in which each of these key dramas is shot entirely on mobile phones. I’ve documented the pain, the tears , the sickness and the trauma Jim and I have experienced over the years , but I’ve also documented the good times too. MOTHERBOARD will explore the chaos, the pain but also the love and the comedy of our family life. MOTHERBOARD is an honest and raw portrait of motherhood, and of the complicated relationships between sons and mothers, at any age. Many parents are raising children alone, by choice or by circumstance. MOTHERBOARD will celebrate the fact that families now come in all shapes and sizes.</p>
<p>A nocturnal and semi-surrealistic science fiction portrait of life in two Asian megacities after 2020, shot at night with an hypnotic intensity and with the lens pointing to the future. The country is plunged into darkness. The abandoned city is like another planet. Lonely figures move through the streets like shadows in a theatre. We are in two Asian megacities in the surreal time after 2020. ‘Night of Nights’ takes place at night, and the images fill the screen with an hypnotic intensity and documents the radically changed reality that the people in the megacities of the world suddenly found themselves in.</p>
<p>Once Upon a Time in a Forest is a film about brave young people who are defending one of the last coniferous forest areas in Europe. It is a morality play and a love story of a younger generation whose main object of love is the Finnish forest. This cinematic documentary explores environmental feelings and witnesses how the 22-year old protagonist Ida grows up to be the leader of the new Forest Movement.</p>
<p>A Danish writer embarks on a quest to locate a disappeared Apache tribe in Mexico but becomes entangled in ethical dilemmas, wrestling with the moral complexities of pursuing a tribe that ardently seeks obscurity. His journey takes an unexpected turn with a shocking discovery in Oslo, reshaping the entire narrative.</p>
<p>This feature documentary centers around an artist couple, renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz (85) and painter / pianist / writer Maggie Barrett (75) as they grapple with mortality, love, legacy and making meaning.</p>
<p>Seamlessly moving between earth and stars, past and present, Wilfred Buck is a hybrid feature documentary that looks to one man’s life to tell a story that spans generations. Our guide is the charismatic and irreverent Wilfred Buck, a Cree elder and ceremonial leader who came to his calling through a harrowing history of displacement, racism, and addiction in 1960s Canada. Adapted from his memoir, and blending verité, archive and stylized re-enactments, the film charts colonization’s attempts to extinguish Indigenous ways of knowing – and what it means to reconnect with and regain ancient teachings that are as relevant today as ever.</p>
<p>In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, ‘Preemptive Listening’ is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 contemporary musicians form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?</p>
<p>A filmmaker searches for the eight winds of the Mediterranean on the island of Corsica. Using found footage and employing 16mm hand-processing experiments that attempt to expose its ethereal subject, the film brings audiences to abandoned churches, cemeteries, and ravaged beaches in its quest to find meaning in that which is invisible and has neither source nor end.</p>
<p>An imaginative film about the digestive process as a condition for our physical existence - and as a prism for an intellectual journey through the cultural history of the body.</p>
<p>Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma. Familiar Phantoms is inspired by anecdotes from Sansour’s own family history and her old childhood in Bethlehem, making it her most personal film to date. Combining live action scenes, Super 8 footage and private photos, the editing mimics the workings of memory, constantly revisiting the same imagery alongside new fragments in search of meaning. The live action scenes are shot in a derelict mansion, serving as the seat of memory. In the rooms, vignettes are played out, adding a theatrical dimension, enlarging and exaggerating the narrative components, just as memory perpetually reworks, reinforces, adds and subtracts.</p>
<p>‘And still, it remains’ is a new artists’ film that examines time, toxic colonialism and how we survive the end of our world. In 2021, radioactive sand resulting from French nuclear bombs travelled in the winds all the way from the Algerian Sahara back to France. The bombs had been detonated in Algeria back in the 1960s. These returning winds were a reminder that the environmental legacies of colonialism cannot be forgotten or contained; it also raised the more pertinent question of how do people live with the afterlife of toxic colonialism?</p>
<p>In uniform darkness, we are driven to shine. In an age of wire and string, futuristic visions anchor in lithic time. In the dark, people are driven to shine in the most spectacular ways. Light, emitted from our digital extensions, has roots traversing millions, even billions of years.</p>
<p>The road holds a promise of freedom. In this 16 mm short it acts a form, metaphor and a cinematic mythology as a phantasmagorical mixtape about being and becoming a truck driver unfolds. Two parallel stories share a drivers cabin in this film. A truck driver shares his thoughts of being a trucker while playing music from different corners of the world; cliché, romantic, rowdy music. The other story breaks in, a driving teacher instructs someone on how to drive a truck. The two stories intertwine, the truck driver turns out to also be an artist, while the artist becomes a trucker. Day light shifts over into pink sunset. Somewhere between fantasy and reality emerges a haunted hill with a ghost fox as the truck descends into darkness.</p>
<p>Trash The Musical (2023) emerged over the last two years in collaboration with performance artist Alicia McDaid. From Los Angeles, McDaid travels back to Philadelphia, her former hometown, to empty out her uncle's house. During the months needed to get the chaos under control, the rooms become her daily stage for performing musical numbers and bizarre self-presentations to post on her online platforms. Surrounded by her uncle's belongings piled up around her, she slips into the roles of celebrities and movie characters and engages her followers with makeup tutorials, TikTok dances, and social criticism. Assembled into a wild post-cinematic collage by Fahrenholz, McDaid's performances are a radical exploration of personal anxieties and questions of aging, unfulfilled dreams, ghosting, and the difference between art and trash.</p>
<p>‘You, My, Omma, Mama’ depicts a journey through space and time in search of our grandmothers and connections to our past, towards the history of the future. The world Prouvost invents here might perhaps originate with the 11 cm figurine known as the “Venus of Willendorf” as great-grandmother of us all. The artist borrows the story of this stone-age sculpture, reinterpreting and interweaving contextual motifs. Among the many interpretations that fascinate Prouvost is one whereby the figurine, named “Venus” by her finder, might not be a fertility symbol but rather a representation of a wise grandmother.</p>
<p>A close-up study of radically different life forms that puts our own human scale in a new and thought-provoking light. Lichens are amazing organisms. A combination of a fungus and algae, two life forms that once upon a time decided to enter into symbiosis with each other. Fungi have difficulty photosynthesising and algae have difficulty incorporating sugar. Therefore, their union is beneficial for both parties. Or in other words: It is better to live together than to live alone. ‘Lichens are the Way’ is a loving and thought-provoking close-up study of radically different life forms, and of what happens when we turn our attention to beings and life forms outside our own scale. Czech Ondřej Vavrečka shot his radically imaginative, organic film in Canada, where lichenologist Trevor and his partner have created a home together in the symbiotic spirit of the object of their studies.</p>
<p>In this stroboscopic film, a virtuosic application of analogue darkroom practices and video processing techniques conceals and reappraises the nature of personal expression in the face of censorship. Times ahead and behind collide—a new linearity is required; the glittering lore of the way things were, generations lost to resolution errors.</p>
<p>A group of international tourists are on a half-day trip to Bethlehem to visit religious sites. But the city is on strike, lunch can’t be delivered as planned and the souvenir shops are closed. Their two guides – one Israeli, the other Palestinian – each have their own reasons for not telling their guests what’s going on. As the tourists visit what is said to be the birthplace of Jesus, there is a rumour among the street traders about a violent incident the day before. The town name Bethlehem brings Christmas cheer to two billion Christians, and images of a baby in a manger come to mind. But what is there to see today and what remains unseen?</p>
<p>Morgan Quaintance, winner of the 2020 New:Vision Award, returns to CPH:DOX with a new and evocative work that combines found footage, analogue 16mm and satellite imagery – not to mention loops and repeats – in an investigation of temporal processes from two radically different perspectives: the physical being of the body and the planetary, geological conditions. Change and dissolution pave the way for new becomings in ‘Efforts of Nature’, which with a rhythmic and almost pulsating force insists on perception itself as a medium for new and transcendent insights. In a short period of time and with a number of striking film and video works, Quaintance has reached a unique level of abstraction, which here is allowed to reach new and dizzying heights.</p>
<p>As one robotic voice recounts nightmarish returns to Thailand, another seeks to console. Moving through different incarnations, like entities from the Buddhist cosmology, the correspondence of voices fuse with images of Thailand’s aggressive urban development, personal (and historical) dread, and also hope through the current Thai youth movement.</p>
<p>Unresolved historical injustices and climate change raise the stakes in a generations-old conflict between Indigenous pastoralists and white landowners in Laikipia, Kenya, a wildlife conservation haven.</p> <p>Co-directors Daphne Matziaraki (<em>4.1 Miles</em>, <em>The Me You Can’t See</em>) and Pete Murimi (<em>I Am Samuel</em>) craft <em>The Battle for</em> <em>Laikipia</em> with empathy, compassion, and brutal truth. Weaving together themes of environmentalism, colonialism, and conservationism, the film delicately showcases the impact of these crucial topics on the Indigenous farming community of Kenya’s Laikipia region. Handled with care, Matziaraki and Murimi’s <em>The Battle for</em> <em>Laikipia</em> takes us through a journey that elicits frustration, awe, curiosity, and wonder.—BB</p>
<p>When residents of a remote Siberian city discover an abandoned coal mine has caught fire beneath their neighborhood, pushing toxic gas into their homes, they turn to homemaker-turned-journalist Natalia Zubkova for help.</p>
<p>Examines the connection between internet use and emotional disorders.</p>
<p>Daughter of Genghis is the story of Gerel Byamba, a Mongolian neo-nazi, who hates the Chinese and wants to protect her country from foreign exploitation. Gerel is also a single mother trying to give her son Timüjin care and attention. The film follows Gerel and her son over seven years, and tells an epic tale of a proud nomadic people fighting to forge a path for their culture and identity.</p>
<p>Democracy Noir is the compelling story of three women, Timea Szabo, one of the very few women serving in the Hungarian Parliament, Nikoletta Antal, a young activist, and Babett Oroszi, a young journalist, confronting the policies and corruption of Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban.<br /> <br /> In the past decade we have seen autocracies rise all over the world—Turkey, Belarus, Serbia, and almost in the United States. Our film reveals an urgent cautionary tale for all democracies: Orban’s relentless work to build an autocratic white Christian state, kept in power through ‘democratic’ elections. Democracy Noir serves as a warning and a ray of hope: it reveals the undemocratic nature of Orban’s regime and the courage of three women, representing many, who will not acquiesce.</p>
<p>Lie to me is a documentary about lies, hope and greed. When OneCoin was launched as "The bitcoin killer" in 2014, gold and green forests were promised. Anyone could become rich if they invested! But OneCoin was not a new financial revolution. It wasn't even a cryptocurrency. OneCoin turned out to be the world's biggest crypto scam, and the man who exposed it all was Norwegian Bjørn Bjercke. Nevertheless, the fraud continues. How is it possible?</p>
<p>Limits of Europe features Saša Uhlová and her journey through the world of European employment. Using a hidden camera, Saša puts herself in the shoes of workers from the Eastern Europe who migrate to the West to earn a living. She tells us about her despondency and exhaustion as she travels from country to country and from job to job, walking a fine line between precarity and exploitation. Who better to reflect on the inequalities in the European workplace than those who have experienced it first-hand?</p>
<p>To prevent their village from extinction, Mexican residents simulate an experience they all know: crossing the border illegally into the US. They disguise themselves as border police and human traffickers so that tourists can feel like migrants for one night.</p>
<p>Every year thousands of European citizens travel from one country to another evading the restrictive laws and ethics of their countries in order to access basic human rights. Stray Bodies follows simultaneously a young student who travels from Malta to Italy to have an abortion, a single 40 years old woman from Italy that reaches a well known fertilization clinic in Greece, an old man who travels from Greece to Bulgaria to find out how to have access to cremation, and a couple travelling from Bulgaria to Switzerland to meet Dignitas, an association that assists them with accompanied suicide. Like Stray Bodies, they travel by boat, car, airplane and train, dizzily crossing borders, highways, tolls, airports, harbors and train stations, on a harrowing yet surreal journey, all searching for answers to existential questions about life and death. As the characters of this road movie cross their countries’ borders, they come together in a cinematic trip through Europe about issues of vital importance: what rights do we have on ourselves and other people’s bodies?</p>
<p>The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) — a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City’s Staten Island — takes on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionize.</p> <p>Chronicling the historic efforts of the ALU, <em>Union</em> is an intimate and surprising story of dogged determination, unorthodox tactics, and speaking up despite David vs. Goliath odds. Capturing up-close, in-the-trenches moments with the upstart labor union leaders — including the charismatic Chris Smalls — as they try to build support for their movement on their own terms, filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing bear witness to the realities of labor organizing in the United States — challenging at best; near-impossible when facing the unlimited resources and influence of a corporate giant. They track exhilarating victories and demoralizing setbacks along the way, but foremost spotlight the far-reaching ability of collective action to inspire hope and bring self-determination to workers who’ve long felt disenfranchised and powerless.—BT</p>
<p><span style="background-color: #14181c; color: #99aabb; font-family: TiemposTextWeb-Regular,Georgia,serif; font-size: 16px;">An atmospheric and dreamy picture poem from Argentina’s vast La Pampa region, where ancient stories of spirits are evoked in dark and evocative images between reality and the beyond.</span></p>
<p>With their smartphone cameras, Parisian taxi drivers document La Base, a gigantic transit hub isolated on the outskirts of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, a rich microcosm of community life, a safe refuge to face the fast-changing world.</p>
<p>Abkhazia is a self-proclaimed sovereign state, separated from the rest of Georgia by a barbed wire border. By following the daily lives of two families, each with two young brothers, living on either side of the demarcation line, the director rediscovers her country, her family home in Sukhumi, and weaves together a bitter history, a fragile present and the possibility of re-imagining the future of Georgia through a particular vision of the world, the one of the children.</p>
<p>On Christmas Eve 1989, when Patricia was only two years old, her mother was killed by two gunmen in their home in Uganda. On Christmas Eve 2013, Patricia gave birth to a daughter whom she named Imelda after her mother. Now, more than 30 years after the killing, Patricia is finally ready to return home and take a look at her traumatic past.</p>
<p>Brazil's love motels are a sexual haven where fantasy becomes reality. When the filmmaker's own date never shows up, she gets a fresh idea for a film instead. The result is a kaleidoscopic insight into a parallel world of human desire.</p>
<p>Esfahan, Iran. Melina lives with her grandparents. Since her parents' divorce neither of them is willing to take on her legal custody. Melina is longing for a home and a family of her own, unhappy with her situation because she feels different from other kids. Actually, Melina wants to live with her mother, but this is not possible because both her father and new stepfather are against it. Melina's mother lives in permanent struggle between a proper relationship with her child and the relationship with her new spouse.<br /> <br /> Celebrating her 9th birthday, Melina is finally old enough to bring her custody case to court. With the law on her side, she hopes to eventually choose her own custodian. Unfortunately Melina is not aware of how the adult world is organized and how reality will probably play out differently.</p>
<p>Invisible People is an experimental documentary film dedicated to Japanese Butoh dance. It includes a series of film portraits of Butoh masters and performers, with a special focus on Butoh master Yoshito Ohno, the son of Butoh-founder Kazuo Ohno, who passed away during the shooting of the film. The film unites elements of Tatsumi Hijikata's poetic-philosophical texts on butoh, recounted life stories of various protagonists, and a mysterious search for the "Invisible People."</p>
<p>Sprawling and visceral, KIX captures 10 years of the chaotic street life of a Hungarian child as he grows from rowdy kid to public enemy. Through a lens both personal and political, we witness a rarely-seen portrait of an impoverished working class in modern day Budapest.</p>
<p>Follow a young filmmaker, as she recounts the story of struggling to make her first feature. Fact bleeding into fiction, and past, present, and future converging to create a modern myth that redefines the very act of creation.</p>
<p>Inadelso Cossa visits his grandparents’ village in Mozambique, where he grew up during the civil war. Back then, his grandmother kept the war out of sight for him. Now the film shines a careful light into the darkness of the past.</p>
<p>An experiential portrait depicting Satanists in both the everyday and in the extraordinary as they fight to preserve their lifestyle: magic, mystery, and misanthropy.</p> <p>Filmmaker Scott Cummings is no stranger to Sundance, having edited many highly acclaimed festival premieres over the past decade, including <em>Never Rarely Sometimes Always</em>, <em>Monsters and Men</em>, and <em>Wendy</em>.</p> <p><em>REALM OF SATAN</em> marks his feature-length directorial debut after first staking his claim in the peripheries of nonfiction-adjacent storytelling with his acclaimed short film <em>Buffalo Juggalos</em>.<br /> His unique approach is to work in collaboration with sinister subcultures to conjure up video portraits that express a vision of their personal existence. Working in lockstep with cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz, each shot is its own small treasure to explore, whether fantastical, explicit, mundane, or all of the above. <em>REALM OF SATAN</em>’s acceptance in an unreality sets itself on an anarchistic path through expressions of identity and image-making that nobly fights all forms of tradition.</p>
<p>A musical journey through passion and courting, exploring the human nature behind the tuning of one of the most iconic vehicles ever made in Italy, the ApePiaggio.<br /> <br /> Like a restless bee who’s looking for the most beautiful flower in the field, Manuel buzzes the streets of Vasto – a place forgotten by God – in search of love and personal affirmation. A path that will lead him to contend for the conquest of the territory and the heart of his beloved.</p>
<p>This is an energetic and intimate coming-of-age story about 18-year-old Atte and 16-year-old Jonsu. Atte has always the next party planned and loves to entertain his 40,000 Snapchat followers, sharing the highs and lows of life unfiltered. Jonsu discovers a new group of friends through Atte, whose anarchic attitude draws her in. Slowly, Atte and Jonsu find themselves entangled in serious troubles as they seek approval from their social media followers and peers. The film is as fast-paced as their ever-changing relationships, hairstyles, and the social media they consume 24/7. It paints an honest portrait of youth in the 2020s, where substance abuse and violence become part of their reality. Alongside darker tones, the film leaves room for humor and hope as they discover an unimaginable strength to persevere.</p>
<p>The birth experience affects the whole life. Two Finnish birth experts, midwife Kirsi and doula (birth support person) Anna-Riitta, work to improve birth practices and empower birth givers. Observational yet strongly cinematic, The Labour of Pain and Joy explores the personal, social and mythic levels of birth.</p>
<p>Mina Hadjian, Norway’s once biggest radio-host, reinvented her career by creating Bandit Radio, a show giving incarcerated individuals a platform. Despite the success, Mina grapples with the unpredictable world of this unconventional radio, with its unique 'Bandit' team and the unstable radio industry. Mina, half Persian and a former outsider herself, passionately believes in redemption, encouraging her 'Bandits' to refashion their pasts into valuable skills. However, turning belief into reality isn't simple. Can they redefine their identities, shedding the criminal label they've worn for so long? Bandit Radio, broadcast weekly by the National Broadcaster, invites you on Mina's remarkable journey to reshape narratives and challenge societal norms.</p>
<p>A brother and sister's loving, poetic and personal film poem to their late father, Danish actor Søren Spanning. Ten years ago, the renowned and charismatic actor Søren Spanning suffered a stroke in the brain. Although he woke up after a month in a coma, it was a new and different Søren than the strong and colourful father that his two adult children Rosalinde and Jasper had known, and with whom they had been able to discuss everything from art to love. Now he was paralysed on the left side of his body and confined to a wheelchair.</p>
<p>At the south tip of Gran Canaria, the sun is always shining. Resorts warmly captures the easy and complicated lives of 6 tourists that never left their holiday.</p>
<p>The Danish-Iranian filmmaker Roja is in the most difficult period of her 36-year-old life. She is pregnant with her son Oskar and is diagnosed with incurable cancer. In the midst of all this, she must try to find herself. The film is her journey filmed over six dramatic years, where she unfilteredly documents her everyday life and her thoughts about living with an illness that can cost her everything. Because how should one live when one's precious time on Earth can run out far too soon? However, Roja is the last to feel sorry for herself. She immerses herself in being present, and then she sets out to chart her Iranian origins and her family's dramatic history, which opened a new chapter when her politically engaged parents fled Iran after the revolution and ended up in Denmark.</p>
<p>Journalist Shiori Ito embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems.</p> <p><em>Black Box Diaries </em>was born out of Ito’s need to document her investigation — a response to the authorities’ refusal to pursue her case in a meaningful manner. More importantly, it was a way to journal her fears and thoughts as she anticipated the backlash that followed.</p> <p>As the film’s director, Ito accomplishes something remarkable. On one hand, <em>Black Box Diaries</em> has a raw and honest quality to it — it’s a personal journey from the perspective of a victim piecing together the crime she experienced, while pushing herself to the extreme. At the same time, it is an impressively crafted, concise piece of filmmaking — guided by a strong sense of purpose and broken up by occasional moments of joy. Shiori Ito came forward to challenge her high-profile abuser despite knowing the risks. Her bravery meant hope for others and the prospect of real change to a broken system.—AT</p>
<p>Surrounded by violence and oppression, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish chose education and tolerance. When the war claimed his three daughters, he responded with forgiveness. But peace must be a two-way street.</p>
<p>Set against the backdrop of escalating farmer suicides in India, Sanjeevani, a young farmer’s widow, discovers strength, joy and companionship in a group of resilient women who share the same loss. During peer-to-peer sessions with a local psychologist, she finds the courage to overcome her grief, tackle social taboos, and strive for financial independence and a better future for her children. While new suicides in her community test her determination, she finds healing in the act of confronting her grief and helping other women farmers like her in a deeply patriarchal society.<br /> </p>
<p>Mediha, a teenage Yazidi girl who has recently returned from ISIS captivity, turns the camera on herself to process her trauma while rescuers search for her missing family members.</p>
<p>Through its two parallel plotlines, the film follows the exploits of a volunteer evacuation team in the front lines of Eastern Ukraine, led by young, precociously stoic Anton, as well as the wartime daily lives and unlikely friendship of two elderly women - pragmatic Zinaida and dreamy, starry-eyed Taisia - who decided to stay at their homes in the now de-occupied Chernihiv region. While Anton faces the most visceral horrors of war on a daily basis during his team's urgent, desperate attempts to rescue the most vulnerable, who are often reluctant or unwilling to leave, Zinaida and Taisia seek to pursue any forms of resistance within their power - from praying and writing poetry to hiding historic plaque and reporting intelligence to the Ukrainian military.</p>
<p>Driven to maintain social order, policing in the United States has exploded in scope and scale over hundreds of years. Now, American policing embodies one word: power.</p> <p>A cogent essay film inviting conscious engagement and reflection on a system of control that has gone largely unquestioned, <em>Power</em> is a sweeping chronicle of the history and evolution of policing in the U.S. With assured precision and deep insight, filmmaker Yance Ford (<em>Strong Island</em>, U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling, 2017 Sundance Film Festival) compellingly argues that the perceived danger of race to the status quo is central to the origins of policing and to its unchecked expansion. Asking pointed, uncomfortable questions about privilege and class; about who belongs to the social order and who is excluded; and about our collective responsibility in actively or tacitly permitting those in power to escape accountability, <em>Power</em> confronts us with the prescient words of Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”—BT</p>
<p>"There is no health without mental health, and there is no mental health without human rights” begins, The Recovery Channel from Filmmaker Ellen Ugelstad. Subverting traditional documentary structure to deliver authentic voices and experiences, Ugelstad gives room for reflection from each unique perspective on mental health and recovery.<br /> The Recovery Channel is both a personal and a political film. The film is based on the directors own experiences with a younger brother who has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for 25 years. The film explores what it is like to be deprived of freedom while calling for a more humanistic view on mental illness.<br /> <br /> The film takes an extreme and unflinching look at mental health as a human right. A human right often violated by lack of resources and training, and outdated medical treatments designed to coerce a patient, not rehabilitate them.</p>
<p>After her mom's tragic death on the Polish-Belarusian border a 16-year-old Kurdish girl Runa has to become a mother for her 4 younger brothers. A partially animated coming-of-age story in the times of a global refugee crisis.</p>
<p>In Zenica, a giant steel factory belches toxic gasses into the air day and night, making the city one of the world’s most polluted, and people are dying. Samir Lemes and citizen activists from Eko Forum fight an uneven fight for change against the reckless corporation, the local politicians who focus on jobs, investments, and re-elections, and the EU who co-funds the corporation without enforcing laws and international standards. Instead, they name Zenica ‘A Green City Project’, building bicycle lanes in a city where breathing is a health hazard. A film about financial cynicism, political pragmatisk and greenwashing, in which West European countries play a surprisingly big role.</p>
<p>Reality beats fiction in the story of Icelandic teenage hacker Siggi who became Julian Assange's sidekick in a story of paranoia, intelligence services, abuse, friendship and betrayal. A coming of age film unlike any other.</p>
<p>World premiere of the ultimate film about the ultimate pop band. On the 50th anniversary of their iconic urovision victory, this is the untold story of ABBA in the golden years between 1976 and 1980.</p>
<p>In this simulation, you are a medical student tasked with obtaining anamnesis from an AI-simulated entity by posing investigative questions. Your empathy towards the suffering chatbot will be assessed.</p>
<p>The sequel to the international mega-hit 'The March of the Penguins' returns to Antarctica on an epic adventure with director Luc Jacquet as a familiar guide in the alien landscapes.</p>
<p>The greatest and most iconic space rocket drama in history is told in a thrilling and human way through crisp, crunchy archive footage and unique audio clips from the shuttle, the control centre and the astronauts' families.</p>
<p>Heartwarming and life-affirming Norwegian coming-of-age story about the intellectually disabled man Ola, his deeply felt friendship with Danish Lasse and the need for all people to belong. </p>
<p>Mapping the body as a site of resistance Blood Speaks is an odyssey of womanhood and defiance drawing together the real and the imaginary to trace possible paths to resilience and justice.</p>
<p>A Norwegian and a Danish story about life in isolation during the corona pandemic - seen from the children's perspective.</p>
<p>In two heartwarming short films, we follow first a family's love through the chaos of war and then a brave girl's journey in Aleppo, exploring hope and love in the midst of darkness.</p>
<p>11-year-old Sam is growing up in the shadow of the UK's largest nuclear power station. Will he work at the plant like the rest of the town? Or will he follow his dream? The adults tell 11-year-old Sam not to worry about the huge nuclear power station the government is building close to his home in the countryside he knows so well. But for someone like Sam, there’s a lot to think about. Hinkley Point C will be the UK’s largest nuclear power station. Most of Sam’s classmates imagine themselves working at the plant when they grow up, but Sam has a different plan. He wants to protect nature, he wants to get an education and maybe become a biologist. But his parents don’t have the money for the expensive education, and now Sam has to seek help from the people behind the nuclear power plant. ‘Sam and the Plant Next Door’ is a film about standing up for who you are.</p>
<p>Nasar still feels young. But the truth is that the time he has ahead of him is becoming much shorter than the time behind him. His body is starting to show wear and tear, and there’s a chance he won’t live to see his young children grow up. In an attempt to cheat death, the amiable Brit wants to be cryonically frozen at the moment when his heart stops beating—the idea is that in a distant future, all being well, he can then return to life again.</p> <p>The film unfolds in the warm embrace of the family, observing the effects of Nasar’s decision on his loved ones from within. His desire to evade death, partly inspired by the traumatic loss of his mother, means that the family members are constantly preoccupied with his mortality—as well as their own. After all, what sense does it make if Nasar has himself frozen but his wife and children don’t? What if he wakes up in a world full of strangers?</p>
<p>Cheers! The sour lambic beer that is experiencing a big comeback. Join us on a trip to the Flemish Pajottenland region and learn more about the process, tradition and the drama behind scenes.</p>
<p>The first two years in Denmark's only crisis centre for young people under 18. Joannahuset gives vulnerable young people a temporary home and a helping hand in the fight against a bureaucracy that doesn't always listen to them.</p>
<p>The life of guitar virtuoso Carlos Santana from his childhood in Mexico to international stardom, according to the 76-year-old legend himself.</p>
<p>Cool Finnish countryside charm meets French elegance when Finland's greatest film director Aki Kaurismäki decides to build the ultimate cinema from the past in an abandoned mining town.</p>
<p>A simple and beautiful film about a three-year-old girl spending an afternoon in her own company, with a jar of colour at hand and her own body as a canvas.</p>
<p>A three-year-old girl is left unsupervised one summer afternoon. The joy she finds while painting herself, simultaneously discovering her own body and creativity, is one of these treasured moments that will not repeat itself. These kinds of episodes stay stored inside of us, as core memories that give an emotional value to our human experience. The absence of shame and her pure amazement by own creative ability is at the heart of Patricia Drati’s short film. The little girl is fascinated to the extent that she can hold her focus for unusually long time for her age. As an audience, we get sucked into this magical world of creativity and freedom.</p>
<p>In the last few years, Tingbjerg on the outskirts of Copenhagen has undergone major changes. For 12 years, Tingbjerg has been on the Danish government’s list of parallel communities. A list that each year assesses social housing neighbourhoods primarily on the basis of ethnicity. If a majority of the residents are from so-called non-western countries, the area risks being put on the list, with the consequence that more housing is built to change the demographics and/or people are forcibly evicted from their homes. ‘My Next Door Neighbours’ is a collage of images and voices from people living in Tingbjerg, two kilometres from the director’s home. The words bear witness to hope, despair, uncertainty and resistance, and are accompanied by black and white film images on analogue, hand-developed 16mm film.</p>
<p>The all-seeing eye of a hovering camera observes the simple and everyday routines in the hospital chapel where ‘Finale’ is set. Here, the living prepare their clients to be sent out on their final journey. Cannes award winner Marlene Lyngstad is a deeply original filmmaker who has a special ability to pull the rug out from under reality, using simple means – such as a camera set-up that looks like you’re spying on the cast through a hole in the wall – to create new ways of making (and at least watching) films.</p>
<p>Gabriel Byrne plays Samuel Beckett in Oscar-winning documentarian James Marsh's biopic on the life and works of the literary genius. The man behind the myth is portrayed with humour and irony.</p>
<p>Experience the furthest reaches of our galaxy in IMAX where the incredible images from the James Webb Telescope are framed in ideal conditions on the big screen. </p>
<p>One of Danish documentary's most original voices is back in the US with a new hybrid film in which five American teenagers from a small town in Arizona are invited to participate in a performative performance of their own stories and dreams.</p>
<p>A charming tour of North Macedonian folk music and a fascinating insight into the creative process of the Danish band Efterklang.</p>
<p>‘Elsewhere in India’ is an audiovisual electronica performance about a future world where global cultures are nearing extinction. We follow a motley crew in the year 2079 as they face the dystopian cultural consequences of unbridled technological growth.</p>
<p>Three short and fascinating films about science and celestial bodies.</p>
<p>On the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, two scientists sat on opposite sides of the world observing sunspots. One in Tokyo, the other in California. The image of the two observatories linked by historical coincidence is the starting point for David Blandy’s poetic archive film about light, time, forest fires and quantum physics. Sunspots were important astronomical phenomena during the war because they could interfere with army radio signals, so the observatories were sharply focussed on the light in the sky. At the same time, an equally powerful light was switched on here on Earth, and the world has never been the same since.</p>
<p>A heartwarming and vibrant film about a chapter in life that everyone will have to deal with sooner or later: The transition from working life to retirement.</p>
<p>A young man struggles to break free from the demons of his past that still haunt him years after the sexual abuse he survived as a child.</p>
<p>Finite Horizon is an amalgamated skyline of Asian futures imagined by white filmmakers. Sourced from 20th and 21st century sci-fi, these movies depict a vice-ridden, dangerous world.</p>
<p>Turbo chickens, plant-based steaks and a pandemic. A lot has happened since the first 'Food Inc.' film, and it's time for a fresh in-depth look at the food industry and at possible solutions.</p>
<p>Welcome to a party so wild that the British state had to rewrite the law to ban it, and that the electronic sound waves of the raging Free Party movement of the 1990s still resonate today.</p>
<p>With Björk as narrator and in IMAX 3D, we are taken on a fascinating journey of discovery into the world of fungi, which may hold new solutions to our biggest problems.</p>
<p>The Swedish gang conflict seen from the inside over five years by a filmmaker who is at home portraying one of Sweden's most dangerous areas, which he is now moving out of. A poetic and existential film about life, death and brotherhood.</p>
<p>An ongoing exploration of resonance as a model for intra-action between tech, humans, and the more-than-human. Visitors are invited to witness the creation of virtual ghost flowers which depend on human voices for growth.</p>
<p>GLITCHBODIES:is an experimental game project that explores body transformations, LGBTQ+Draq and intimate sensitive representations of the 59 protagonists and aims to bring them to a wider audience. It is a play of transformation, a catwalk of vogeuism, exhibitionism & voyeurism.</p>
<p>The Search for a lost film from the 70s takes a young man from one of South America's largest indigenous communities on an existential journey in a post-colonial film about the right to one's own image.</p>
<p>A Danish family travels to Brazil to say goodbye to their mother, who passed away six years ago. But things don't quite go according to plan. Can the father and the two adult sisters reach each other and talk about loss, life and death?</p>
<p>The museum world is at a turning point. Artefacts from indigenous peoples and other cultures are being encouraged to be returned to their place of origin. A Sami filmmaker traces the heritage of her own people in a personal film.</p>
<p>It was a different time! The female contestants on an Irish TV show with an iconic gentleman host look back on a beige-coloured chapter in TV history. More than entertaining kitsch, and with some delightfully quick-witted ladies in the winning role.</p>
<p>Led by star scientist Eske Willerslev, a team of researchers are sequencing DNA from before the Ice Age for the first time in history. A project that could revolutionise our understanding of the history of life itself.</p>
<p>Combining machine learning and Jacquard weaving, the artistic wall-hanging delves intomental health of low paid micro-workers laboring in the data and content moderationsector of the AI industry.</p>
<p>The legendary singer has finally received the major portrait film he deserves. Oscar winner Alex Gibney unravels Paul Simon's life's work, from his time with Art Garfunkel to solo highlight 'Graceland' to his latest album.</p>
<p>Intangible investigates the oddly satisfying sensation of touching simulated natural phenomena while calling attention to the controversial idea of reconnecting with nature through computational means.</p>
<p>Jess Coldrey explores her uncertain and pain-ridden relationship to the world during her battle with endometriosis by creating a soft, surreal, yet alien world through contemporary quilts and surreal digital imagery.</p>
<p>Two young American Jews are raised to love Israel unconditionally, but their lives take a sharp left turn when they experience the plight of the Palestinians. A film about Jewish identity on both sides of the generation gap.</p>
<p>In Japan, thousands of people disappear voluntarily every year. And there are companies ready to help those who want to disappear without a trace and start a new life somewhere else. Meet some of them in a film that soberly examines a modern phenomenon.</p>
<p>Franz Kafka's famous short story about a man's transformation into an insect, filmed as a surreal version of a children’s TV show by Israeli artist and iconoclast Roee Rosen.</p>
<p>A quirky hybrid film that employs understated humour and spontaneous encounters to explore the healing power of conversation and its ability to break down both internal and external boundaries.</p>
<p>Marion Cotillard gives a hypnotic performance in a phenomenal docu-hybrid that charts one woman's dramatic life in the cultural bohemian milieu of Paris in the 60s and 70s. A reconstruction of a dark family history and an artist's attempt to understand her mother's tragedy.</p>
<p>The solution to the climate crisis is already here if you ask the growing low tech movement, who insist that with simple means and great ingenuity, it is possible to live a modern life without destroying the planet.</p>
<p>How to ensure food production for a growing population on a decreasing cropland. A radical idea using Greenlandic mud might help - and at the same time reduce climate change</p>
<p>A political epic about the female icon with the modest but determined appearance, and about the important 16 years in modern European history when she was at the helm. Based on a treasure trove of archive footage and narrated by Merkel herself.</p>
<p>From a meteoric career to tabloid tragedy. Get the untold details of the lip-synch scandal of them all in thr stranger-than-fiction account of the pop duo behind the mega-hit 'Girl You Know It's True'.</p>
<p>How can a digital artwork that anyone can download for free be sold for 69 million dollars? Get the answer - and lots of new questions to ponder - in a critical and entertaining film about culture and capital in the 21st century.</p>
<p>Putin had been preparing his country for the big war long before it started. A group of independent Russian journalists and activists face severe punishment and end up facing personal and political dilemmas in Askold Kurov’s couragous and critical film.</p>
<p>Copenhagen Zoo is partnering with a palm oil plantation in Borneo to shift production in a sustainable direction. </p>
<p>10 years in the turbulent life of the British rock n' roll poet as a singer in The Libertines and Babyshambles, and as a regular in the tabloids. The struggle to quit the drugs is the untold chapter in the story of Pete Doherty - until now.</p>
<p>A retired playwright is losing his memories and seeks companionship on a transformative journey to reconstruct and preserve fragments of his cherished remembrances.</p>
<p>How can a building become part of the treatment in physical and mental rehabilitation? A film about architecture, bodies and universal design that could revolutionise the way we shape our shared spaces.</p>
<p>Live recordings, everyday notes and vocal music intertwine in an audiovisual project where every digital line and musical note are creative expressions of a shared grief. </p>
<p>Danish translator Sidse Laugesen has a secret alter ego existence in China as the award-winning avant-garde poet Lao Shuzhen. Through the poets Sidse herself considers important, we experience the Chinese poetry scene. We meet avant-garde poet Yu Jian, who lives in a museum where Ming vases are piled high with old sheet music and candy wrappers. We meet Zhai Yongming, feminist campaigner and head of a poetic cultural centre in Chengdu, where young and old come together over the power of poetry. We meet Wang Linyan, the new generation who collaborates with rock bands as much as other poets. We meet a mysterious train conductor who waits for nothing and a group of dancing women who routinely dance their way into the night. Through music, collage, associations and fragments of words, the film paints an emotional portrait of a culture that is usually beyond the language barrier.</p>
<p>In his first documentary, music video legend Anton Corbijn tells the wild story of the visionary album cover designers behind Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and many others. The rockumentary of the year!</p>
<p>A young actor in rehab is cast as a gambler in a crime thriller based on a film from 1901. Realities are layered in a British visual artist's performative film about the risk - and freedom - of letting go of yourself and becoming someone else.</p>
<p>A love sonata to ballet and to 'Swan Lake' with all that it entails of hard training, low self-esteem, dreams, racism, redemption and stubborn traditions that might be in a process of change.</p>
<p>A group of delightful teenage girls who have all fled to Germany find their own creative ways to overcome hidden discrimination in a film about friendship, sisterhood and living your dreams.</p>
<p>Andy Kaufman was the favourite comedian of all the other comedians. The story of his life is an endlessly fascinating and entertaining trip through the mind of a brilliant, tragic and extreme human being with an unsurpassed sense of humour.</p>
<p>Dinosaur fossils are worth their weight in gold in a market where serious scientists and fortune hunters vie to be first to the next big find. An eye-opening adventure documentary about bones, cash and big egos - and an absolute must for dinosaur fans.</p>
<p>Tribute screening in memory of Michael Haslund. An epic and adventurous journey of discovery to the last white spaces on the world map.</p>
<p>The discovery of a diary with meticulous records of a Hungarian man's 2,158 visits to the cinema becomes a tale of a divided family held together by a shared love of film.</p>
<p>One of the most important contemporary writers invites us on a personal stroll through the past he has come to terms with in his autobiographical novels. Class, culture, sexuality, identity and education: Édouard Louis speaks from experience.</p>
<p>A sensitive and scientific analysis of infertility as a social phenomenon that will make you blush if you have ever asked your colleague when they are going to have children. </p>
<p>A gentle, personal story about a filmmaker who has lost his older brother and decides to explore the culture of grief with a group of experts in psychology.</p>
<p>It’s 2073, a decade after the Bio-Rift which killed half of humanity. This show at the Museum of Medical Archaeology will explain how a benign bacteria was driven by war to become a “perfect killer.” A speculative interactive work based on the real science of antibiotic resistance.</p>
<p>A food-loving and scientific tribute to the Mediterranean diet and, not least, the liquid gold: olive oil.</p>
<p>Created by a collective of neurodivergent filmmakers in an attempt to provide an alternative and artistic take on what it's like to live with neurodivergence in a chaotic world not made for those who are different.</p>
<p>Genius, sex symbol, lost soul. The director of 'Kurt and Courtney' and 'Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love' unravels the story of the Rolling Stones icon who mysteriously ended his days at the bottom of a swimming pool aged just 27.</p>
<p>A thoughtful and sensuous tour along Mexican train tracks on the Yutacán Peninsula, where a new, large-scale railway project threatens the indigenuos Mayan culture and the nature around them.</p>
<p>It's a paradox that the world's population is getting fatter and fatter when many dream of being thin. Why can't weight be controlled?</p>
<p>An upbeat tribute to the Brazilian ballroom scene, where LGBTQ+ and non-white people create the creative space they are not allowed in a repressive society.</p>
<p>A sunlit and sensuous film from the center of Portugal, where an entire village has been growing cork for generations. An elegant fable about the changing times in an old world.</p>
<p>Charli, Nya, Chris, Alia and Milo are children. They tell their own stories in their own voices about being between genders - surrounded by family and love.</p>
<p>Utopian and dystopian environments for disabled people, built in Unreal Engine and based on collaboration with disabled-led groups and disabled people in East London.</p>
<p>Sign up to Vocalize - the cutting edge voice agency. Shape your showreel with Hayley, our AI-assisted voice coach. Will she unlock your potential or does she have a hidden agenda?</p>
<p>The party-loving British glam rockers in The Darkness are trying to reclaim stadiums around the world. But not everything goes according to plan in an unpretentious, funny and touching story of brotherhood and rock n' roll.</p>
<p>A humorous, personal and highly educational manifesto about being fat in a world designed for thin people. Based on the iconic texts and activist Aubrey Gordon, and on six years of lived experience from anonymous blogger to best-selling author.</p>
<p>The ubiquitous cultural cachet of <em>Star Wars</em> is under attack, not by an intergalactic warlord, but from 1978’s absurdly campy “Star Wars Holiday Special.” The program aired a single time on CBS, never to be shown again, and is considered one of the worst pieces of <em>Star Wars</em> media ever made. Despite being a thorn in the sides of the creatives behind the franchise, in the 45 years since, the special has become a cult classic within <em>Star Wars</em> fandom. – <em>Brandon Harrison</em></p>
<p>In a forest in Norway, a family lives an isolated lifestyle in an attempt to be wild and free, but a tragic event changes everything, and they are forced to adjust to modern society.</p> <p>Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s portrait of the Payne family is an intimate encounter with a family coming to terms with a new reality. For years, the family of five enjoyed a slower-paced, independent life in harmony with nature on a picturesque farm. Now they are at a turning point, and Jacobsen captures their journey with a caring eye. The vulnerability and compassion they extend to each other, the land, and their animals are tenderly and beautifully observed by a camera that feels part of the family, while home videos woven throughout provide meaningful insights into years past. Joyous moments spring through the heartache, and the Paynes’ strong bond and love for each other guide them through each challenge they face. Jacobsen crafts a sensitive, affectionate, and completely heartfelt experience that is as much about navigating grief as it is about graciously accepting change.—SO</p>
<p>The walker with the shaved head and dressed in a red robe is barefoot. He walks slowly but determinedly through the forest, over stones and grassland. He also makes his way through the shadows of trees and houses. He sets foot in the train station, the church and the museum. The sun rises and sets again. The walker passes through Washington, D.C. Another stranger is also on the move in the city. We are unsure whether or not he is following the walker.<br /> Tsai Ming-liang began his Walker series in 2011; this is now the tenth film. In the role of the monk, his long-time collaborator and lead actor Lee Kang-Sheng travels all over the world. The figure is inspired by Xuanzang, a Tang Dynasty Buddhist monk who journeyed thousands of miles on foot between China and India.</p>
<p>The children transform into adults before our eyes. Yet they remain in limbo, haunted by memories of the war in Kosovo. Combining raw realism and staged performance, <em>Afterwar</em> is a meditation on the long-term repercussions of war.</p>
<p>Amber is one of the many agents working for the Bhutanese government to measure people’s happiness levels among the remote Himalayan mountains. But will he find his own along the way?</p> <p><em>Agent of Happiness,</em> directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó, offers a unique take on the notoriously exoticized Bhutan and its unusual happiness policy. We follow Amber as he investigates various expressions of contentment across different households and lifestyles while navigating his own struggle as a Nepali minority. The holistic philosophy at the heart of the survey he conducts challenges the conventional metrics of fulfillment and success, often provoking some deeper soul-searching. The filmmakers elegantly capture many tender moments between Amber and his interlocutors, as well as some very revealing conversations filled with unflinching honesty and quiet wisdom.</p> <p>Through its carefully crafted narrative, the film resonates as a heartfelt exploration of happiness in the face of adversity. As Amber grapples with societal disparities and personal roadblocks while searching for love, this story becomes a beautifully realized reminder to count our blessings.—AT</p>
<p>In 2004, a urinal was voted the most influential work ever in modern art. Famed artist and provocateur Marcel Duchamp claimed to have created “Fountain”—or rather, he bought the mass-produced product and signed it—but according to some, it is the lesser-known, flamboyant Dadaist artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who should take credit for transforming this much-discussed porcelain “piss pot” into art.</p> <p>Filmmaker Barbara Visser has delved into the absurd history of the iconic work, of which it is uncertain whether the original still exists. The absurdity is heightened by the fact that Visser regularly intervenes in the film to chat with the designer, giving instructions to change fonts or to zoom in on photos.</p> <p>Alreadymade is a search for the truth behind “Fountain,” a reflection on what makes art into art, and at the same time an attempt to bring Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to life. Using the little archive footage of her that exists, and with the help of a German actress and modern technology, the fascinating bohemian is brought out of the margins of art history.</p>
<p>Amidst the traditional pomp and circumstance of Filipino elections, a quirky people’s movement rises to defend the nation against deepening threats to truth and democracy. In a collective act of joy as a form of resistance, hope flickers against the backdrop of increasing autocracy.</p> <p>With the end of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency and his attacks on democratic institutions like a free independent press, some Filipinos hoped for a new beginning. In contrast, others yearned for even more autocracy and a return to an era before the People Power Revolution and the restoration of democracy just a generation before. In this companion piece to A Thousand Cuts, which helped introduce the world to online news site Rappler and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, director Ramona Diaz returns to Sundance with a film that takes you inside the fight for democracy in the modern media age. As elections threaten to be simulacrums of democratic processes, And So It Begins chronicles what the defenders of democracy in the Philippines have experienced and is a haunting depiction of what is at stake in elections around the world.—SS</p>
<p>Embark on an immersive exploration in a psychotropic cyberpunk universe, where each element – from spatial audio to tactile haptic systems – is meticulously crafted to represent the emotional spectrum of a lived bipolar disorder experience. Lotus flower speakers resonate with personal stories, while triptych displays visualize the journey from turmoil to tranquility. This experience, deeply personal yet universally resonant, offers a window into the life of an individual navigating the complexities of bipolar disorder, pre and post-treatment. It's a shared exploration that invites understanding, empathy, and a collective reimagining of mental health narratives.</p>
<p>A journey through the material that makes up our habitat: concrete and its ancestor, stone, and their impact on a changing planet.</p>
<p>At the Natural History Museum in Vienna, everything that is found on earth and in outer space and that humans can get their hands on, is collected, archived, and studied in the name of evolutionary research. Archiv der Zukunft captures the aesthetic appeal of the natural-history collection and its working process, illuminating the mammoth project of knowledge preservation and production hidden behind the building’s imperial façade.</p>
<p>The 27 residents on the tiny Danish Wadden Sea island of Mandø are used to severe weather and flooding. But climate change and increasingly extreme weather now pose a serious threat to the eight-square-kilometer island. Its last farmer, Gregers, bravely faces the inevitable catastrophe. He refuses to build a life elsewhere and instead hopes to find a wife to manage the farm with him.</p> <p>As a storm approaches, Gregers and his faithful dog inspect the decaying dykes that protect his beloved island. Meanwhile Mie celebrates her 100th birthday and Niels, an avid birdwatcher, laments the rare birds that don’t visit the island anymore. Tourists arrive in buses at low tide and hear from tour guide Preben how Mandø’s community was almost completely wiped out during a storm surge in 1634. Today, the current generation holds on steadfastly, despite the new threats from nature.</p> <p>The portrait of this microcosm is accompanied by masterly shots of the distinctive landscape, shifting skies, and seas that change with the wind and tide. In a sense, the grim fate of these islanders, presented in drily comic situations, affects us all.</p>
<p>When a wild otter in desperate need of help washes up on his jetty in the remote Scottish islands of Shetland, Billy, his wife Susan, and their devoted sheepdog Jade find themselves with a unique new member of their family. From National Geographic and Silverback Films, “Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story” is a heart-warming story directed by Charlie Hamilton James and shot in 4K. This documentary film shows us how love can reawaken us to the beauty of nature.</p>
<p>We all know the big bad wolf of fairy-tale fame—over hundreds of years the wolf has become a culturally imprinted symbol of fear that’s completely detached from reality. In fact there weren’t even any wolves in western Europe for a long time. But they’re back—for example in Germany, where these social animals now occupy a few scattered areas around the country that people have left to them.</p> <p>The comeback of the wolf in Germany resulted from a democratic decision that is carefully managed within a bureaucratic framework. This meticulous documentary follows some of the people—scientists, conservationists and shepherds—who are keeping a close eye on the wolves.</p> <p>Scenes of these people at work in the field and in laboratories are interspersed with conversations and presentations at political hearings. As well as monitoring the wolves, they add their voices to counter the fact-free public debate and tendentious arguments put forward by opponents.</p>
<p>If the shamans stop dancing and life in the rainforest loses its balance, the sky will fall and crush everything beneath it. This wisdom is passed on in the Brazilian Amazon by every generation of Yanomami. But gold diggers pollute the rivers, shamans die, the rainforest perishes and the earth warms up. Davi Kopenawa, shaman, chief and well-known spokesperson for the Yanomami, has been fighting these threats for more than 40 years. Time and again, he travels the world defending his people against an endless colonization.</p>
<p>The Amsterdam-Amstelland fire brigade needs to change. At Amsterdam’s oldest fire station, not far from the Rijksmuseum, we follow station commander Gerrie on the eve of a move and during the long-running process to make the organization more inclusive and diverse.</p> <p>With Gerrie in the leading role, we see the firefighters carrying out their daily activities at the fire station. We join them when they go out to fight a blaze, when someone needs to be resuscitated, or when difficult conversations take place with commanders and policymakers. And we witness during group discussions where emotions sometimes run high.</p> <p>Gerrie represents the old guard, and he watches with dismay as his familiar working environment disappears. He is also struggling with understaffing, partly as a result of the new recruitment policy. Without taking sides, director Saskia Gubbels reveals why the changes imposed from above meet with so much resistance. Burning Out provides insight into the dynamics arising on the fault line of cultural change.</p>
<p>In 1968, the civil war in Nigeria is entering its second year. Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, a young Nigerian drama student, flees to San Francisco. David Schickele wants to make a feature film about Okpokam’s experiences in his new home and casts him in the role of Gabriel. During his adventures, Gabriel encounters racism at every turn. The motorcyclist who gives him a lift is a harbinger of the racist America that is later to be the actor’s undoing. Liberal America, represented by progressive intellectuals quoting Marshall McLuhan, also comes in for criticism.</p> <p>What starts as a fictional docudrama rich in subtle irony unexpectedly turns into a documentary when Okpokam is wrongly arrested during production after a strike at San Francisco State College. “Truth was not stranger than fiction, just a little faster,” Schickele says to the camera.</p> <p>Schickele, originally a composer and violinist, taught English at the University of Nigeria. On his return to the US, he made Bushman, which won the Best First Feature Award at the 1971 Chicago International Film Festival. His rediscovered film has recently been restored.</p>
<p>Director Lina Soualem traces the history of four generations of Palestinian women in her family by pointing the camera at her mother, actress Hiam Abbas, of <em>Succession</em> fame. In playfully recreating moments from Abbas’ life in Palestine, Soualem pays tribute to her mother while creating a record of the political and cultural issues of her lifetime. – <em>Murtada Elfadl</em> </p>
<p>In the summer of 1971, the world’s best women’s soccer teams competed in Mexico. Copa 71 still ranks as the best attended women’s sporting event of all time. So why do we never hear about it? Copa 71 tells the incredible story of the tournament that was written out of sporting history.</p> <p>The opposition to women’s soccer goes back a long way. Many soccer associations even banned women’s teams. After the success of the men’s World Cup in 1970, the Mexican business community proposed holding a women’s tournament the following year. This purely commercial venture, which was not supported by FIFA, proved to be a resounding success. Soccer-crazy Mexico embraced the tournament, and the country’s two largest stadiums were filled. Copa 71 could have been the launch of women’s soccer worldwide. But the male-dominated establishment wasn’t ready for that.</p> <p>Half a century later, the women who played in the tournament still find their experiences unbelievable. Ordinary girls, mostly from simple backgrounds, were welcomed as heroes in Mexico. It was “like a parallel universe,” as one of them put it.</p>
<p>After an explosion in the port of Beirut destroys a large part of Lebanon’s capital, a crew of filmmakers decides to continue to shoot their film in a life-affirming effort of resistance. Working against all odds, amidst the collapse of the city and the collapse of the economy during Covid, this chosen family of collaborators finds meaning and purpose in their work through the transformative power of cinema. A heartwarming and lucid documentary. – <em>Ruth Somalo</em> </p>
<p>Born in response to the Kent State massacre, new wave band Devo took their concept of “de-evolution” from cult following to near–rock star status with groundbreaking 1980 hit “Whip It” while preaching an urgent social commentary.</p> <p>Leave it to acclaimed filmmaker Chris Smith (<em>American Movie</em>) to perfectly capture the gloriously radical spirit that is Devo. This high-energy documentary embraces the spectacle of the band reveling in lofi archival footage, swift montage, and a charging rhythm that leaves you mesmerized by their wild rise. Band members are open with both their memories and archives — finally sharing their full story. They are a rare band founded by a philosophy; a Dada experiment of high art meets low, hellbent on infiltrating American popular culture, and <em>Devo </em>relishes every freakish moment of their story. Not to mention all the incredible performances.—CS</p>
<p>As he proved with his scandalous, scathing political comedy <em>Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn</em> (NYFF59), Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is among the most radical filmmakers working today and one of the few unafraid to diagnose the absurd evils and moral blind spots that make contemporary living what it—unfortunately—is. In his latest film, Jude again explodes conventional boundaries of narrative and form, this time charting a lacerating course through one day in the life of a severely overworked film production assistant, Angela, who drives around Bucharest on her latest gig: filming work accident victims auditioning to be in a safety equipment video for a German multinational corporation. At the same time, the sleep-deprived Angela upkeeps her own side project—a face-filtered, trash-talking, right-wing alter ego with more than 20,000 viewers that serves as the film’s perverse Greek chorus. Intercutting all this with footage from Romanian director Lucian Bratu’s feminist 1981 film <em>Angela Moves On</em>, following the travels of a female cab driver around the city’s same sights and locations, Jude initiates a conversation with his country’s past and present, while engaging in a meta-commentary about the ability of the captured image to exploit, and to contort the truth.</p>
<p>When Rene (86) buys flowers, he always thinks about what color his wife would have chosen if she were alive. This elderly Danish man, being interviewed about his life with a group of his contemporaries, spent more years of his life with his wife than he has alone.</p> <p>In Echo of You, filmmaker Zara Zerny tenderly portrays nine elderly Danish people. They talk about their love lives, growing old, grief, and their perspectives on life and death. The eloquent, candid and sometimes poetic speakers are filmed at home, seated in a chair or in bed. Zerny intercuts these static shots with artistic, sometimes dreamy or abstract representations of their testimonies. Old home videos are also projected onto the interviewees, reflecting a different, bygone existence.</p> <p>The interviews create a group portrait of a unique generation that will not be with us for much longer. With their passing, their stories will perish, along with the furnishings and objects they have valued for decades, ranging from wooden ceilings, voile curtains and pendulum clocks to double rows of framed photos of generations of their relatives and forebears.</p>
<p>Visionary musician and artist Brian Eno — known for producing David Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, among many others; pioneering the genre of ambient music; and releasing over 40 solo and collaboration albums — reveals his creative processes in this groundbreaking generative documentary: a film that’s different every time it’s shown.</p> <p>Filmmaker Gary Hustwit brings to the Sundance Film Festival the first career-spanning documentary about visionary musician and artist Brian Eno. This innovative bio-doc also elevates the documentary form to become an evergreen, algorithmic performance.</p> <p>Hustwit and creative technologist Brendan Dawes have developed a bespoke generative software designed to sequence scenes and create transitions out of Hustwit’s original interviews with Eno, and Eno’s rich archive of hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music. Each screening of <em>Eno</em> is unique, presenting different scenes, order, music, and meant to be experienced live.</p> <p>The generative and infinitely iterative quality of <em>Eno</em> poetically resonates with the artist's own creative practice, his methods of using technology to compose music, and his endless deep dive into the mercurial essence of creativity.—SF</p>
<p>At the beginning of the 20th century, a Japanese scholar, Abe Masanao, devoted his life to filming and studying clouds around the world. A century later, as if in echo,major campaign of observation of the clouds takes place, on the island of Barbados, in the Caribbean. Scientists from all over the world are involved.<br /> What do we know about clouds? About their birth and death? About their role in climate change? So little.</p>
<p>Startups are using AI to create avatars that allow relatives to talk with their loved ones after they have died. An exploration of a profound human desire and the consequences of turning the dream of immortality into a product.</p> <p>“I wanted to see if he was okay,” explains Christi, one of the users of Project December. With this innovative software, users can communicate with a virtual version of the deceased through a chatbot that simulates the dead person’s conversation patterns. Hers was an attempt to check on her first love. Others may simply miss someone, seek permission to move on, or want to rid themselves of guilt.</p> <p>Little is known about the effects that this kind of generative AI might have on our brains, hearts, and wallets. The filmmakers, Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck (<em>The Cleaners</em>, 2018 Sundance Film Festival), do not claim to have the answers, but instead bring up various emotional and moral complexities we should be aware of. <em>Eternal You</em> poses important questions about algorithmic immortality, and the need to take a closer look at our future “digital remains.”—AT</p>
<p>The protean Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso (<em>La Libertad</em>, NYFF39; <em>Jauja</em>, NYFF52) continues to shapeshift, delight, and challenge with his marvelous and immersive new film, which takes the viewer on an unexpected journey through three stories set in wildly different terrain, each of them reflecting lives haunted by the specter of colonialist violence. In the first, Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni guest-star in a black-and-white neo-Western pastiche following a taciturn gunslinger seeking revenge in a lawless frontier town. In the second section, in a different kind of law-and-order narrative, set during the present day in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, we accompany a Native American cop (Alaina Clifford) on her nighttime patrols, revealing a community troubled by addiction and poverty, but also, because of the cop’s good-hearted basketball coach niece (Sadie Lapointe), touched by transcendence. Finally, the film travels to the magnificent Brazilian rainforest of the 1970s, where Indigenous workers pan for gold while articulating their dream lives. Cleverly transitioning between segments without hand-holding the viewer, Alonso has created an improbably unified aesthetic experience that leaves it up to us to make the connections among its transient worlds.</p>
<p>Amid the glamour of Hollywood, Los Angeles, a woman finds herself on a transformative journey as she nurtures wounded hummingbirds, unraveling a visually captivating and magical tale of love, fragility, healing, and the delicate beauty in tiny acts of greatness.</p> <p>A film of joy and wonder, <em>EVERY LITTLE THING </em>offers profound truths in a deceptively simple story. What does it mean to care for another, and what impact does this act have on us? In tending to these fragile yet resilient hummingbirds, Terry Masear finds a sense of healing from her own past. Her diminutive patients — brought into sharp focus through breathtaking, beautifully detailed photography — become memorable protagonists in their own right. The viewer becomes emotionally invested in Cactus, Jimmy, Wasabi, Alexa, and Mikhail, celebrating their small victories and lamenting their tiny tragedies. The compassion and empathy that Masear shows her Lilliputian charges serves as a lesson to us all — a reminder that in the smallest of acts, and in the tiniest of creatures, we might find grace.—BT</p>
<p>“Beid, Hafsa, Melissa, Manessa, Mohammad… 25 children and their dedicated teacher. We wanted to find out who they are… to discover their skills and strategies, their joys, fears, wants and needs."<br /> (Ruth Beckermann)<br /> <br /> More than 60% of all children in Viennese elementary schools do not have German as their first language. At the same time, there is an acute shortage of teachers and tutors. These adverse conditions are the starting point for Ruth Beckermann's FAVORITEN, in which the Austrian filmmaker (The Waldheim Waltz, Mutzenbacher) accompanies a Viennese elementary school class over the course of three school years. The result is an astonishingly cheerful portrait of an unusual community.</p>
<p>An intimately raw and magical journey through the life, mind, and heart of iconic artist Frida Kahlo. Told through her own words for the very first time — drawn from her diary, revealing letters, essays, and print interviews — and brought vividly to life by lyrical animation inspired by her unforgettable artwork.</p> <p>Carla Gutierrez, renowned for her masterful editing of films including Sundance Film Festival projects <em>RBG</em> (2018), <em>When Two Worlds Collide</em> (2016), and <em>Cesar’s Last Fast</em> (2014), brings artistry and a deep understanding of her subject to an astonishing directorial debut. Through a cacophony of rich archival sights, music, and journal entries joyfully brought to life, we become immersed in Frida’s interior world, fears, arduous relationships, and events that drove her indelible artistic creations. Gutierrez vibrantly guides us through Frida’s complex relationship to her own work, navigating the tension between art as commerce and painting for pleasure and self-knowledge. With reverence, thoughtfulness, and the color of pure emotion, <em>Frida</em> invites us to get to know one of the greatest artists of the 20th century in a completely new way.—AS</p>
<p>After graduating from high school, a group of teenagers from small-town Oregon go on a road trip to the coast some 500 miles away. The five good friends set off in a van in high spirits and begin a rollercoaster of adventures and extraordinary encounters with odd passersby, hobos and hippies—a modern version of Kerouac's On the Road. On foot, by freight train and by boat, they hope to reach the famous “Party at the End of the World.”</p> <p>The friends talk about their uncertainties and problems, musing in voice-over or with new best friends they make along the way. What will the future hold when they return home? There’s no shortage of inspiration and new ideas in the meetings with the free-thinking, hippie-like residents of Oregon.</p> <p>The filmmakers play with reality and fiction, as they did in their previous projects that are an ode to typical American phenomena, in this case the road trip. There is room for emotion and sadness, but also loads of fun in the endless freedom of skating, sleeping under the stars and smoking a lot of weed—all under the motto: “Fuck it.”</p>
<p>A celebration of a community of Argentine cowboys and cowgirls, known as Gauchos, living beyond the boundaries of the modern world.</p> <p><em>Gaucho Gaucho</em> paints an Argentinian Western with image and sound that reach an operatic beauty. Acclaimed photographers and now three-time Sundance-feted filmmakers Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck return with another striking nonfiction work after first taking audiences to the final stock car racetrack of New York with <em>The Last Race</em> and the secret corners of the Italian countryside in search of white truffles with <em>The Truffle Hunters</em>. Their focus is now on the vast plains of Argentina, expressed in stunning black-and-white photography, and a small community of gauchos who hold profound connections to the surrounding nature and their own traditions. As older generations dispense their wisdom, the film keeps its eye toward a new generation who continue to fight for their families’ legacy in a modern world.—CS</p>
<p>January 2021. The UK is in its 3rd lockdown and all entertainment venues remain closed. For theatre actors Sam and Mark, the future looks bleak. As the pandemic drags on, Mark - single and childless - is increasingly socially isolated, while Sam panics about how he is going to support his young family. They spend their days in the online digital world of Grand Theft Auto and when they stumble across a theater, they suddenly have an idea to stage a full production of Hamlet within the game. This film charts their ridiculous, hilarious and moving adventure as they battle violent griefers and discover surprising truths about life, friendship and the enduring power of Shakespeare.</p>
<p>Stefan, a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels, is on the verge of moving back home. He cooks up a big pot of soup with leftovers in his fridge as a goodbye gift for friends and family. As he is about to leave, he meets a young Belgian-Chinese woman who is working in a little restaurant while researching her doctorate on mosses. Her attention to the near-invisible stops him in his tracks.</p> <p>A hunter-gatherer of beauty in urban landscapes, Bas Devos knows how to tell stories through images. Berlinale audiences beheld this talent in his films <em>Violet</em> (<em>Generation</em>, 2014) and <em>Hellhole</em> (<em>Panorama</em>, 2019). In <em>Here</em>, the Belgian filmmaker’s ability to register the invisible and the untold performs many a small c. Unfolding in beautiful tableaux in 4:3 format, his work features characters in whose presence we want to feel the here and now, just as they do. Observing his central duo, played by the radiant Stefan Gota and Liyo Gong, as they discover each other, Devos’ gaze is as moving as it is delicate. And what more solid way for a bond to grow between two people than with their feet firmly rooted in Mother Nature’s soft carpeting? It is more fragile than cement, but it is our true terrain.</p>
<p>The footage of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein crawling out of a hole in the ground in 2003 is iconic. Now, 20 years later, the man who dug that hole tells the fantastical story of how he, an ordinary farmer, hid the deposed president beneath a flowerbed in his garden for eight months.</p> <p>On camera, he talks about the day his house was selected as a hideaway for this wanted man, hunted by 150,000 US soldiers. The Iraqi farmer had no choice but to assume the role of presidential hairdresser, physician and bodyguard—and something akin to a friendship seems to have grown between them as they ate together and helped wash each other’s backs.</p> <p>His story is richly illustrated with re-enacted scenes interspersed with clips from news reports of the time. The farmer had no plans to violate his duty as a host, even when the US offered a reward of $25 million. He talks in detail about how this huge secret was able to remain hidden for so long.</p>
<p>Egyptian documentary maker Ibrahim Nash’at traveled with a camera and an interpreter to Afghanistan in 2021, just days after the U.S. Army withdrew. He came to see, as he puts it, in whose hands the country had been left. He gets permission to follow a Taliban commander who has taken over Hollywoodgate, claimed to be a deserted CIA base. The Taliban is in the process of transforming itself from a guerilla movement into a military regime.</p> <p>What’s the best way of working under the control of an organization like this, one that sees you as a pawn for their propaganda? This film’s answer is to capture those seemingly trivial moments that serve to puncture that image—of an absurd inspection of abandoned gym equipment, and of a night-time military operation during which Nash’at is told to wait at the side of the road. Rather than stopping filming, he points his camera at the moon and records the sounds of gunfire in the distance, undermining the Taliban narrative without downplaying its dangers. A complex tightrope walk performed with great verve.</p>
<p>Libuše has been capturing her “rock-n-roll” life full of twists and turns in thousands of pictures and autoportraits. Yet the sudden photographic success after 53 years of work has not helped her to see her real self in the mirror. She is still searching for herself, the place where she belongs, as she goes through piles of negatives and diaries while working on a new book.</p>
<p>Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer, died of a degenerative muscular disease at the age of 25. His parents mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life, when they started receiving messages from online friends around the world.</p> <p>Benjamin Ree (<em>The Painter and the Thief,</em> 2020) returns to the Festival with a heartwarming and adventurous journey through the breadth of Mats Steen’s digital life and his profound impact on a community. Thoughtfully beginning with an overview of Mats’ life from the Steens’ perspective, Ree then uncovers and revives Mats’ vibrant cyberself. Narrated entries from Mats’ published blog introduce us to Ibelin, his charismatic World of Warcraft persona. Mats’ personality is revealed in a fuller dimension through reconstructed animated moments from his gameplay and interviews with people who knew him as Ibelin. Mats’ parents’ deepest remorse was the thought of their son never experiencing love and friendships, but Ree offers an endearing and innovative portrait of Mats’ abundant life through World of Warcraft, underscoring how community and soulful relationships can transcend the boundaries of the physical world.—SO</p>
<p>There are six seats in the back of the van. The passengers, though sitting right next to each other, do not always know the next person. They are women, children, old men, and occasionally, a young father. Regardless of where they come from, they share the same destination: safety. With scenes taken on his trips as a volunteer evacuation driver, filmmaker Maciek Hamela portrays heart-wrenching accounts of civilians who had to leave their homes during the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine.</p> <p>In this van, silence is punctuated by experiences of the war. A family reminisces about the cow left behind. A grandmother wipes away her tears as she sends off her grandchildren. A small girl has stopped talking since a bomb hit nearby.</p> <p>Outside the van window, the road is bumpy and the buildings are full of holes. Yet there is still warmth and hope in the midst of destruction. Two children become new friends. A surrogate mother talks about her dream of opening a café. A family reunites. Without reproducing any image of violence, In the Rearview shows the depth and resilience of humanity among traumatic moments.</p>
<p>The destruction caused by the war against Ukraine is shown in lengthy tableaux. Intercepted phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families set up a shocking parallel world. Sound and image stare each other in the face, stunned.</p>
<p>A fascinating portrait of Taiwan and its first female president Tsai Ing-wen. The country increasingly fears invasion by China, especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong. The camera is able to get remarkably close to the president in her struggle to preserve Taiwan’s hard-won democracy, a balancing act between the geopolitical forces of the US and China, which does not recognize the country’s existence as such.</p> <p>The film shows how the progressive President Tsai is elected for a second term, in a clear signal to China. Her story is interspersed with interviews with historians from home and abroad, activists and academics, who provide a fascinating analysis of circumstances on the surprisingly liberal island. Various Taiwanese people also talk about what it was like to grow up with the idea that their culture was forbidden.</p> <p>Archive footage and TV news excerpts illustrate the long history of this constantly colonized island and provide context for the current political situation, which appears to be becoming increasingly urgent and perilous.</p>
<p>A group of New York City psychics conduct deeply intimate readings for their clients, revealing a kaleidoscope of loneliness, connection, and healing.</p> <p><em>Look Into My Eyes </em>by Lana Wilson (<em>Miss Americana</em>,<em> Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields</em>,<em> The Departure</em>) gives us an intimate view of psychics in New York City. Over a series of interviews and with a camera that is not afraid to get up close and personal, Wilson highlights the ins and outs of being a psychic and what that entails, while constructing a tender portrayal of the clients. A thoughtfully paced and oftentimes deeply personal piece, it unfolds the grief, turmoil, and loneliness that come along with being a human. On the flip side, the joys of gaining clarity, achieving closure, and even having a pet are experienced. Wilson’s truly masterful work with <em>Look Into My Eyes </em>cements her as a powerhouse documentary filmmaker.—BB</p>
<p>The United States’s unrivaled maestro of observational nonfiction, Frederick Wiseman, brings his camera into a three-star Michelin restaurant in rural central France, and the results are as expansive, delectable, and provocative as one would hope. La Maison Troisgros, located in the Roanne commune in Loire, is run by head chef Michel Troisgros and his sons César and Léo. In addition to displaying the craft and skill that goes into Troisgros’s mouthwatering dishes, Wiseman takes an organic approach, bringing us to the local farms that provide the restaurant’s produce and animal products as well as behind the scenes with floor staff and administrators. The result is a patient, kaleidoscopic documentary portrait of the demand for perfection that makes for a surprising but apt subject in Wiseman’s decades-long inquiries into the inner workings of complicated institutions that function with their own rules and standards. A Zipporah Films release.</p>
<p>Leading contemporary German filmmaker Angela Schanelec (<em>I Was at Home, But…</em>, NYFF57) is singularly adept at creating dramas of unexpected catharsis via the most oblique narrative strategies. Her latest film, <em>Music</em>, pushes this approach to new levels of emotionality. Using abstract gestures and broad narrative ellipses, yet still managing to plumb the depths of its characters’ complicated traumas, <em>Music</em> tells the story of a young man and woman unknowingly united by the same violent death. Brought together by fate and horrible irony, Ion (Aliocha Schneider) and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer) first meet in prison, where he’s an inmate and she’s a guard; they kindle a romance fomented by passion for classical music and opera, followed by marriage and children. Yet as in all tragedies, the past returns to haunt them. Inspired by the Oedipus myth, Schanelec has created an alternately austere and vivid portrait of grief and redemption through art told with her distinctive compositional rigor.</p>
<p>This film made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective shows the destruction of the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities and the unlikely alliance which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval.</p>
<p>In the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas, moths are whispering something to us. In the dark of night, two curious observers shine a light on this secret universe.</p> <p>Deep in the pitch-black forest, a few hundred moths are drawn by a single source of illumination to a piece of hung canvas. Only through this intimate examination can their existence, and the happenings of their world, be made visible. Though moth life spans are measured in hours and represent only a small amount of the immense biodiversity of their species, in these small beings lies a history of our planet. With a transportive and experiential visual style and immersive sound that brings you to a place few people can travel, co-directors Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s <em>Nocturnes </em>gives us a multi-millennia vision of time nearly beyond our human-scale perception.—SS</p>
<p>In 2019, a nationwide movement forms in Chile to create a new constitution. For three years, the film accompanies Indigenous, feminist, militant, legalistic, anarchist and conservative activists. A timely large-scale canvas of democratic protest.</p>
<p>This is the story of two immigrant outsiders, Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala (At the Drive-in / The Mars Volta), and their desire to create their own place in the world. Told through intimate self-shot footage, Omar and Cedric charts the duo’s intense and profound journey of brotherhood, love, fame, betrayal and sacrifice. Tackling themes of addiction, grief and redemption, it’s an intimate portrait of lifelong friendship and a look at the world through a whole new creative prism.</p>
<p>In a Parisian hospital, Claire Simon films a ward where destinies intersect: abortion, endometriosis, assisted reproduction, maternity, gender transition, cancer... There, she collects the stories of these individuals, their hopes, their desires, but also their fears. This film follows doctors and patients at a gynecology ward in France. </p> <pre> </pre>
<p>Can people truly change? In Hanka Nobis’s engrossing observational film, she follows a 22-year-old Polish man named Antek as he goes from membership in a far-right, anti-LGBTQ group called The Brotherhood to, four years later, joining his girlfriend for a Gay Pride march he formerly protested against. What happens to Antek in those four years reveals much about the character of those who traffic in hate as a means of identification. – <em>Jaie Laplante</em> </p>
<p>Gentle or rough, blonde or shaved, cis or trans, long term inmates or those newly admitted: women re-enact their lives in a Buenos Aires prison, in trance and balance, voguing and singing. A hybrid musical and charming piece of collective empowerment.</p>
<p>When Ryuichi Sakamoto died in March 2023 at age 71, the world lost one of its greatest musicians: a classical orchestral composer, a techno-pop artist, and a piano soloist who elevated every genre he worked in and inspired and influenced music-lovers across the globe. As a final gift to his legions of fans, filmmaker Neo Sora (Sakamoto’s son) has constructed a gorgeous elegy starring Sakamoto himself in one of his final performances. Recorded in late 2022 at NHK Studio in Tokyo, this filmed concert is an intimate, melancholy, and achingly beautiful one-man show, featuring just Sakamoto and a Yamaha grand, as the composer glides through a playlist of his most haunting, delicate melodies (including “Lack of Love, “The Wuthering Heights,” “Aqua,” “Opus,” and many more). Shot in pristine black-and-white by Bill Kirstein and edited by Takuya Kawakami, this stirring film brings us so close to a living, breathing artist that it feels like pure grace. A Janus Films release.</p>
<p>In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.</p> <p>Director Johan Grimonprez (<em>Double Take</em>, 2009) returns to Sundance with this magnificent essay film that vibrantly embodies the historic and continually evolving colonial machinations that underpin what author and Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane refers to as an ever-evolving “algorithm of <em>Congo Inc</em>.”</p>
<p>Never-before-seen home movies and extraordinary personal archives reveal how Christopher Reeve went from unknown actor to iconic movie star as the ultimate screen superhero. He learned the true meaning of heroism as an activist after suffering a tragic accident that left him quadriplegic and dependent on a ventilator to breathe.</p> <p>Moving backward and forward in time, filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui expertly weave together a dual narrative exploring the life-changing impact of two pivotal moments in Christopher Reeve's career: being cast in 1978's <em>Superman</em> and becoming paralyzed in 1995. Decades before superheroes took over the cinemas, Reeve made the world believe a man could fly; his accident brought worldwide awareness of disability. In <em>Super/Man</em>, Reeve's family and close confidantes demonstrate remarkable candor in their reflections on life before and after the accident. The result is a deeply moving film foregrounding the man behind Superman — not a hagiography, but a full-fledged portrait that encompasses both the soaring heights and the dark depths of Reeve's journey.—BT</p>
<p>Filmed during the “Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour” in 2022, this documentary seamlessly weaves together exclusive archival gems with dynamic tour footage to capture the transformative journey of Canadian Merrill Nisker into the internationally acclaimed cultural powerhouse that is Peaches. From the inception of the stage show to the rigorous rehearsals and riveting performances, the film provides an intimate look at the inner workings of the tour. As a feminist musician, producer, director and performance artist, Peaches has spent over two decades challenging gender expectations, solidifying her status alongside pop and music industry icons. Her fearless originality has called social norms into question, dismantled stereotypes and confronted patriarchal power structures. Through biting wit, she advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights and tackles issues of sexual and gender and identity, leaving an indelible mark on popular culture.</p>
<p>French street artist JR (Faces Places) uses his portrait photography to draw worldwide attention to people who are often neither heard nor seen—like the inmates of the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi. Here, convicts are serving long sentences which they often received when they were still minors. These are people who may never be able to escape the impulsive mistakes of their youth.</p> <p>JR asked a group of 40 inmates to help him install a huge photo collage in the concrete prison yard. The film shows how the work draws these often seriously traumatized men out of their shells, and how members of different ethnic groups are sometimes able to have real contact with each other for the first time. By telling their stories, various detainees even manage to restore the broken relationships with their families.</p> <p>“Paper and glue, that’s what I do,” is how JR describes his working method. Above all, what he does is make connections and dispel prejudices through something as simple as photography.</p>
<p>Through Her Child’s Eyes, Patpro Will Go Through Three Periods of the History of Her Indigenous People, in the Heart of the Brazilian Forest. Tirelessly Persecuted, but Guided by Their Ancestral Rites, Their Love of Nature and Their Fight to Preserve Their Freedom, the Krahô Never Stop Inventing New Forms of Resistance.</p>
<p>In 1998, Tomoaki Hamatsu, an aspiring Japanese comedian who became known as Nasubi, participated in a reality TV program. His Sisyphean challenge: to live alone in an apartment and subsist entirely off what he could win in magazine sweepstakes until he reaches 1 million yen in prizes. As days turn to weeks and months, the program, which is live-streamed, unbeknownst to Nasubi, grows popular, and the conditions take their toll on our hero. At the dawn of the internet age, this striking film forewarns the ethical concerns of reality entertainment in the 21st century. – <em>Brandon Harrison</em> </p>
<p>A triptych of images set within a widescreen frame, <em>The Daughters of Fire </em>is a musical of ecstasy and ache featuring singers Elizabeth Pinard, Alice Costa, and Karyna Gomes as women separated from one another following the eruption of the volcanic Fogo island in Cape Verde. This short film from Pedro Costa (<em>Vitalina Varela, </em>NYFF57), whose best-known work highlights the beauty of Lisbon’s struggling immigrant communities, summons something entirely entrancing, pushing his art to rhapsodic new heights. A Cinema Guild release.</p>
<p>An 86-year-old man prowls the proscenium of a crumbling theater, his naked body stretches and bends, illuminated under glaring lights or hidden by shadow, always heaving with the weight of history. This is Wang Xilin, one of China’s leading classical composers, who becomes the passionate narrator of his life, art, and political persecution against the dramatic backdrop of Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. Whether emotionally relating the abuse suffered at the hands of the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, describing how he translated personal and historical pain into the furious abstraction of his symphonies, or simply displaying his miraculously persistent flesh, the musician is at once witness to history, grand storyteller, and physical evidence of his own torment. With director Wang Bing’s tirelessly circling, endlessly compassionate camera and the striking use of Wang Xilin’s glorious music, which buffets, buoys, or sometimes drowns out the composer’s words, <em>Man in Black</em> is an overwhelming sensory experience that speaks to the power of creation amidst human deprivation. An Icarus Films release.</p>
<p>Armed with a 360-degree camera, Argentinean director Eduardo Williams returns to the bold, time-and-continent-skipping world of his 2016 film <em>The Human Surge</em> (NYFF54) and constructs something even more immense, fearless, and breathtaking. As in that earlier film, groups of friends from different parts of the world interact in the downtime between work, drifting and existing in constant motion along with the camera. Yet Williams here pushes things even further into a kind of hypnotic abstraction, filming in Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Peru and achieving an unprecedented fluidity between spaces and feelings, natural splendor and human sensuality. Working as always without a locked script, Williams highlights the beauty of language and the sensations of people traversing liminal states of being, moving toward a kind of otherworldly queer utopia.</p>
<p>The former KGB archive in Kyiv was made public in 2017, allowing Ukrainians to view their personal dossiers from the Soviet era for the first time. For many older citizens, it was an opportunity to get answers to questions that had been haunting them for decades.</p> <p>The film’s director Walter Stokman delved into three very different cases to make this extraordinary glimpse into the methods and reach of the Russian secret service. In one case, they set up a fake military base to capture the Dutch amateur spies Reydon and De Jager. The story of Française Regine Chivrac shows the KGB’s methods also had a paranoid aspect—while visiting family in Ukraine, she started a relationship with a student who later turned out to be an informer.</p> <p>Stokman shows how the suspicion of that period echoes through the years to the present, with irreparable damage done to family relationships, a son now fighting against the Russians, and a generation of people who have been on their guard all their lives. A starring role goes to cameraman Jackó van ’t Hof’s meticulous observations in today’s Ukraine.</p>
<p>Funky Town is one of the last safe and free places in Chengdu for free-spirited young adults. But that’s about to change, because the expansion of the subway means the club, which is already surrounded by a construction site, will have to go. The Last Year of Darkness captures the lives of a handful of regulars in scenes that switch from the lyrical to the intensely real.</p> <p>These twenty-something clubbers are queer, performance artists, DJs—outsiders of every kind. They plod through the days to show off their true splendor at night. Most of their conversations are about trying to find—or create—a place for themselves in the oppressive society around them.</p> <p>We follow these young adults from the bleak daytime realities of money worries, family arguments and uncertainties, to euphoria in the darkness. In stroboscopic quick-cut scenes set to uplifting techno beats, we see the clubbers coming to life and dancing, flirting, kissing, drinking, smoking—till the inevitable moment when their dream world meets the shock of reality.</p>
<p>Filmmaker Asmae El Moudir takes an unorthodox approach for her reconstruction of a painful period in the history of her homeland Morocco, and of her own family. Her father has built a miniature replica of the house and neighborhood where she grew up. El Moudir situates family members and neighbors in this set, where they recount what happened during and after the Casablanca bread riots of 1981, which the government brutally crushed.</p> <p>We discover that El Moudir’s fragile-looking but still-savvy grandma played an important and none too savory role during this oppressive period when liquidations, arrests, and torture were commonplace. The filmmaker’s questions, combined with the intimate but artificial setting of the scale model neighborhood, impel the interviewees to relive these events. This leads to painful recollections, new insights, and sometimes catharsis.</p> <p>A forgotten history comes to life in the minutely detailed re-creation of the old houses and streets, complete with furniture, lighting and local characters.</p>
<p>A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. Blending documentary and fictionalized performances and set to an L.A. landscape/soundscape never quite seen before, this film explores a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.</p>
<p>In this new feature by Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Tamara Kotevska (<em>Honeyland</em>), Asil is a young Syrian refugee in Turkey, processing the trauma of losing her home and family.. Her story gives voice to a charming gigantic puppet named Amal, who represents millions of migrant and displaced children in a walk from the Syrian border in Turkey all the way across Europe. Escorted and animated by a group of puppeteers who are themselves refugees, Amal’s epic journey is one of compassion and discovery. – <em>Ruth Somalo</em> </p>
<p>In <strong>Avant il n'y avait rien</strong>, Yvann Yagchi finds a possible, poetically fitting way to address the longstanding conflict between Israel and Palestine. Made before the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, the film concentrates on a close friendship forged in childhood. The Palestinian filmmaker and his Israeli counterpart grew up together in Switzerland and each eventually explored their respective national and cultural pasts and identities. The best friend embraced Zionism and moved to the West Bank to live in a Palestinian Occupied Territory. Yagchi, troubled but curious, decided to make a documentary with his friend there – an opportunity to discuss, compare and argue, but in a hopefully peaceable way.<br /> <br /> But the friend soon called a halt to the project, withdrawing his collaboration. He exists in the film now only as a trace, with his face erased. Yagchi refashioned his film as an impassioned, sometimes furious letter to this absent interlocutor. In cinematic terms, the letter takes the form of a peripatetic essay, including an investigation of his own family legacy – in particular, the existence of a magnificent collection of books now falsely catalogued as "Abandoned Property" in the National Library of Israel.</p> <p>Blending live footage, animation and voice-over, the film offers a moving testament to friendship.<br /> <br /> <em>– Adrian Martin</em></p>
<p>While writing a book about the Brazilian bossa nova craze of the 1960s, music journalist Jeff Harris came across the forgotten pianist Tenório Jr. He was considered one of Brazil’s leading jazz musicians, but he mysteriously disappeared in 1976 during a tour with Brazilian poet and singer Vinicius de Moraes.</p> <p>The more people Harris questions about Tenório, the more his fascination grows, and he becomes determined to solve the mystery of Tenório’s disappearance. This means delving into the dark period when military regimes seized power in many South American countries—including Argentina, where Tenório was last seen in 1976.</p> <p>To relate the story of Harris’ quest, directors Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba (Chico & Rita) once again chose animation. This is a masterstroke, because it brings to life a colorful era of optimism and exciting music. But just as the heyday of bossa nova was abruptly ended by the Brazilian dictatorship, the best jazz pianist the country had ever known also became a victim of political violence.</p>
<p>A charismatic young woman's intelligent film about making the leap from supporting roles in German TV dramas to play the leading role in her own life. A courageous piece of performative autofiction which invents its own rules as it unfolds.</p>
<p>Frantz Fanon is a renowned politician and decolonisation activist. This feature focuses on his visionary social therapy methods during his time as a psychiatrist in Algeria from 1953 to 1956. A piece of sober anti-racism.</p>
<p>When extended reality artist Ben Joseph Andrews suffers an attack of vestibular migraine, he loses his sense of orientation, balance and spatial awareness. It also affects his experience of reality, where everything familiar suddenly seems new and different—a neurological phenomenon called “jamais vu”.</p> <p>Andrews lets you experience this sensation of jamais vu yourself with a VR headset. This distorts your reality into a black world with objects outlined in white. Sitting at a table, Andrews guides you with his voice through a series of actions with everyday objects, which suddenly feel awkward and clumsy—something as simple as leafing through a book feels strange. How does this experience affect your image of your environment, of the material world, of yourself?</p> <p>Turbulence: Jamais Vu is the first part of a series of mixed reality works that Andrews is making about the chronic condition he lives with, in an attempt to see it not as an impediment, but as a source of creativity.</p>
<p>A bipartisan group of U.S. defense, intelligence, and elected policymakers spanning five presidential administrations participate in an unscripted role-play exercise in which they confront a political coup backed by rogue members of the U.S. military, in the wake of a contested presidential election.</p> <p>Award-winning filmmakers Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber seize a unique opportunity to bring audiences tableside to a simulation that dramatically escalates the threat posed by January 6, 2021. With the grip of a thriller, <em>War Game</em> posits active-duty military breaking ranks to join an insurrection that soon spreads to other state capitals, yielding a chilling moment when it’s unclear whether the president fully commands the armed forces. The simulation’s outcome hinges on several inflection points, from the government’s capacity to counter the disinformation that’s effectively spread by the insurgent side to the potential invocation of the Insurrection Act (i.e., the last resort). While the exercise served to stress test our institutions, the film is a critical wake-up call, underscoring the urgent need for bipartisanship in safeguarding American democracy.—JN</p>
<p>Filmmaker Nouf Aljowaysir found it impossible to give a clear answer to the question “where are you from?” since she was 13, when she went to live in the US. She was born in Saudi Arabia; her family originally came from Iraq. These are not just places you can point to on a map, search for on Google or look up in Wikipedia. They are also personal memories, smells, family ties and things that simply can’t be explained in a single sentence.</p> <p>In this original and incisive video essay, Aljowaysir talks to an AI system speaking with a British accent, which asks her where she comes from and interprets her answers. The director adds personal stories and images, while the AI makes connections that reveal how Western its world view remains, with prejudices about the Middle East and limitations in terms of factual knowledge. What ensues is a personal explanation of Aljowaysir’s genealogy and life history, and a confrontational, sometimes jarring conversation about migration and identity.</p>
<p>Only through his camera is Swiss-Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler (The End of Time, Becoming Animal) able to relate to the world, study himself and the people around him, and share his insights. This also applies to his relationship with the phenomenon of time and the finite nature of our existence on earth. He is confronted by this when his mother dies and he knows that his 90-year-old father, despite his cheerful zest for life, inevitably will follow. During Mettler’s cinematographic exploration of the meaning of life and what comes before and after, the COVID pandemic breaks out, which puts everything even more sharply into perspective.</p> <p>While the Green Grass Grows consists of parts 1 and 6 of a seven-part filmic diary that unfolds unhurriedly and meditatively. Mettler asks his parents and friends his existential questions. At the same time, he focuses on nature: the Swiss Alps, where his parents come from, and the forests of his own native country, Canada. Everything flows, reproduces and continues—with great beauty, and without revealing any meaning.</p>
<p>The latest epic work of observational nonfiction from Wang Bing furthers the filmmaker’s ongoing chronicle of the economic, social, and personal upheavals happening across a transforming China. Deepening the intimacy with which he captures communities of people living amidst financial struggle and toiling for little money in exploitative conditions, <em>Youth (Spring)</em> is a remarkable account of rural migrant workers employed in textile factories in Zhili, a town outside Shanghai. Over the course of five years, Wang follows various groups of people, most of them in their twenties, as they labor over their clothes-making, interact in the cramped dormitories where they live after hours, bargain (often fruitlessly) for better wages, and create emotional bonds and relationships with one another. As the title suggests, this film is specifically about the lives of the young, forcefully and humanely depicting—with its director’s customary patience and unassuming formal rigor—the consequences of the country’s rapid growth on the minds and bodies of a new generation of workers.</p>
<p>The young generation of Iraqis has known little else but war since the US invasion. Although their daily lives differ significantly from those of Western youth, they are united in their pursuit of happiness, freedom, and safety. The film takes a hopeful look into a world little known to audiences</p>
<p>A meditative atour of three different, fascinating and distinctive Japanese listening cafés that offer an immersive, musical sanctuary amidst the chaotic streets of Tokyo.</p>
<p>Tatheer goes to police summer camp in an engaging film about a young girl who discovers she might be an action hero without even realising it. Tatheer loves cars. In fact, she has already driven her uncle’s car, even though she doesn’t have a licence yet. This week, she’s going to a police camp with a bunch of other kids aged 12-14 to learn about police work. What she arrives in is a new world of shields and helmets, guns and action. Filmmaker Ömer Sami gets up close and personal with Tatheer as she is pushed to the limit in the new world of police work, and ends up making a powerful film about daring to be yourself.</p>
<p>The story of the icon behind the monster hit 'Old Town Road' and his exhilerating journey as he defies musical boundaries and redefines what it means to be a superstar in the 21st century.</p>