Berlinale 2022

<p>Like the best films about photography, 1341 Framim makes a simple but crucial choice to put cinema in the service of still images, poising itself on the line that separates documentary from the much less frequent form of the still image film, between the evanescence and persistence of a frame. The career of Israeli photo reporter Micha Bar-Am, born in Berlin in 1930, thus becomes an assembly of iconic snapshots, enlargements and contact sheets which serve as the score for two voices: Micha, who is struggling with his memories as some remain while others fade, and his wife Orna, the assiduous curator of his archive and custodian of the memory that he is losing in his old age. However, forgetting is also a choice, given the events and atrocities Bar-Am immortalised by documenting the history of Israel including Adolf Eichmann&rsquo;s trial in 1961, the Six-Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982. But whether they&rsquo;re confronting the horrors of war or moments of family life, his pictures always reveal his ability to turn photography into a refined language of the gaze and, in the background, as the constant protagonist, a land without peace.</p>

<p>A snowbound country manor, just before Christmas in the 1950s. When the man of the house is found murdered in bed, with a knife in his back, suspicion falls on the six women who live under his roof, along with his sister and a visiting daughter. Cut off from the outside world, the victim&rsquo;s wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and daughter, along with the cook and the housemaid, try to figure out who the killer is. It turns out that each one of them had not only a motive, but also an opportunity for murder &hellip;</p>

<p>Anna is 60 and her acting heyday is now behind her. She lives on her own but has a friend and confidant in her downstairs neighbour Michel, who is also single. Reluctantly, Anna accepts a job as a language coach for 17-year-old Adrian who has a speech impediment and is something of a misfit. She recognises him as the boy who recently snatched her handbag in the street ... &ldquo;Irresistible&rdquo; is the term that springs to mind when describing this light-footed and humorous story of an impossible love affair between a thief and a lady. Director Nicolette Krebitz handles the fragile balance between the dictates of society and the heart with great care. The fresh breath of freedom blows through a narrative that makes room for a nod to old West Berlin, some gentle teasing of Germany&rsquo;s French neighbours, and even a ghost that is chased away to make way for new possibilities. But most of all, A E I O U is a passionate love letter to Sophie Rois and, perhaps through her, all the brilliant actors neglected by an industry all too fond of young blood. Well, it turns out that these young players, embodied here by newcomer Milan Herms, not only look up to their more experienced peers, they truly love them</p>

<p>Vienna, 2019 &ndash; the end of an era. The smoking ban in public places means that a part of Kaffeehaus culture has disappeared. Of all moments, this is the one that Angeliki chooses to buy an apartment with help from her interior designer, Carmen. Angeliki seems to have something against all of them: either the parquet floors creak, the tiles are the wrong colour or she is bothered by the proximity to a restaurant. How will she ever find a new home in this environment? Carmen feels like she is talking to a brick wall. Moreover, she simply cannot understand why Angeliki is refusing to part with her money.</p>

<p>A remote lake in the North American landscape. The sand is yellow, the sky is blue and the mountains distant; there is nary a tree far and wide to provide shade. Faye is spending her days here in a trailer, with two books and a radio, leisurely birdwatching and stargazing. With her wiry build, wild blonde hair and hands that speak of a life of labour, she fits in perfectly here. Anything that breaks, she simply fixes; the only time she sits up and takes notice is when there is a knock at the door. Because Faye is waiting for Lito. Their connection goes way back to their youthful love for each other, but for some years now they have also shared the pain of loss &ndash; both are widowed. Max Walker-Silverman&rsquo;s gentle, laconic film is about contemplative introspection, the power of love and the depths of melancholy. Dale Dickey&rsquo;s portrayal of Faye is a touching mixture of inner strength and fragility, which is also reflected in the impressive natural scenery and a delicate soundtrack</p>

<p>Joan Verra, independent woman and successful publisher, is driving her car one rainy night when she stares into the camera and begins to tell her story. Leaving Ireland, where she met her first love, for France, where she single-handedly raised the child from that relationship, Joan&rsquo;s dreamlike autobiography moves between partings and returns, across a network of fragmented relationships and patchy memories with her at the centre, dealing with the pain she has caused and the pain from which she has tried to shield herself. Accustomed to working with other people&rsquo;s stories, Joan finally recounts her own. Slipping away from the initial romance, her story matures alongside its protagonist, distancing itself from credibility towards an elaborate web of perception and temporal planes that strike chords of nostalgia, the comic and the surreal. With yet another performance that justifies her Honorary Golden Bear at the 72nd Berlinale, Isabelle Huppert lends her enigmatic facial expressions and rigorous poses to portray a woman who is hard to forget, as is reflected in the gazes of the two men in her life: the elusive son played by Swann Arlaud and neurotic beau and fellow-writer Tim Ardenne (Lars Eidinger).</p>

<p>Failing to bring them together, Mitra Farahani instigates a visual, sound, and written correspondence between two artists: the writer and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan, a key figure in Iranian culture, and Jean-Luc Godard, a legendary filmmaker living in Rolle. For 29 weeks, every Friday, we put ourselves on stage, not without humor and foresight.</p>

<p>The epic tales of polar explorations are littered with mysterious tragedies. In the event of success, history is written by the protagonists, but it is the failures that most interest scholars, engendering various theories about the fate of men who are unable to recount their defeats. Such was the case of the notorious Danish expedition in north-east Greenland that Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, Niels Peter H&oslash;eg-Hagen and J&oslash;rgen Br&oslash;nlund carried out between 1906 and 1908. Only Br&oslash;nlund&rsquo;s body was recovered, but the Danish claim for that unexplored territory, in contention with the United States, depended on the location of the other two, as well as their journals and maps. These geopolitical implications led to a new mission: seven men departed on the Alabama; two of them, the ambitious captain Mikkelsen (played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who also wrote the film) and the inexperienced mechanic Iversen (Joe Cole), set out repeatedly into the icy desert. But confirming the discoveries of Mylius-Erichsen and H&oslash;eg-Hagen turned out to be the easy part. The journey became an odyssey that tested the limits of survival and was to acquire legendary status of its own.</p>

<p>The perfect automation of a greenhouse where the fruit is checked and sorted using machinery. Human presence serves to fix where the machine fails &mdash; straightening the crooked, planting the delicate, and tending to the machine, unable to take care of itself.</p>

<p>As summer approaches again, ripe peaches droop in an orchard that generations of the Sol&eacute; family have been caring for. But this year is different: the air is thick with the odour of dead rabbits plaguing the crop and with the stench of a tragedy foretold. The Sol&eacute;s face their final harvest as eviction looms, and their peach trees will soon be replaced by solar panels.</p> <p>Shot entirely with nonprofessional actors in the Alcarr&agrave;s village, this semi-autobiographical work draws on the cast&rsquo;s palpable connection to the land to depict a tight-knit family reckoning with the loss of its roots&mdash;and dignity. As summer comes to a close, the film&rsquo;s gentle rhythms stir up buried grief and anxiety, yet also undeniable tenderness.</p>

<p>La Arcadia in the Colombian capital, Bogot&aacute;, is a home for teenage girls who can no longer rely on their families. Giggling, they take a seat in front of the camera, against a background of shelving containing their personal belongings. The camera glides over the shelves, which are decorated with brightly colored nameplates: Natalia, Veronica&mdash;but Alis&rsquo;s compartment is empty.</p> <p>One by one, the girls close their eyes to picture this imaginary classmate. While they reminisce, the third-person perspective of the fictional Alis allows for candid and sometimes shocking stories to emerge, which increasingly touch on their most intimate feelings.</p> <p>For five years, filmmakers Clare Weiskopf and Nicolas van Hemelryck gave film workshops to the captivating residents of La Arcadia, whose powerful personalities make their poignant stories of abuse all the more compelling.&nbsp;Alis&nbsp;received major awards at film festivals worldwide, including Berlin, Guadalajara and Sheffield.</p>

<p>Clara is 39 and is taking a PhD in philosophy. She lives in a Kreuzberg flat share while her teenage daughter lives with her ex. Clara is having a secret relationship with one of her students. Her thesis supervisor, the strong and independent Margot, provides her with professional encouragement. When Clara visits her home in provincial Mecklenburg-Vorpommern for her mother&rsquo;s birthday, she finds herself struggling with the pride and expectations but also with the rejection of her family and former companions. She begins to realise just how far she has moved away from her roots in her search for a self-determined life. But perhaps she had to move away. Because one&rsquo;s perception of home can change.</p>

<p>&ldquo;The Turgot is not a country club,&rdquo; the school&#39;s principle warns, welcoming the newcomers, &ldquo;here, we don&#39;t give in, and we don&#39;t give up.&rdquo; In the middle of Paris, young people are trained to become professional dancers and, at the same time, they are prepared for their A levels. That&#39;s the deal. The training motivates, strengthens and allows the students to surpass themselves, including overcoming setbacks. Everyone brings his or her own story: complex family relationships, problems in the social environment and in school. Through dance, the students learn to translate their experiences into physical energy. The intimately immersive camera interweaves explosive movement with moments of reflection. There are injuries and deficits, but also hopes, dreams and inner transformations.</p>

<p>Alma nestles solemnly against the tree her mother planted long before she died. Soon it will be sold, along with the rest of the plantation. Paz, her older half-sister from the city, is already sorting out the paperwork and getting the sale underway. Meanwhile, Alma is doing everything she can so that she and her grandmother can stay here, where her mother&rsquo;s memory lives on. A chapter closes for three women &ndash; and in the process, the youngest comes of age.</p>

<p>How would a photo album carefully made by a Romanian Army Regiment from WW2 look like? By a stroke of luck, we have an answer: Regiment 6 Roșiori created their photo album on the Eastern Front. So now we can see how a &quot;military gaze&quot; operates, what does it see, what does it want to keep in memory for all posterity. We have systematically broken the flow of this silent photo album with texts taken from other documents - which reveal what the photos tried to hide.</p>

<p>The world is about to end. Maya is forced to go home to the province of Zambales. There, she confronts her childhood house that terrorizes her as frogs rain outside.</p>

<p>Four siblings, a mother torn between care and helplessness, a cursing father and a wet mattress every morning: these are the things that make up quiet young C&aacute;it&rsquo;s life. Her parents decide it&rsquo;s best if she spends the summer at the farm of two relatives she has never met. Lush green trees flank the road leading up to their property, a respectful silence pervading their bright, clean house. Here, tenderly looked after by Eibhl&iacute;n, C&aacute;it finally feels loved and safe. Initial aloofness likewise starts giving way to a deeper bond between her and Se&aacute;n, with whom she feeds the calves. The mattress stays dry. And yet, in the midst of the scraggly beauty of the Irish countryside, certain secrets seem to linger, which C&aacute;it begins to face with newfound courage and confidence</p>

<p>Transfixed, she follows the movements of a group of dancers rehearsing a routine. Watching two girls kiss, she longingly bites her lower lip &ndash; yet in the mirror, she studies her own reflection with disapproval. As feelings of desire vie with insecurity and dejection, the film reveals its 16-year-old protagonist&rsquo;s emotions mainly through glances and facial expressions &ndash; her most explicit utterance being the one written on her forearm: TAKE ME DEMONS.</p>

<p>LOVE, DEUTSCHMARKS AND DEATH tells the story of the independent and largely unknown music of immigrants from Turkey and their children and grandchildren in Germany in a very lively way, full of rhythm. In the form of a documentary essay, director Cem Kaya takes his viewers into a dazzling universe of musical diversity. In a cinematic experience of the highest sound quality, he brings the energy and spirit of those years to life. E.g., the stage shows of the eccentric folk duo Derdiyoklar at a wedding with thousands of guests in a multi-purpose hall redecorated as a festival hall somewhere in the Ruhr region: melancholic, but danceable, political, but cheerful, larmoyant in expression, but sincere.</p>

<p>After arriving in heaven, Jerome goes on a search for his wife Maryline. In his search, he dives into a surreal and colourful world in which nobody seems to be able to help him.</p>

<p>Sara and Jean have been in a loving, stable relationship for ten years. They are happy. He is her rock, someone she can hold on to. When they first met, Sara was in a relationship with Fran&ccedil;ois, Jean&rsquo;s best friend. One day, Sara sees Fran&ccedil;ois on the street. He does not see her, but she is overwhelmed by a sensation that her life could suddenly change. Fran&ccedil;ois does indeed get in touch with Jean to suggest that they work together again. Before long, things are in danger of spiralling out of control.</p>

<p>Julius is an eloquent young museum attendant loved by his friends, colleagues and his girlfriend. One day he invites his fellow workers to join him for a sailing trip on his aristocratic family&rsquo;s boat. But something goes wrong. Julius is not who he seems to be.</p>

<p>When mysterious bubbles rained down in Tokyo, the city was destroyed and covered by a huge dome. Resources are scarce, and the remaining residents, especially orphaned youth, compete for food. In daring parcour battles, which includes jumping off the bubbles, Team Blue Blaze, centered around the secretive Hibiki, makes a notably good impression. When Hibiki is rescued by the mute Uta in an accident, a magical, tragic romance unfolds, inspired by H. C. Andersen&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Little Mermaid&rdquo;. Uta confronts Hibiki with a previously unknown intensity of emotions. An explosive, visually fascinating anime in which metaphysical thoughts about emergence and decay are woven.</p>

<p>A woman is standing in front of the mirror. She is beautiful and has a striking face and strong cheekbones. She is bracing herself, a last vestige of self-respect driving her on. Her body is black and blue from the marks of many years of abuse. She swathes it in the orange dress that represents her working life. In this world she is a successful influencer promoting a product line called &ldquo;Happiness&rdquo; that &ndash; as she demonstrates in her hypnotic sales pitches &ndash; is supposed to make women attractive and happy. But terror reigns at home; it even reigns in her newlywed daughter&rsquo;s house too. A self-determined life is something about which a woman in Kazakhstan dares not even dream</p>

<p>Rebeca &ldquo;Beba&rdquo; Huntt strives to come to terms with the violence that has been inscribed in her DNA for generations. Growing up in New York City as the daughter of a Black father from the Dominican Republic and a fair-skinned mother from Venezuela, she discovers and questions her own identity as an Afro-Latina as well as the role which she subsequently assumes as a student at the renowned Bard College, a predominantly white environment. Private recordings, archive material, interviews, snapshot moments, largely captured on 16mm, offer a beguilingly intimate impression in this relentless self-exploration. A massive, emotionally extreme, dense debut that Huntt worked on for eight years.</p>

<p>In 1890s St. Louis, vaudeville singer Ruby Carter is celebrated as &ldquo;the greatest sensation of our 19th century&rdquo;. Men swarm to her, including the young boxer Tiger Kid, whose trainer resorts to a ruse to end his prot&eacute;g&eacute;&rsquo;s liaison with the singer. Ruby then moves to New Orleans to work at the Sensation House tavern owned by Ace Lamont, where she finds a new gaggle of admirers. But she doesn&rsquo;t get to enjoy the diamonds showered on her for long, after Ace arranges for a thief to steal them. Ruby doesn&rsquo;t suspect that the thief is an old flame of hers ... &ldquo;It&rsquo;s better to be looked over than overlooked&rdquo;. The audience gets ample opportunity to do just that to the glamourous star during the film&rsquo;s opening number. To the tune of &ldquo;My American Beauty&rdquo;, Ruby AKA Mae West poses centre stage like a living pin-up of a butterfly, a vampire, a rose, a spider and, finally, the Statue of Liberty. Subject to restrictions by the Hays Code, the flippant &ldquo;sweetheart of the red, white, and blue&rdquo; patriotically presented herself as the &ldquo;statue of libido&rdquo;.</p>

<p>Fourteen-year-old Balli is something of a misfit. He lives with his drug-addicted mother in a squalid house and is bullied by his classmates. A stepfather who &ldquo;thought the gun wasn&rsquo;t loaded&rdquo; has left him with a glass eye. But then Balli meets three boys of his own age &ndash; Addi, Konni and Siggi &ndash; and a friendship gently develops. For the first time in his life, Balli finds that he is able to connect, especially with Addi, whose mother believes in &ldquo;the subconscious&rdquo;. Addi is fighting his own demons and, when his visions appear to indicate that Balli&rsquo;s brutal stepfather can no longer be tolerated, the boys decide to act.</p>

<p>A biography set in East and West Berlin about the life of a defiant woman who unites the political and the private in the poetry of her song lyrics. Bettina Wegner is often reduced to just one of her many songs, &ldquo;Sind so kleine H&auml;nde&rdquo; (&ldquo;Children&rdquo;) and her collaboration with Joan Baez. But here in Lutz Pehnert&rsquo;s portrait she is given the space she deserves. Taken to court at the age of 21 for protesting against the violent end of the Prague Spring, she soon became part of the lively music and literature scene around Thomas Brasch and her husband Klaus Schlesinger, all the while pursuing her critical stance as an individual and as an artist. In her husky voice, she describes &ndash; even humorously &ndash; her inner turmoil and her determination not to give up her home in the GDR, even when she was no longer wanted there. Written in 1980, her song &ldquo;&Uuml;ber Gebote&rdquo; (&ldquo;About Rules&rdquo;) serves Pehnert as a narrative thread while he uses archive material from East and West Germany, audio recordings from her trial as well as Wegner&rsquo;s own words and music to guide us through her life. In this way, the film gives a new audience the chance to discover singer-songwriter Bettina Wegner &ndash; who really only ever wanted to sing love songs.</p>

<p>As class president, Myung-eun sets up a letterbox for wishes and secrets. The twelve-year-old knows a thing or two about this; she herself has plenty of both. Her wish for recognition, for instance &ndash; from her teacher, her classmates, and from her parents. Or perhaps she simply wishes she had different parents to begin with: a mother who is more elegant and not so stingy, and a father who has an office job and doesn&#39;t get up late every day. While carefully keeping her family a secret, Myung-eun discovers an ability to connect with the world through writing competitions, pouring hours upon hours of research into each of her essays. When a new girl joins her class, she begins to realise there might be another way.</p>

<p>The boys are rehearsing a dance for their traditional initiation ceremony into adulthood; their teacher instructs them. A girl observes the scene but is not allowed to join in. When one of the boys chases after a strange bird, she follows him without knowing why. One day, the boy will no longer be able to see the bird either.</p>

<p>African fashion model Alexandra Cartier meets Jorge Luis Borges in a visionary experience. What does the famous Argentine modernist writer have to say about our contemporary ecological and pandemic problems?</p>

<p>His T-shirt caked with mortar, Alex takes a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. The other apprentices are laughing, throwing punches and showing off their fighting moves. They try to draw him into their game, but his thoughts seem elsewhere &ndash; not even his girlfriend can get through to him. Alex is searching for answers and he withdraws from the expectations of those around him. He eventually finds himself, at ease among a group of complete strangers.</p>

<p>Blue skies , the ocean, people walking across an imposing square, Laura&rsquo;s cousin laughing into the video camera: with holiday footage taken many years ago, far removed from all the recent images of war, a Scottish-Syrian filmmaker tells the story of her family&rsquo;s regular trips to Syria to visit their relatives in Damascus. It has now been more than ten years since she last saw her cousin. Hoping to reconstruct a positive image of the past, she clicks the call icon.</p>

<p>In her lecture &ldquo;Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression,&rdquo; filmmaker Nina Menkes dissects the use of the visual idiom of film as an instrument of the heterosexual male gaze. The sections of this startling lecture that form the framework for this documentary are illustrated with about 175 clips, as well as interviews with filmmakers such as Catherine Hardwicke and Julie Dash, and film theoretician Laura Mulvey, whose famous essay on the male gaze is at the heart of Menkes&rsquo;s analysis.</p> <p>Drawing on scenes from classics such as&nbsp;<em>Raging Bull</em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Lost in Translation</em>, as well as cult films including&nbsp;<em>Superfly</em>, Menkes shows how women are systematically filmed differently than men&mdash;an example being how framing and lighting are repeatedly used to position women as passive objects of lust. Menkes argues that this persistent approach to representing women in fiction is far from harmless. By connecting the dots between gender discrimination on the work floor and sexual and other forms of violence against women, she reveals the all-too real impact of that ubiquitous portrayal.</p>

<p>Brothers Mitya and Andrey want nothing more than to conquer the skies flying jets. To achieve this, they undergo Russian military pilot training. The twins watch out for each other &ndash; in every situation. If one fails a theory test, the other steps in. In practical exercises, it is the other way around: when Mitya&rsquo;s vestibular system falters, Andrey assists him in his training. Cutting the cord becomes a challenge: the aptitude test is coming up and the accompanying test flights turn out to be an extreme experience for everyone. Their flight instructor (also a pilot in real life) is not the only one to recognise that adhesive forces of a different kind prevail between the brothers.</p>

<p>In 1896 Hamburg, work on the docks is hard and labour unrest is brewing. Management is deaf to demands for higher pay. The situation reaches a boiling point and the dockworkers call a strike. One of the movement&rsquo;s organisers is particularly hard hit. He lives in a neighbourhood that is a warren of alleyways, with his bedridden wife, elderly mother, and small daughter. On Christmas Eve, he is arrested and hauled to the police station, where he faces off against his brother &ndash; a police sergeant and representative of the class enemy &hellip; Made on the eve of the global economic crisis, Werner Hochbaum&rsquo;s look back at the failed Hamburg dockworkers&rsquo; strike is a reminder of the achievements in social welfare that the trade unions and social democracy forces brought about in the Weimar Republic. Hochbaum&rsquo;s feature debut was financially supported by both the unions and the Social Democratic Party. Its documentary passages provide authenticity and at the end &ndash; just as on the Battleship Potemkin &ndash; a colourised red flag flutters in the wind. &ndash; World premiere of the digitally restored version with new music by Martin Gr&uuml;tter, played by the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Raphael Haeger.</p>

<p>M&aacute;rcia is a social media pro and knows all the best poses and filters for perfect selfies. Her son Fl&aacute;vio helps her to take photos of herself. This is how she manages to hook up with famous rapper Da Reel Chullz on Instagram. She is not about to turn him down when he asks her out on a date &ndash; even if no one can be found to look after Fl&aacute;vio. A refreshing portrait of a single mother who knows how to work things out</p>

<p>Benedetta, 15, lives in rural Italy with her parents and her two little sisters. After work, her father enjoys tinkering with cars while her mother takes out her frustration on Benedetta. When a funfair sets up on the family&rsquo;s doorstep, she meets a fairground worker named Amanda who lives a self-determined life and defies gender norms. Benedetta is immediately fascinated by the older Amanda&rsquo;s self-confidence and independence, and school quickly fades into the background. The two barely talk; their cautious friendship is not one fuelled by grand emotions but rather by genial affection, curiosity and unspoken acknowledgement.</p>

<p>A 1968 housewife joins an underground collective that helps women obtain safe abortions during a time when it was illegal.</p>

<p>A young indigenous Bunong woman and her older brother spend one last day in their rural village in northeastern Cambodia, before an impending move to the capital city in search of a more prosperous life.</p>

<p>Amaia and Javi have just had their first child. Amaia&rsquo;s parents &ndash; the friendly Koldo and the energetic Bego&ntilde;a &ndash; are visiting to help the young family for a few days. After their departure, the new parents try to balance the new challenges and their professional obligations. But when Javi disappears for weeks at a time for work, Amaia finds herself having to manage on her own. Exhausted and at the end of her tether, she seeks refuge at her parents&rsquo; house where she hopes to find some support. But Bego&ntilde;a falls ill, and the family dynamics begin to change.</p>

<p>Phantasms and screens&mdash;enter the burrows of a teenager&rsquo;s psyche in this bracingly original hybrid film by French auteur Bertrand Bonello.</p> <p>An 18-year-old spends the pandemic lockdown trapped with her thoughts, FaceTiming friends, and consuming YouTube videos by an alluring life guru peddling bizarre devices as well as ideas on how to &ldquo;live better&rdquo;. Different realities and worlds, desires and projections, bleed into one another in a fever dream where meaning is but a thwarted attempt at existence.</p> <p>Bookended by a letter to the filmmaker&rsquo;s own teenage daughter, Coma was produced during the lockdown which spurred even greater creativity in terms of formal experimentation with the use of animation and found footage. Resisting interpretation, Coma is a daring work that reveals the impossibility of a totalising reality&mdash;especially in a teenage girl&rsquo;s head.</p>

<p>Sasha doesn&rsquo;t want to cry. She&rsquo;s deeply angry at her mother for taking her own life. To escape a similar fate, the 13-year-old compiles a survival list. First up: cut off her long hair. Second: don&rsquo;t read any more books. Third: never take care of something that&#39;s alive. And fourth: become a stand-up comedian to make her papa laugh again. On her way, Sasha can count on the support from friends and family, even if they can&rsquo;t always follow her moves, like when she tells one of her bad jokes. Sanna Lenken once again demonstrates a sensitive feeling for the emotional life of her protagonist and allows grief and anger to be transformed by real humour, and an old earworm.</p>

<p>Ben plants a tree on the street in front of his house in Neve Sha&rsquo;anan, a migrant neighbourhood in the south of Tel Aviv. The district is on the up, and Ben has bought and upgraded a flat here together with his partner Raz. This gay couple now enjoys a settled existence, their days are structured by a well-established routine and everything is in its proper place. Time then, to tackle their desire to have children. And so, assiduously and conscientiously, they set about searching for a suitable egg donor and surrogate mother. One day, when a neighbourly conflict escalates over the tree he has planted, Ben becomes witness to brutal police violence against an Eritrean. The incident upsets his self-image and his plans for a life together with Raz.</p>

<p>While the bear parents are away, their cubs stay at home with the sheep. The bear cubs play merrily with a ball of yarn, but soon get all tangled up, and everything is turned upside down! The film is based on the traditional Latvian lullaby &ldquo;Hush Hush Little Bear&rdquo;.</p>

<p>Das Kino Projekt is a traveling movie theater screening an archive of amateur analog film, on Super 8 and 16mm, side by side with video works from international visual artists and filmmakers. It is an on-site installation investing in new and temporary locations as it travels from one city to another. Following in-depth research of the respective city&rsquo;s cinema history, the Kino takes on the name of a former movie theatre that was closed down, demolished, or transformed</p>

<p>Matt sneaks his late dad&rsquo;s car out of the garage one last time, with best friend and little brother in tow. The Datsun will be gone tomorrow, sold. Dusk bathes the vast landscape in a hazy light, as papa&rsquo;s music drones away on the stereo. On the road, anger, grief and the police accelerate the farewell trip. Director Mark Albiston returns to Generation with this wild ride through the night, wherein protagonist Matt tries to recover some sense of self.</p>

<p>Berlin, 1942. A young Jewish man, Cioma Sch&ouml;nhaus, refuses to let the Nazis take away his love of life. When he discovers his talent for forging documents &ndash; especially passports &ndash; he sees this as the ideal way to help not only himself but also others escape deportation. Thanks to his knack for creating new identities, he dares to venture out of hiding and navigates round the authorities with inventiveness and charm. He and his friends Det and Gerda are hiding in plain sight. Cioma even catches a fragile glimpse of love in seemingly hopeless times. But the more lives the trio saves, the more the noose tightens around them.</p>

<p>Judge Cornelia Porter makes an enemy of a newspaper tycoon when she awards his wife large alimony payments during the divorce proceedings. To get his revenge, the publisher agrees to sic reporter Jeff Sherman on the judge. The plan is to seduce Porter, opening her up to blackmail by embroiling her in a public scandal involving Sherman&rsquo;s planned marriage. He follows her to the seaside resort where she is vacationing, where the upright judge initially rebuffs Sherman&rsquo;s advances. But by posing as an artist, he manages to exploit her love of sculpture. Far from her usual professional habitat, Judge Porter displays a &ldquo;typically feminine&rdquo; weakness. After Sherman flatteringly calls her glamourous, she checks herself out in the mirror &ndash; providing Rosalind Russell with a perfect opportunity to show off her physical comedy chops. Although she manages to rise above false compliments, she proves powerless against Sherman&rsquo;s insinuations of love &ndash; with the central gag of this romantic comedy being that even the man whispering sweet nothings ends up succumbing to them.</p>

<p>Devil&rsquo;s Peak reflects on recent unprecedented shifts in the socio-cultural fabric of the artist&rsquo;s homeland of Hong Kong and a nagging anxiety that hangs over daily life in the former British Colony. Highly condensed glimpses of cityscapes and everyday life form a collage of overlapping poetic narratives and coded references. The film cycles through ominous sites of social tension, lush urban spectacle, relics of imperialist legacies, and places of personal significance&mdash;such as the artist&rsquo;s 500-year-old ancestral village&mdash;at a rapid, frenetic pace. By interrogating highly subjective experiences in the context of a seemingly insurmountable change in the political and cultural fabric of his native city, Liu creates a site of remembrance for a time and place that may never be as it was.</p>

<p>Is it ok to play funeral with your grandmother while she&rsquo;s sleeping? Not according to Greta&rsquo;s granny. But the girl can&rsquo;t think of anything better to do, seeing as granny isn&#39;t exactly animated when she&rsquo;s awake either. Always scolding: &quot;Don&rsquo;t touch the matryoshka dolls! Don&rsquo;t paint the black-and-white photos!&quot; What&rsquo;s left after death? You can&rsquo;t have good memories without sharing nice moments. The expressively animated duo tackles this dilemma.</p>

<p>For some, a dirndl is just a pretty, colourful dress with an apron; for others, it is a symbolically charged provocation. Just like items of clothing, places can also be contaminated. The narratives constructed around them are constantly changed and adapted by private family histories and historical circumstances &ndash; and with each generation, a new reading is superimposed on these layers. This Super 8 film dives deep down into the idyll of Austria&rsquo;s Lake Grundlsee to reveal the chasms that lie beneath.</p>

<p>Diva is a fan letter to Diva Cat Thy, a Vietnamese transwoman, street food vendor, and performer, who openly shares her life and struggles daily on social media. Trying to bridge distances of both geography and language, the French director uses found footage posted online by Diva and her community to get in touch with her. He has never met her, cannot travel to Vietnam due to COVID-19 restrictions, and relies on his boyfriend, an Australian of Vietnamese origins, who helps translate the footage and acts as an intermediary. In a conversation constructed through subtitles and surtitles, the film not only reveals the filmmaker&rsquo;s adoration for Diva, but also his and his partner&rsquo;s process of understanding and making meaning of Diva&rsquo;s life as well as their own in relation to it. Diva&rsquo;s life, on the streets of Saigon as a transitory street food vendor, online as a social media celebrity, and on stage as a bingo singer and circus performer, is interwoven with the processes of looking at (or watching) her and of translation, as well as with a reflection about queer identity, distance, intimacy, and incoherent histories. Diva is a fleeting moment in a woman&rsquo;s life, one that promises to reach out to a wider queer and solidarity community, blurring the spheres of the online and the real.</p>

<p>The camera hovers, lost in reverie as voices and sounds waft through the gutted rooms of a building. Archive footage is sometimes projected onto unplastered walls and at others used as a soundtrack as we continue our tour. This is the legendary Chelsea Hotel, famous as the preferred abode of New York&rsquo;s bohemia from the 1950s to the 1980s. Here, bourgeois society&rsquo;s misfits &ndash; sex workers, poets, queers and artists &ndash; were able to find cheap accommodation and form alliances. In this documentary, the remaining tenants from that era grant access to their flats and give us an insight into their lives. They are the focus of a film that interweaves the present with the ghosts of the past. The completion of eight years of luxury refurbishment ahead of the building&rsquo;s reopening as a hotel is eagerly awaited by some residents and dreaded by others.</p>

<p>In a remote mountain village, the still young love of Anna and Marco is put to serve a test. As a result of the brain tumor, Marco increasingly loses his impulse control. In the tense relationship between the village community and the effects of Marco&rsquo;s illness, Anne tries to preserve a love that in the end outshines even death.</p>

<p>An explosion at a police training camp in Afghanistan leaves instructor Saskia Harder traumatised. Surrounded by the garish clouds of smoke grenades, she realises that she has not been able to save anyone in her troop. Back in Germany, she resumes her job as a police detective in the criminal investigation department. As a precaution, she is assigned the supposedly unspectacular case of a mummified corpse that has turned up on the moor in provincial Friedland. Harder immerses herself in her work, trying all the while to repress her memories. Her investigations into unsolved missing persons cases in the area open old wounds, both in Friedland&rsquo;s history and in her own past. And then a bomb from the Second World War is found and has to be destroyed in a controlled explosion. It is located of all places in front of a manor house belonging to Lorenz von H&uuml;ning, whose daughter Bea disappeared a long time ago.</p>

<p>Since 2013, the AfD has become the leading party of the German populist right. Focusing on its leaders, the film examines the political intrigues and strategies implemented to broaden its electoral base, particularly during the health crisis and leading up to the 2021 general election. A disturbing look at the heart of a German far right in its recovery.</p>

<p>When Rosa is expected to hand her boss the suntan lotion on a deer hunt, this feels like a sign. Don Reynaldo&rsquo;s ranch is about to celebrate its farm anniversary, but this passionate hunter&rsquo;s image is built on a lie. And so, here in the countryside, where men are men, employees are grateful subjects and women diligently and docilely hold it all together, cracks begin to appear in the social life of this microcosm. Ordered around day in and day out, unnoticed by those in her class-conscious surroundings, the menial Rosa gradually becomes an agent of change. While Don Reynaldo&rsquo;s extended family contorts itself in a bid to save the old order, men begin to arrive at the farm in pickup trucks. Their appearance at the feast and a threat are enough to make the ageing patriarch fear for his life and his family &ndash; and force him to act. All that passes is observed by the animals who, either as trophies on the wall or as livestock out to pasture, seem to sense the end of an old hegemony.</p>

<p>Neymar&#39;s world is based on four pillars: his family, mainly his grandmother, that accomplice figure, storyteller, partner in mischief, the one that gives him the smile that his mother seems not to have time for, much less an absent father. ; his love for horse racing that takes him to the racetrack every weekend and extends throughout the week in his games and fantasies; religion, the one that he does not fully understand but that he accepts as a family legacy while preparing himself by attending catechism; and his own imagined universe of street games embraced by the complicity and joy of familiar and spontaneous dealings with any of the inhabitants of his small town. Four pillars on which Neymar&#39;s world is founded and sustained. Four even columns, essential. Stable?<br /> <br /> The Realm of God is a beautiful film narrated from a character as endearing as powerfully acted. The self-confidence, the innocence, the capacity for surprise, the freedom lived in some physical streets that are known and some corners that only he sees and lives in his head... It is difficult to imagine what is scripted and what is improvised in a masterful performance precisely for this reason, for the authenticity of a character who alone sustains the weight of an apparently simple film that delves into a childhood universe broken with regret and forever, when life shakes that terrain of childhood that we believe to be the safest and most eternal place.</p>

<p>Distant lights reveal the outline of a city. Illuminated ships cross the water with sleeping people on board and the night appears to become liquid.</p> <p>The sower of stars wakes them and travels with them through the city. They talk about this and that &ndash; and say goodbye to everything.</p>

<p>Businesswoman Mich&egrave;le Leblanc is brutally raped in her own house by a masked intruder. When she starts getting obscene e-mails, she suspects the rapist is someone she knows. As the daughter of a mass murderer, she rejects the idea of going to the police &ndash; and begins her own pointed cat-and-mouse investigation, which leads her attacker into revealing himself. She begins an erotic game with the man, who has no idea that Mich&egrave;le is following a risky plan &hellip; Isabelle Huppert moves through this unsettling thriller with a solid aura of autonomy, like an avatar in one of the video games that her company develops. A fearless heroine, she deals with family crises and professional problems as the plot moves towards the final confrontation with her tormentor. She plays an ambivalent character with an uncertain moral compass &ndash; a victim who has what it takes to become a perpetrator. With her performance, Huppert helped director Paul Verhoeven, often criticised for his provocative depictions of sex and violence, to a multitude of awards. She herself was nominated for an Oscar.</p>

<p>In New York amid rousing New Year&rsquo;s Eve celebrations to ring in 1900, police captain Jim McCarey tells con artist Peaches O&rsquo;Day that she should leave town, because the chief of police wants her arrested. But with the help of a wealthy well-wisher, she&rsquo;s soon back. Taking to the cabaret stage disguised as &ldquo;Mademoiselle Fifi&rdquo;, she catches the amorous eye of police chief John Quade. When she rebuffs his advances, he orders McCarey to shut down the show and, when McCarey defies the order, Quade takes his badge. Peaches manages to get hold of files compromising the corrupt chief and urges McCarey to run against him for the office of mayor ... &ldquo;He&rsquo;s the kind of a man I want, I mean for mayor!&rdquo; In her final film for Paramount Studios, Mae West played it remarkably chaste. Her innate sensuality, usually expressed in verbal innuendo, is here accentuated by the 17 extravagant gowns designed by fashion star Elsa Schiaparelli. The couturier, in turn, contributed to the fetishization of West&rsquo;s body by designing the bottle for her perfume Shocking to resemble the film star&rsquo;s figure.</p>

<p>From the first moments, there can be no doubt that this is a Rithy Panh film. His signature is unmistakable&mdash;we recognize the handmade, static figures and dioramas from&nbsp;<em><a href="https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/9a4981de-6714-41d7-92e1-439a0ed7289c/the-missing-picture" target="_blank">The Missing Picture</a></em>&nbsp;(2013), the first Cambodian film to be nominated for an Oscar. And as in&nbsp;<em><a href="https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/6bba32c1-10ad-4b63-a836-f78f9c0f020f/irradiated" target="_blank">Irradiated</a></em>&nbsp;(2020), Panh bombards the viewer with the horrors of the 20th century.&nbsp;<em>Everything Will Be OK</em>&nbsp;is a dystopian vision &agrave; la&nbsp;<em>Animal Farm</em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Planet of the Apes</em>, with nightmarish sound design and a poetically political commentary.</p> <p>In a near future, during a pandemic, the animals have taken over. They treat humans in a way they learned from humans themselves, as we see through sometimes disturbing archive footage&mdash;from dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot; from the horrors of factory farming, which we see repeated on countless screens. Panh overlays this with cinematic references alluding to film classics such as&nbsp;<em>2001&nbsp;</em>and&nbsp;<em>Metropolis</em>. The ironic title cites the T-shirt of democracy activist Kyal Sin, who was killed by Myanmar police in 2020.</p>

<p>In Kigali, Rwanda, a struggling masseuse is devastated by the death of her teenage son while a woman contemplates becoming an organ donor to save her father. Meanwhile, a small-time thief drags his son into his increasingly violent schemes.</p>

<p>Fire Emergencies is firefighter Derron Everson stating the most requested emergencies in the city of Columbus Ohio.</p>

<p>Peter Strickland&rsquo;s fifth feature takes place in an art residency led by an upper-class aesthete who has invited a culinary collective to perform their &ldquo;sonic catering&rdquo; practice for a month. Hired to report on their creative process, a Greek writer begins to suffer from indigestion, to which the institution&rsquo;s sarcastic doctor responds by advising him to &ldquo;let food be his medicine&rdquo;. While his intestinal disorders force him to acknowledge his own malaise, the collective is undermined by internal quarrels as well as external assaults from a group of sardonic, rejected candidates. This may all sound frivolous, but it is quite the opposite, since the film broaches not only a culinary problem but also a question about art. Films have rarely taken food intolerances and human consumption so seriously, or so literally, and certainly not to such hallucinatory and nightmarish ends. With its inimitable, precise and colourful gestures, Strickland&rsquo;s gory comedy reconnects the image with those organic processes that art usually deems to be impure and unacceptable. Not as a provocation, but to remind us that the imagination should not be seen as separate from the natural realm. As the writer puts it at the outset: &ldquo;Every day at the Sonic Catering Institute begins with a walk in the park&rdquo;.</p>

<p>Fernanda returns to her uncle&rsquo;s ranch in Goi&aacute;s in mid-western Brazil after an absence of many years, bringing the ashes of her deceased adoptive mother back home. Her appearance and her search for the truth about her roots shake the fa&ccedil;ade of her middle-class family. For her landowner uncle, a conservative mayor of the local municipality who is campaigning for re-election, Fernanda&rsquo;s investigations and accusations are rapidly becoming a threat. But she remains unyielding in her bid for truth and justice.<br /> In her surreal, fantastical debut, Fl&aacute;via Neves masterfully interweaves the search for one&rsquo;s own origins with Brazil&rsquo;s colonial past. At the heart of this family drama is the confrontation with antiquated traditions, exploitative relationships and with those who profit from them. Fogar&eacute;u depicts an inspiring attempt to break out of hardened structures as well as the hope for a new beginning.</p>

<p>Ram and Maya have moved thousands of miles from their home in Nepal in the hope of realising their dream in New York City. As Ram works to finish his feature film, Maya, normally an actor by profession, receives a job offer that puts a strain on their relationship and calls into question what they are willing to sacrifice to continue their lives as international filmmakers.</p>

<p>Jean Christy is a reporter to the core. So when she learns that the publisher is planning to shut down the newspaper, she takes him to task without a second thought. She manages to talk publisher Pat Buckley into re-hiring the editor-in-chief he detested, Bob Lansford. But Bob is a wily PR man who uses his journalistic omnipotence to further a private smear campaign against a millionaire who, unfortunately, just happens to be the grandfather of Pat&rsquo;s fianc&eacute;e Lorri, who promptly kicks the publisher to the curb. Bob convinces Pat that Jean Christy is in love with him, all the while flirting strategically with Lorri. The men are clueless to the fact that Jean has never had any doubt about who the right man is for her ... &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t wear pants, but I&rsquo;m a newspaperman&rdquo;, the reporter says, expressing perfectly Rosalind Russell&rsquo;s penchant for roles that place her squarely on male territory. In this tumultuous comedy of errors, she uses her investigative talents to succeed where the millionaire&rsquo;s bloodhounds regularly fail &ndash; in tracking down Bob, played by Errol Flynn of Robin Hood fame. It was a kind of dry run for her star turn as the reporter Hildy in His Girl Friday.</p>

<p>Alone at home, Robin explores her own body with eager curiosity. But when hanging out with her best friend Merel, she keeps others at a distance, prodding them with her eyes only. She takes it all in: Merel&rsquo;s easy exuberance, kisses by the lake, boys full of bravado, two bodies intertwining on the dance floor. In moments of lust and tenderness captured in intimate close-ups, director Nicole Jachmann&rsquo;s protagonist is more than a mere observer, navigating desire on her own terms.</p>

<p>Young Ganga is tricked by her boyfriend with the promise of a film career and persuaded to leave the countryside for Mumbai. Once there, she is sold to a brothel in Kamathipura &ndash; India&rsquo;s main red-light district in the 1950s &ndash; where her resistance is broken and she is coerced into servicing clients. But Ganga&rsquo;s rebellious spirit endures. She may have no choice but to accept her circumstances but she can at least bend them in her favour. She becomes the feared Gangubai, champion of prostitutes who, allied with the neighbourhood Mafiosi boss, will be the first woman to raise her voice to advocate for the rights of sex workers&rsquo; and their children. Her path of emancipation and courage in a profoundly chauvinistic and narrow-minded society leads to an encounter with Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India.</p>

<p>Winter has descended on a mountain village in Northern Iran. Still in serious condition, Ehsan&rsquo;s brother returns from the hospital as snow falls. While the mysterious apparition of a deer in the nearby forest causes a stir in town, Ehsan grows more and more worried about his brother. An ancient legend tells of an angel of death that takes on different forms. When the deer appears at the window in the dead of night, Ehsan sets off to save his brother.</p>

<p>Gazing&hellip; Unseeing speculatively envisions a dystopian future scenario of an Egyptian city post-disaster. Floods have taken over the West Sahara, setting off a string of corporate and governmental measures to control the rioting population. The film is based on an interview with an imagined fugitive. Through different positions, ideological turns, and questions on economic sovereignty, the interview imagines the future of the greens&rsquo;, governments&rsquo;, and private sectors&rsquo; relations to infrastructure, privatization, ecology, surveillance, and migration.</p>

<p>The life of the meek and patient 14-year-old Daniel, who only wants to please everyone, is characterised by violence and emotional coldness. His domineering brother uses him to run errands and leaves him to care for his terminally ill and bitter father, who longs for his own end but does not dare to commit the final act himself. In the forest, Daniel meets Marcel, an outcast who has returned to this isolated village after many years away and ekes out a living organising dog fights. Both are receptive to the comforting silence of the forest and share a strong affinity with nature. This unites them, and Daniel believes he has found a friend.</p>

<p>Hollywood star Mavis Arden has a clause in her contract prohibiting her from marrying for five years. So her press agent Morgan worries about her secret dinner with a congressional candidate and alerts the press, hoping to scare off her beau with a scandal. Their next assignation is thwarted when Mavis&rsquo; Rolls Royce breaks down on tour. She and Morgan end up in a rural boarding house, where Mavis turns her lustful eyes on the hunky car mechanic. And like the character she most recently played in &ldquo;Drifting Lady&rdquo;, she breaks her rival&rsquo;s heart. But unlike in the film-within-a-film, real life proffers up a happy ending ...</p>

<p>Bawdy saloon singer Cleo Borden contracts to marry a cattle rustler if he deeds her his oil-rich land. When he is suddenly killed, Cleo inherits his oilfields and fortune. But no amount of wealth can help her win the affections of gentlemanly land surveyor Edward Carrington. When he travels to Buenos Aires for race season, Cleo follows. She manages to increase her fortune when a horse she owns wins a race, but remains shut out of Carrington&rsquo;s world of moneyed aristocracy. She enters into a marriage of convenience with the bankrupt son of a Lady. Her mother-in-law is determined to wreck the marriage and joins forces with a Russian gigolo to try to ruin Cleo&rsquo;s reputation ... &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a good woman for a bad man.&rdquo; Cleo&rsquo;s rise in the social ranks is represented by her transformation from saloon to opera singer, as she strives to impress high society. An aria from Samson and Delilah is the perfect choice, showing off Mae West&rsquo;s penchant to fully inhabit characters whose aim is to send even the strongest men into a swoon. But West indicates how unimpressed she herself was with the cultural capital that Cleo amasses, as she serves up a pure camp portrayal</p>

<p>Somewhere in Northern Myanmar, twelve-year-old Hung Hsia wears a dazzling red wedding dress &ndash; the same colour as the blood that now drips from the slit throat of a rooster. The bird and the Burmese girl stood before the altar a moment ago, as newlyweds &ndash; the former as a stand-in for the absent Chinese husband, a stranger to whom Hung-hsia has been promised. Soon she must move to his country to join him.</p>

<p>Nancy Stokes, a 55-year-old retired teacher, has never experienced an orgasm, or any satisfying sex at all. Her marriage was stable but stale and her late husband was the only man she had ever slept with. To make things right, Nancy takes the leap and hires the services of Leo Grande, a sex worker &ndash; or &ldquo;sex therapist,&rdquo; as he puts it &ndash; in his twenties. But her plan is complicated by a seemingly insurmountable collection of inner barriers and taboos.</p>

<p>Nadja&rsquo;s body is broken. Her toes are bleeding and she has eczema on her neck that looks like bruises. All the hard work she has put in as a ballerina is making itself felt and nowadays she spends her time teaching young girls how to dance. She was still a girl herself when she had a son, Mario, whom she left with her mother. Mario spends his time training his body every day at the gym. He has not seen his mother for a very long time. It is said that Nadja does not have a motherly bone in her body. But then, one day, she turns up on his doorstep, wanting to take an interest in her son. When she sees his body, she wants to touch him. And does so, more and more often.</p>

<p>New York hotel manicurist Regi Allen comes from poverty and has resolved to marry a rich man. She doesn&rsquo;t realise that her best customer, a millionaire in a wheelchair, has developed feelings for her. Instead, she hooks up with Ted, the happy-go-lucky scion of a family that lost all its money in the stock market crash. Although he confesses to her that he needs to marry for money and is engaged to the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Regi allows the spoiled layabout to take up residence on her living room sofa. While Ted&rsquo;s fianc&eacute;e sees in Regi an unwelcome rival, the manicurist&rsquo;s rich customer considers proposing marriage ... Hands Across the Table was made under Paramount&rsquo;s newly-installed head of production, Ernst Lubitsch.</p>

<p>On a remote coast of the Russian Arctic in a wind-battered hut, a lonely man waits to witness an ancient gathering. But warming seas and rising temperatures bring an unexpected change, and he soon finds himself overwhelmed.</p>

<p>Lidija does not have an easy job, but she goes about it, assertively and efficiently, 24/7. As the go-to girl working for a dubious real estate company, her brief includes everything from evicting people from their flats to working hand-in-glove with her boss to cheat and bribe. She currently finds herself on a major building site supervising a group of illegal construction workers and making sure that everything looks good to the outside world. But while she is putting on a brave face demonstrating to TV cameras how the firm is complying with European safety standards, in reality there is a rebellion afoot. Derided by the others as a yes-man, foreman Braco is sidelined as a worker nicknamed the &ldquo;professor&rdquo; becomes the real authority, leading the labourers in their struggle against subjugation and constant humiliation. Theirs is a fight to the death in which Lidija, too, must finally decide whose side she is on.</p>

<p>Kendal Browning not only loves her job as secretary, she&rsquo;s also in love with her boss, Stephen Dexter. So she&rsquo;s not happy about his seasonal habit of pursuing blondes whenever spring fever strikes him. His latest romantic entanglement is with model Phyllis Walden. When Stephen&rsquo;s concrete company is threatened with a hostile takeover, his lawyers advise getting married and putting his assets in his wife&rsquo;s name. But when he sends Kendal to tender his marriage proposal to Phyllis, the secretary is prepared to use devious means to thwart the romance. Kendal presents the proposal in such a way that Phyllis can only reject it &ndash; forcing Stephen to say &ldquo;I do&rdquo; to his secretary. Any chance of newlywed harmony comes to an abrupt end when Kendal confesses her scheme to Stephen. Initially setting his sights on a quick divorce, he then realises that his bride owns all his assets, which she uses to hang on to the man of her dreams ...</p>

<p>A newspaper editor uses every trick in the book to keep his ace reporter ex-wife from remarrying.</p>

<p>It begins with an argument. A river of tears bursts its banks and washes the heroine away into a surreal world where symbols, references and personal experiences dance together. A baby learns to play the flute from a goose before becoming a girl and using the flute to drink up the river and swallow her teacher, the goose. A bone remains with which she draws herself a belly that gives birth to little creatures that suckle, swim, scream and explode and do all the other things that new-born babies do. In a pastel-coloured frenzy, the filmmaker traces the development from being an infant to an adult woman and artist.</p>

<p>&ldquo;Stretching and blurring the boundaries of video essay, experimental film and home movie, traces of a 1950&rsquo;s homemade melodrama by amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin intermingle with a mournful homage to the author&rsquo;s granmother and her vacated home. A powerful m&eacute;lange of cinematic and domestic spaces, part and present.&rdquo; &ndash; Kevin B Lee</p>

<p>From carny caravan to luxury apartment. Tira starts out as a sideshow performer on the carnival circuit and develops a stellar career as lion tamer. Among her many admirers in New York is wealthy Kirk Lawrence, who is, however, already engaged to be married. Tira doesn&rsquo;t give up on grabbing him until his business partner and friend Jack Clayton asks nicely &ndash; and the two fall in love. But when Tira&rsquo;s past raises its ugly head in the form of pickpocket and former boyfriend Slick Wiley, who pretends to be her lover, Clayton calls off the wedding. Tira takes Jack to court to defend her honour</p>

<p>&ldquo;I&#39;m a tiger!&rdquo; Vanja creeps through the jungle with a hiss. Attack! The living room lamp tumbles to the floor, the room is enveloped in menacing darkness. But it will take more than that to turn the little tiger into a chicken: before things inside the flat can get boring, Vanja is back on the prowl. Outside in the courtyard at dusk, fantasy blends with reality, as shadows morph into terrifying monsters. Fortunately, Vanja is a tiger!</p>

<p>"If From Every Tongue it Drips" is a film that uses the framework of quantum physics to explore the ways that personal relationships and political movements at once transcend and challenge time, space, identity and location.</p> <p>The film follows the lives of a couple living in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, one of whom writes Rekhti, a form of 19th century, Urdu, queer poetry; the other, the camera operator. As their personal lives unfold on camera, the lines between rehearsal and reality, location and distance, self and other dissipate and reinforce one another. Simultaneously, through poet and camera operator&rsquo;s daily lives, interconnections between British colonialism, Indian nationalism and the impact of both on contemporary poetry, dance and music in South Asia is revealed.</p>

<p>Set in Warsaw, the film loosely follows the character of an orphaned Vietnamese child who grows up to be absorbed into a dance group inspired by South Korean pop music. Widely popular within Polish youth subculture, K-pop is used by the artist as a vernacular material to trace a relationship between Eastern Europe and Asia with roots in Cold War allegiances. This dichotomy is further complicated by the significant Vietnamese diaspora currently living in Poland, composed of Northerners who migrated before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Southerners who came in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Nguyen traces how these layered inner conflicts are reckoned with inside the process of finding shared symbols and naming oneself from within another&rsquo;s regime.</p>

<p>From visionary director Quentin Dupieux, a quirky comedy fantasy about middle-aged house hunters who find more in a suburban bargain buy than anyone could have dreamed. For what Alain and Marie discover in their new basement could well change their lives forever. An absurdist meditation on the cruelties of ageing? A droll Bu&ntilde;uelian satire on the world of bourgeois property ownership? Or a giddy time travel metaphysical wonder? All you need to know is that the incredible Incredible but True is another bizarre Dupieux masterpiece and another amazing addition to his wacky oeuvre.</p>

<p>Instant Life (2022) is a layered experimental short comprising three shot-for-shot remakes of the 1981 compilation film Instant Life, itself a recreation of a lost 1941 precursor. Juxtaposing geological textures, brine shrimp, and crystalline growths with narrated riddles, it explores artificial life, cinematic reproduction, and the paradox of creation and decay&mdash;with no definitive answers provided</p>

<p>In this series, creator and showrunner Daniel Burman has taken on a dark chapter in the history of his native Argentina. Inspired by real-life events, he tells the story of a young secret agent named Jos&eacute; who infiltrates the Jewish community in Buenos Aires from the mid-1980s onwards under the code name of Iosi. Unbeknown to him, he was paving the way for two devastating terrorist attacks: the bombings of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA building in 1994. Years later, eaten up with guilt, he tries to bring the real masterminds to justice.</p>

<p>James Gregory Atkinson&rsquo;s performative short film centers the history of the iconic Peacock Chair to interrogate contemporary social contexts and historical concepts of identities. The film engages the chair&rsquo;s origins in forced prison labor in the Philippines, its status as an internationally traded &ldquo;exotic&rdquo; commodity, its use in portrait photography, and its associations with Black radical activists such as Huey P. Newton&mdash;to explore ideas of Black masculinities and resistance.</p>

<p>In an empty hospital in Kolkata, India, a man faces protocols of blood, a subtly discriminatory office, and a vacant operating theater. His mind is on a loop of the last months of his wife&rsquo;s life, when a quiet argument developed. When is the end of pharma-medical care, whose life is it anyway?</p>

<p>There it stands, the house, drawn in pencil. It begins to fall apart. Bricks come loose from the wall, the front door falls off its hinges and walls break away. Everything sinks into endless nothingness. A view of the rooms is exposed. Furniture shatters, objects fall to the floor and the roof slides off. Melancholia and the possibility of leaving is all that remains.</p>

<p>It took Arnaud des Palli&egrave;res ten years to make POUSSI&Egrave;RES D&#39;AM&Eacute;RIQUE (2011). A decade later, JOURNAL D&rsquo;AM&Eacute;RIQUE has adopted the narrative system and historical scope of the previous work to create an essay film interweaving various anonymous, often private archive images and intertitles containing a mixture of reflection, speculation and poetry. The new work comprises fragments of images, texts and sounds written in the language of cinema which seem to hark back to a silent era that was nonetheless full of the noise of the world. Written from January to April of an undefined year, this diary is like &ldquo;an old movie from the 20th century&rdquo;. Parables about fairies and sharks, fond memories and dreams of catching fish and collecting precious stones slowly turn into stories about wars, atom bombs, patriots and veterans, as well as about our alienated childhoods and the ghosts among us. While sparks of light and ideas burst onto the screen and in our minds at a thought-provoking pace, we are invited to meditate upon what the French filmmaker once liked to call &ldquo;our old homeland&rdquo;.</p>

<p>A group of Indigenous Achuar children that moves self-determined through the endless green. Along the course of the Pastaza River, on the border between Ecuador and Peru, they catch fish, hunt and cook, play with lianas and watch videos on their smartphones. Director In&ecirc;s T. Alves respectfully follows the everyday life of this young collective living in deep connection with one another and with the environment.</p>

<p>The Allee der Kosmonauten does not lead to the stars. If you grow up in the prefabricated high-rises here in north-eastern Berlin, your path is more likely to be mapped out in other directions. Even if you&rsquo;re as smart as Pascal, also known as Kalle, who is ten-years-old at the beginning of the film. Tine Kugler and G&uuml;nther Kurth have accompanied him for over a decade. Sometimes full of hope and ambition, sometimes burdened by fears and problems, tormenting thoughts and experiences, he looks for his place in life. A documentary observation in which animated sequences complement what is transpiring beyond the camera. Empathetic, poetic and humorous, the directing duo not only draws a precise portrait of the charismatic protagonist, but it also creates a kaleidoscopic picture of the unglamorous side of Berlin, far from the landmarks and trendy neighbourhoods.</p>

<p>Muraki has just been released from prison, where he served time for murder, and returns to his old yakuza haunts. In an illegal club, where gamblers bet large on cards in a game called tehonbiki, he meets an enigmatic young woman. Saeko takes big risks, but gambling is more about the thrill than the money for her. She persuades Muraki to take her to an even more exclusive club. During the day, Muraki is beset by people from his past gangster milieu, while at night, he falls increasingly under the spell of the attractive drag racer Saeko</p>

<p>Standa works in a volunteer fire brigade with his older colleague Bronya, whom he admires. Fires are rare in their Czech village and so it is a pretty relaxed job. Impressionable Standa is more concerned about whether his pregnant wife is spraying her belly regularly with vinegar. A colleague recommended this as a homespun remedy against the harmful effects of so-called chemtrails. During the village&rsquo;s Easter celebrations, a van veers out of control and injures a villager before coming to a halt at the fountain. The driver manages to escape. Right away Bronya is convinced that the village has become the target of a terrorist attack, carried out by an &ldquo;Arab&rdquo;. Standa sees things differently. A wave of misinformation soon puts fear into the hearts of the villagers and the fire brigade becomes a citizen&rsquo;s militia.</p>

<p>Keiko, a young pro boxer, was born with a hearing impairment. Boxing is a real challenge for her, but the club she belongs to is like a second home. After winning two difficult fights, a creeping fear begins to grow inside her. The club chairman, the only person who had accepted her as a boxer, is plagued by health issues and is losing his eyesight. Having learned that the gym is about to close for good, a confused Keiko goes on to her third bout. But perhaps the biggest challenge she faces is trying to understand the true nature and strength of her will to fight.</p>

<p>What are the things that define identity, and what are children and grandchildren given to take with them on their journey through life? What role does language and speech play, and what happens when a language is prohibited from being spoken? A poetic exploration of the filmmaker&rsquo;s Indigenous origin and mother tongue. The setting and starting point is an audio recording that the filmmaker&rsquo;s mother once made with her own mother &ndash; in an attempt to learn the almost forgotten Pechanga language from her.</p>

<p>School ends, and big decisions are imminent: How best to use this long summer? Study where and what? Move in as a couple? Or perhaps share a flat with friends? The future seems full of promise. The relationship between Billie and Lucas, on the other hand, suddenly no longer feels exciting. It&rsquo;s actually rather comfortable and familiar. Lucas just continues with his samples, and the performances with Charlotte. Billie is searching for something new. New habits, new feelings. What remains is the affection for each other. The directing duo Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes fuses documentary and staged items in a fascinating way, casting a reflective look at the feelings, gestures and language of a first love.</p>

<p>The story of a Ukrainian family living on the border of Russia and Ukraine during the start of the war. Irka refuses to leave her house even as the village gets captured by armed forces. Shortly after they find themselves at the center of an international air crash catastrophe on July 17, 2014.</p>

<p>In San Francisco&rsquo;s Chinatown in the 1890s, a singer known as the &ldquo;Frisco Doll&rdquo; is a woman kept by a wealthy Chinese man. When she tries to flee her golden cage, she stabs him in self-defence. Doll heads to Alaska by ship and the captain promptly falls in love with her. Also onboard is the missionary Sister Annie. Headed to Nome to save the settlement house there, she befriends the amoral adventuress. When Sister Annie dies suddenly, and with the police hot on her heels, Doll assumes the missionary&rsquo;s identity. Using charisma and charm, Annie/Doll revives interest in the Klondike mission, and draws the romantic interest of a detective</p>

<p>Two loving parents, a best friend and a lovely yard to play in. In Babs&rsquo; orderly world, even the wholesome, vegetarian meals are exemplary. One day, however, a cool cowboy guy arrives to stir up this idyllic existence. Babs&rsquo; grandpa from America fulfils his granddaughter&rsquo;s deep desire to have a pet of her own when he gifts her Oink the piglet. While the pink whirlwind manages to charm everyone within no time, grandpa arouses suspicion. What overjoyed Babs doesn&#39;t know: the old man with the banjo has some unfinished business with the traditional sausage-king competition. In this puppet animation realised with a great attention to detail, lifestyles and generations collide, in a comedic romp with unexpectedly edgy potential.</p>

<p>Kumbuka is a multi-dimensional film that confronts the history and legacy of colonial views of Africa. It tells the story of two emerging African filmmakers as they struggle to re-edit an acclaimed yet controversial Dutch film about them. As the primary subjects of that film, they had publicly criticized it for its Eurocentric perspective, which they felt distorted their story. Having been offered the original footage for use by the film&rsquo;s production company, they are at the same time presented with a chance to launch their nascent filmmaking careers as well as with the constraints that underscore persistent questions of power in cinematic representations of Africa. Interspersed with their re-editing efforts are two contradictory collections of archival footage, which provide a meta-critique both of the colonial project and of the Africanfuturistic movement that is growing in Congo in the wake of Petna Katondolo&rsquo;s ongoing project of Recoding Aesthetics.</p>

<p>Nathalie has everything under control, professionally and personally. She teaches philosophy at a Paris high school and writes books. She has two grown children with her husband Heinz, a fellow teacher. Her only worry is her depressive mother. But then Heinz leaves her for a younger woman, her mother develops dementia and dies in a home, and her publisher raises issues about agreed-upon new editions of her books. With a new freedom thrust upon her, Nathalie turns to a connection with a former favourite student, who lives far away from the big city and is forging plans for a future society with likeminded people</p>

<p>Sophie, the new housemaid for the Leli&egrave;vre family, is reserved and unassuming. But she loses favour with her employers when she makes friends with the feisty postmistress, Jeanne, whom Monsieur Leli&egrave;vre doesn&rsquo;t like. The two very different women are linked by dark secrets and when one of Sophie&rsquo;s is uncovered, she is fired. At Jeanne&rsquo;s urging, she stands up to her employer. Aggressive, with a strong sense of class consciousness, Jeanne continues to spur on the escalating dispute</p>

<p>Beatrice is an assistant at a Paris hairdressing salon. The shy 18-year-old lives modestly with her single mother. Her only friend is a co-worker with an active love life. When the two go on a seaside holiday together, Beatrice meets upper-class philosophy student Fran&ccedil;ois and falls in love. Back in Paris, she moves in with him, renovates the apartment, and keeps house. But Fran&ccedil;ois soon begins to have misgivings. He is embarrassed by his girlfriend&rsquo;s lower social status and lack of education. He prepares to break up with Beatrice</p>

<p>Aleister doesn&rsquo;t have all that much time left with Joana before she moves out of town the next morning. Partying, dancing close together with friends, skating, smoking pot, chatting, or drifting through the evening - somehow none of these options seem right. What has to be finished? And what is worth starting over? And who is this strange guy with a bow and arrow?</p>

<p>Margaret, 35, has a history of violent behaviour which has cost her a romantic relationship. She has moved back in with her mother Christina, a fragile, immature 55-year-old woman who blames Margaret, her firstborn, for ruining her dreams of a career as a concert pianist. In a state of unbridled fury during an argument, Margaret hits Christina. The law steps in, further complicating family dynamics. As she awaits trial, Margaret is forbidden from coming into contact with her mother or within 100 metres of their home. This only intensifies her desire to be closer to her family. Every day, Margaret appears at this 100-metre threshold to see her 12-year-old sister Marion and give her music lessons.</p>

<p>Erika Kohut teaches piano at Vienna&rsquo;s conservatory. Her educational eros is not without sadistic elements. She demands obedience and submission from her students. She lives, and shares a bed with her domineering mother, and seeks relief from her urges with porn films and self-harming. At an in-house concert, she meets young pianist Walter, a talented dilettante who falls in love with her. She reluctantly accepts him as a student. When she reveals her masochistic impulses to him, she is met with incomprehension and aggression</p>

<p>The queen is the saddest member of the pack. To cheer her up with flattering phrases, the other foxes sift through people&#39;s rubbish night after night, in search of unsent love letters. Alas, they never feature odes to furry ears. In this hand-drawn fable from Marina Rosset, though their efforts initially prove fruitless, it&rsquo;s the thought that counts in the end. Unlikely cupids, the sly animals ultimately succeed in bringing together more than just people.</p>

<p>A small film crew ventures into the compartments of Mumbai&rsquo;s local trains that are reserved for women. &ldquo;What makes you angry?&rdquo; is the simple question the filmmaker poses to the train&rsquo;s female passengers. Acquaintances and women who are encountering each other by chance are invited to reveal their opinions and stories in a space that is public, yet protected. Their answers and observations are manifold: sometimes funny, sometimes depressing, sometimes combative, sometimes resigned, but always honest, they come together to form an increasingly complex tapestry</p>

<p>Fan dancer Alabam Lee is given a suspended sentence for her racy performances. On the advice of her publicist, the easy-going blond dancer tries to improve her public image by &ldquo;adopting&rdquo; a resident of an old-age home. But erstwhile street drunk Patricia &ldquo;Patsy&rdquo; Patterson, herself no stranger to the legal system, is no motherly innocent. Before long, the tough old lady has found out that Alabam&rsquo;s handlers are swindling her and fires the dancer&rsquo;s manager. She takes over managing Lee&rsquo;s career and tries to turn the fan dancer into a reputable stage artiste. She has an ally in a young lawyer tasked by Patsy&rsquo;s father with keeping an eye on her, who soon fixes his amorous sights on Alabama</p>

<p>Summer days in the quiet suburb are warm and shimmering. Still, between images of parties and intimate moments with his girlfriend, teenager Noah is repeatedly plagued by flashbacks that arrive out of the blue. Though all is calm around him, the sound of the river is overwhelming inside his head. Noah&rsquo;s best friend died in a sporting accident. The departed&rsquo;s presence is still palpable, haunting what were supposed to be care-free days.</p>

<p>Once upon a time, there was a 210-year-old oak tree: the pillar of its world and a guardian of nature&rsquo;s balance. Like a hostel that is always open, it was visited by friends passing by, but also by treacherous parasites and ruthless predators. Two eminent nature-loving filmmakers, Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux, have joined forces to create this unusual and rather spectacular adventure film, which they shot for months in the verdant French region of Sologne. Not only is their lush production mesmerising, the co-directors have also directed a prestigious cast comprising squirrels, woodpeckers, barnacle lichen, jays, ants and field mice</p>

<p>&Eacute;lizabeth may have been in the mood for change for some time, but a stroke of ill fate was not really what she had in mind. When her husband dies unexpectedly, she finds herself left not only with a distraught group of in-laws and two teenage sons who seem to have lost their way, but also with a farm, replete with seasonal workers from Latin America. Up to this point, the farm has been of little interest to her, but now she has no choice but to face these new challenges</p>

<p>While their classmates endure the visit to the concert with pranks, Pietro and Tommaso secretly get closer to each other in the box. During the playing of Vivaldi&rsquo;s composition, their lips touch. When Tommaso invites Pietro to his home shortly afterwards, the tension is still in the air. The desire, however, soon gives way to an ambiguity that particularly irritates the otherwise cautious Pietro. What did the kiss mean?</p>

<p>LEONORA ADDIO narrates the stunning adventures of Pirandello&rsquo;s ashes and the tortuous journey of his urn from Rome to Agrigento, leading up to his eventful burial that took place only fifteen years after his actual death. And beyond that, to Pirandello&rsquo;s last story, written twenty days before his death, &ldquo;The Nail&rdquo;, in which the young Bastianeddu, torn from his mother&rsquo;s arms in Sicily and forced to follow his father across the ocean, is incapable of healing the wound that drives him to an irrational gesture.</p>

<p>Paris, 1981. The winds of change are blowing on election night and the French storm the streets, elated. But &Eacute;lisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg) struggles to share the general mood of optimism. Her marriage is coming to an end and she will now have to support her family. She is distraught, and her father and teenage children are worried that her tears simply will not dry. But what if listening to her emotions could help her to start filling the blank page of her future? What if she were to write a letter on a whim to the host of her favourite radio programme? Or invite a homeless girl into her house? What would happen if she were to make the kind of gestures that actually change lives?</p>

<p>One day, out of nowhere, a giant Rock lays in the middle of the peaceful little village where Luce lives. The villagers can&rsquo;t even open the door to their houses anymore! Luce is angry: go away Rock, you don&rsquo;t belong here! And why are you here anyway?</p>

<p>A strong wind blows a paper crown over the pasture. Sheep Louis places it on his head. And accordingly becomes Louis I, King of the Sheep. But his subjects just keep grazing and digesting. Until Louis I gives a speech over the loudspeaker. From now on, the others have to serve and pay homage to him. However, another storm approaches. With pinpoint accuracy and depth, this absurdist stop-motion animation tells the story of the fascination of power.</p>

<p>&ldquo;Make Sweden Sexy Again&rdquo; is the lurid slogan of a government study for which Anette has been asking women in their mid-40s and over about their sex lives. She herself, her sister and her closest friends are also grappling with the question of how good sex, bad sex or the absence of sex relate to the way they see themselves and to getting older. Living under the same roof with one&rsquo;s ex and his new girlfriend, throwing yourself on your half-asleep husband&rsquo;s morning hard-on out of sheer desperation, or accidentally ordering the wrong dildos on the internet &ndash; that can&rsquo;t be all there is. Or can it?</p>

<p>Do you keep an account of your gray hairs? Of the number of houses you have owned or rented? Of the number of kisses you have exchanged? Of the number of times you&rsquo;ve flown in dreams? You may not have. It makes no real difference in a life lived beyond numbers.</p>

<p>Former prostitute Mamma Roma strives to build a middle-class existence and provide her son with a respectable life. She moves to a better neighbourhood, re-unites with her son Ettore, and opens a vegetable stand. But the 16-year-old boy falls in with a gang of young criminals from the housing estate, and starts a relationship with an older neighbour. All his mother&rsquo;s attempts to turn the delinquent into an industrious young man fail. When Mamma Roma&rsquo;s former pimp turns up and blackmails her, she is forced to return to peddling her body on the streets</p>

<p>A concert is coming up. Gabriela is sitting at the piano and playing &ndash; for herself, for him and for her mother. The piece of music changes each time and yet always remains the same. Memories surface, the present intertwines with the past. The deeper she goes, the closer she comes to finding inner peace and reconciliation.</p>

<p>A city at dawn. Traffic is flowing like red and white blood cells. A man sleeps, enveloped in the darkness &ndash; he is beautiful, he is naked, it is hot. We will never know what he is dreaming. The sun rises and the fa&ccedil;ades of the skyscrapers begin to sparkle.</p>

<p>The two videos in Medicine and Magic work together to try and bridge these two stories from my maternal grandparents&rsquo; family histories. I&rsquo;ve been raised with stories of the medicine men in my family. A bundle that was used successfully to heal people. Stories of bear spirits that took care of us.</p>

<p>It is a morning in September. A storm is about to break. A mother drives a girl to school in the morning and picks up a woman at the end of the school day. Anna, a&nbsp;fifteen-year-old girl&nbsp;sneaks&nbsp;out&nbsp;of&nbsp;school,&nbsp;and with the help of her&nbsp;boyfriend, they&nbsp;visit&nbsp;a&nbsp;hospital. There,&nbsp;she has to face an event that will jolt her into adulthood. &nbsp;</p>

<p>On a sombre theatre stage, sculpted and hand-drawn apparitions move about in stop-motion. Between Jesus and Nokomis, a legendary figure of the North-American Anishinaabe, a dialogue unfolds. A M&eacute;tis girl is caught in the middle, investigating the deep rift in her identity. One by one, Nokomis counters the Seven Deadly Sins with Seven Sacred Teachings. A cathartic act of self-discovery, in which Terril Calder once again examines the wounds of colonial history.</p>

<p>As the rain pelts her tent, Millie edits a freshly-snapped selfie into a fake NYC backdrop, before posting the image on Instagram. A recent grad with a prestigious internship awaiting her in the States, it looks like Millie&rsquo;s made it &ndash; until the moment where everything falls apart, right before take-off. A panic attack. Not as rare as people think, observes the woman behind the counter, though her empathy stops at offering a refund. Broke and effectively homeless, Millie tries to come up with the cash for a new ticket. No one is supposed to find out she&rsquo;s still in Wellington. In a brilliantly staged race to stay ahead of the truth, set to a driving soundtrack, the young woman manoeuvres her way from one absurdly tragic situation to the next.</p>

<p>In Moja&rsquo;s family, there is a gaping hole. A plate still sits on the table, but the chair behind it remains empty. Her father is but a shadow of his former self; filled with grief, he irons, cooks meals that remind him of his Slovenian homeland and clings to routine. Meanwhile, her big sister Vesna keeps trying to burn through her own pain and bewilderment with slam poetry and cigarettes, seemingly repressing the fact that she is heavily pregnant. And so it falls on ten-year-old Moja to keep things afloat and prepare for the baby&rsquo;s birth. With a delicate, meticulous grasp of interpersonal dynamics and the large significance of small gestures, writer and director Sara Kern&rsquo;s impressive feature debut tells a compassionate tale of loss and solace.</p>

<p>By presenting the festive events which accompanied the premiere of the film Jean Galmot, aventurier (1990) by Alain Maline, in which the filmmaker&rsquo;s father played a role, the images of Moune &Ocirc; reveal the survival of the colonial inheritance within a western collective unconscious always marked as stereotypes. From little gestures of daily life, the resistance toward oppression comes in its own rhythm.</p>

<p>Ann and David Smith&rsquo;s marriage is all about squabbling. Then the couple discovers that, due to a jurisdictional technicality in the small town where they wed, their three-year-old marriage is void. A new proposal is not forthcoming, and Ann boots David out of their apartment. To fan the flames of jealousy, Ann turns to David&rsquo;s old friend and business partner. The two make plans to marry and decamp to a ski resort where, however, David is waiting. He is determined to win Ann back, even if it means employing devious means</p>

<p>Tracing the minutiae of their familiar domestic space, Heller considers the intimacies and intricacies of inherited language in a poetic meditation on selfhood and belonging.</p>

<p>&ldquo;A bee stung me on my finger. It happened yesterday in the yard of a kindergarten, even though I am not in kindergarten anymore.&rdquo; Fragmented memories of childhood and adulthood blend together in a song that an unknown narrator is humming. Children are learning a new game in a sixties TV show. Someone is waiting in the hallway for permission to re-enter the classroom. Everything is set. Everything is nailed down.</p>

<p>Josephine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself is an erotic account written in 1906. Staging a casting for a fictitious adaptation of the book, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ruth Beckermann asks men of all ages to read extracts of this scandalous book. The result is a witty, thought-provoking glimpse into how society shapes our eroticism.</p>

<p>After an affair with a masked bandit, Flower Belle Lee is run out of Little Bend and sentenced to stay out of town until she is a respectable, married woman. On the train to her next stop, she meets traveling salesman Cuthbert J. Twillie, a blustery drunk, and stages a wedding to him for show. When they arrive in the wild west town of Greasewood, the saloon owner and town boss appoints Twillie as sheriff &ndash; with the intent of putting his life in danger. While Flower Belle finds another admirer in the law-abiding newspaper editor, Twillie sniffs out the masked bandit</p>

<p>One item on the list for a scavenger hunt mounted by a ritzy New York hotel is a &ldquo;forgotten man&rdquo;. Uptown girl Irene Bullock wins when she finds Godfrey, a tramp living at the city dump. But the homeless man seems so cultivated that Irene hires him as the family butler. The other members of the household are Irene&rsquo;s jealous sister, her addle-brained mother, the mother&rsquo;s &ldquo;prot&eacute;g&eacute;&rdquo; Carlo, and a father under financial strain. Godfrey soon proves to have more class than all of them, and it turns out he comes from a distinguished blue-blooded family. To keep that secret, he allows the fiction to circulate that he is married with five children &ndash; greatly disappointing Irene, who has fallen in love with Godfrey</p>

<p>Sisters Ruth and Eileen Sherwood move from Ohio to New York in the hopes of building their careers. The two end up living in a dismal basement apartment in Greenwich Village, where a parade of odd characters are constantly breezing in and out.</p>

<p>Sarya has lived in Japan since she was five. She pretends to be German to her friends, which is easier than telling the truth. In reality, Sarya&rsquo;s parents are Kurds who travelled from Turkey to Japan as refugees. Furthermore, she is responsible for her younger siblings while her father is at work. Despite the hardships, the future seems bright and soon, Sarya will be attending college. A tender relationship develops with her work colleague Sota, and her own feelings begin to surface. All Sarya wants is a completely normal life. However, when her father&rsquo;s application for asylum is denied, she is increasingly torn apart. A truly haunting film about the balancing act of a young refugee who is searching for her own world while caught between two other ones.</p>

<p>Myanmar is one of those countries that repeatedly appear in the international headlines, only to be ousted again for months on end. Ten young Burmese filmmakers, who must remain anonymous because to reveal their names would risk their lives, have dared to create this shocking cinematic appeal. This hybrid documentary shows the aftermath of the military coup in Myanmar on February 1, 2021, the ensuing nationwide protests and civil disobedience. Mobile phone footage shot by citizen journalists documents the brutal and arbitrary response of the military towards demonstrators. One young woman, for example, is shot dead for wearing a red T-shirt &ndash; red being considered the colour of the protests. In between demonstrations, we also see the opposition members at home. Their faces are never recognisable, but their fear, their determination, their grief, their anger and the huge void that their friend&rsquo;s death has left behind in their everyday lives, become all the more palpable.</p>

<p>Like a stroke of white paint, the aeroplane&rsquo;s condensation trail moves across the blue canvas of the sky. The voice on the radio is talking about an upcoming lunar eclipse &ndash; of which nothing will be seen here, on the outskirts of a city in Portugal. Instead, with touches of humour and magical realism, director Nicolas Bouchez observes the everyday happenings and colourful facets of a city where there is ostensibly nothing to see.</p>

<p>The 1960s in Indonesia were a period of dramatic political change and turmoil, with Suharto&rsquo;s coup ousting Sukarno and leading to a violent anti-communist purge. Nana, a gentle, beautiful young woman, has been badly affected by the conflict. Her husband was kidnapped and taken into the forest. Although she managed to escape from the gang leader who wanted to force her to marry him, the incident cost her father his life and drove her into poverty. Several years later, she is living comfortably as the second wife of a rich Sundanese man, with a maid to help her adjust to her new environment. But Nana&rsquo;s past re-emerges in her dreams.</p>

<p>Four friends &ndash; Nic, Leo, Andrea and Raff &ndash; tell the stories of their gender transitions. Looking back on their childhood and youth, they share their personal memories and experiences. Even if they did not always conform to the social norms of femininity &ndash; all four were socialised as girls. Each of their gender biographies may be different, yet there are parallels. This helps them to understand each other and feel less alone. The discussions with partners, the choice of pronouns, the hormone therapy, decisions about surgery and dealing with the authorities &ndash; the processes are diverse, and lengthy. In the strictly binary world we live in, the decision to determine one&rsquo;s own gender identity is a subversive act.</p>

<p>The voice of opera singer Nelly resonates in the middle of Ravensbr&uuml;ck concentration camp. Nelly and Nadine met for the first time at Christmas in 1944. They found each other again after liberation and were to stay together for the rest of their lives. Today, Nelly&rsquo;s granddaughter Sylvie is about to be confronted with her grandmother&rsquo;s legacy, locked in a box. The photographs, Super 8 footage and audio recordings as well as the poetic and harrowing diary entries that she comes across describe not only her grandmother&rsquo;s memories of the camp, but also tell the story of her life with Nadine &ndash; a relationship that was never referred to as such by the family. &ldquo;Nothing is real until it&rsquo;s socially expressed&rdquo;, says historian Joan Schenkar in conversation with Sylvie.</p>

<p>A story of three siblings building a tree house together over the course of a year. We experience the beauty and brutality of the seasons, as we follow them through their struggles and moments of joy.</p>

<p>Joe Anton owns the &ldquo;55&rdquo; speakeasy in New York, a favourite hangout for both gangsters and snobs &ndash; and a sad young woman who sits alone night after night. She turns out to be Jerry Healy, the daughter of the once-wealthy family that lived in the glamourous townhouse where the club is housed. Joe falls in love with Jerry, and his girlfriend Iris turns on her in jealousy. Joe invites Jerry to dinner and, during the meal, Joe&rsquo;s ex-mistress Maudie Triplett shows up, boosting the romance and ensuring an all-round convivial evening. She&rsquo;s used to getting her way with men using double entendre, but even she can&rsquo;t charm the gangsters determined to take over Joe&rsquo;s club</p>

<p>Fleeing ahead of a police investigation, card shark Babe Stewart leaves New York for the small town of Glendale, where he meets librarian Connie Randall. An attractive blonde, she falls for the smooth-talking Babe and uses his love of gambling to get him to marry her. To conceal the source of his wealth, he pretends to be a stock trader on Wall Street, but at some point, his secret comes out. Connie finds his marked deck and thwarts his next attempt to cheat at cards, but she&rsquo;s not ready to give up on him. Not even when his ex-girlfriend tells Connie the whole truth</p>

<p>As South Sudan hangs in the balance of a peace agreement, a mother and her two daughters return from exile. While the mother becomes central to a new government, her daughter&rsquo;s struggle to come to terms with what it means to call South Sudan home.</p>

<p>In his first documentary, well-known and celebrated Nigerian director Ike Nnaebue embarks on a personal journey. As a young man, he took the route from Nigeria via Benin, Mali and Mauritania to Morocco, hoping to get to Europe from there. But as the crossing seemed too risky at the time, Nnaebue turned back and began studying film in Nigeria. Now, 21 years later, he revisits the stages of his journey as a documentarian, and tries to find out what motivates young people today to expose themselves to all kinds of ordeals and dangers on their way to an uncertain future. In carefully conducted interviews, he also explores the experiences of young women in particular on the long journey and asks them about the dreams and hardships that drive them on. With great respect for his protagonists and a keen sense of the role his camera plays, he succeeds in capturing intimate images and situations without ever being voyeuristic. Rounded off by a densely poetic commentary, the result is an essayistic and self-reflective travelogue that hints at the deep longing of an entire generation for a better life.</p>

<p>The infiltration of the jewellery market by synthetic diamonds did not exactly make international headlines. Even more surprising then, that Jason Kohn should choose the topic &ndash; one so decisive for an industry based on discretion &ndash; as the starting point for a riveting investigation of the universal themes of value, the real and the symbolic</p>

<p>Journalist Wally Cook hopes to use small-town beauty Hazel Flagg to restore his tarnished reputation. She has been told that she is dying of radiation poisoning, and Cook plans to promote her as a big-time hero. As it turns out, Hazel&rsquo;s doctor has since admitted that his diagnosis was in error, but both doctor and patient keep this a secret from Wally. The journalist takes Hazel to New York, where she becomes the toast of the town, showered with attention and beneficence by people from all strata of society. When Cook falls in love with Hazel and engages European experts to assess her chances of survival, her deception is threatened. A desperate Hazel plans to fake a public suicide attempt</p>

<p>Director Jean-Luc Godard is among the speakers at a 2004 European book fair in Sarajevo, alongside literary luminaries such as Spaniard Juan Goytisolo, and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Two women question the guests about the Balkan War, the traces of which are still visible in Sarajevo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the genocide of Native Americans and European Jews. While Judith Lerner, a journalist from Tel-Aviv, wants to shed light on the shadow side of history, Olga Brodsky, a Russian Jew, is consumed with dark thoughts of suicide and plans for action</p>

<p>When you&rsquo;re a student and you live far from your parents, friends are family. Friends study together, eat together, share everything and have no secrets, almost believing it will always be that way. But life has other&nbsp;plans, and the University of Bangui, in the Central African Republic, is just a synecdoche for&nbsp;a weary country.</p>

<p>After killing the dragon, Cadmus released the blue curse spread like dust into the city of Goi&acirc;nia.</p>

<p>In an almost deserted, summery Rome in the midst of a hypnotic solar eclipse, a mysterious serial killer starts targeting high-end prostitutes. Diana is one of them. In a desperate attempt to escape him, she becomes the victim of a serious car accident that leaves her blind. After a long period of rehabilitation, Diana learns that the only other survivor of the crash is a now-orphaned child of Chinese descent named Chin, and she decides to take care of him. Coming from different cultural backgrounds, the two connect via a special bond that allows them to defend themselves from the serial killer&rsquo;s thirst for revenge.</p>

<p>Onder het witte masker: de film die Haesaerts had kunnen maken is a film that uses fragments from Under the Black Mask, an 1958 film about Congolese art directed by the Belgian artist Paul Haesaerts and qualified as colonial propaganda. This new piece imagines what the masks would have said. Aim&eacute; C&eacute;saire&rsquo;s &ldquo;Discourse on Colonialism&rdquo; is spoken in Lingala for the first time. His words still form a confrontational mirror for Europe. In an attempt at reparation, the film limits itself to images, texts, and music already available to Haesaerts.</p>

<p>A millennial death doula introduces us to the world of end-of-life care. With a matter-of-fact demeanor and intense physicality, she guides us into the largely uncharted waters of corpse care&mdash;practical, political, and spiritual. She performs her knowledge within a field of props that are the tools of her trade, kept in a &ldquo;mobile corpse kit&rdquo;&mdash;everyday items that she manipulates to profound use. The film, drawn from workshops, research, and interviews conducted with several end-of-life doulas from different cultural backgrounds, is a skill share, threaded with humor, grief, unknowing, and a desire for justice. The doula&rsquo;s work encourages us to turn towards that which we strive so hard to avoid.</p>

<p>Re-discovered film negatives represent families of affluence who absorbed Thailand&rsquo;s wealth, like parasites. The journey from analog to digital, and finally to AI-generated images, gradually evolves these captured faces into a new species of monster.</p> <p>Negatives found at an out-of-business film lab are manipulated through analogue and digital means, producing an abstract sequence suggestive of monstrous figures of wealth and power.</p> <h2>&nbsp;</h2>

<p>Peter von Kant is a successful film director. He lives with his assistant Karl, whom he likes to mistreat and humiliate. Sidonie is the great actor who was his muse for many years. She introduces him to Amir, a handsome young man of modest means. Peter falls in love with Amir on the spot and offers to share his apartment with him and help him break into the film industry. The plan works, but as soon as he acquires fame, Amir breaks up with Peter, leaving him alone to face his demons.</p>

<p>An afternoon at the lake. Children are playing on the shore, the sun is shining. A woman makes her way past towels and parasols. She walks very upright, her gaze directed strictly ahead. Her tension shows no signs of abating, even when she is standing in the water. Later, she impassively begins her shift as a nurse. When a patient dies during the night, the woman remains completely detached. Is she somehow involved in the death?</p>

<p>In the back room of a small supermarket in suburban Moscow, a modest wedding is being celebrated. A harmonious community of immigrant workers, you might think. But Mukhabbat&rsquo;s face looks troubled. The Uzbek is an immigrant worker at &ldquo;Produkty 24&rdquo;. Despite being pregnant, she toils day and night in cramped conditions as a member of a pseudo-family of labourers under the iron rule of shop owner Zhanna. Those who disobey or even try to run away are brutally abused. Meanwhile, the police look the other way and even join in, helping themselves to anything in the shop &ndash; even the people &ndash; free of charge. But then, when not just Mukhabbat&rsquo;s passport but the most important thing in her life is taken away from her, she decides to break free.<br /> Michael Borodin&rsquo;s debut feature film is a daring and alarming journey into that heart of darkness called modern slavery. As we accompany his reticent heroine from the claustrophobic gloom of the Russian metropolis to the white expanse of the director&rsquo;s Uzbek homeland, the film turns from horror story into road trip, and shows us, at times surreally, the reality of life in the new Russia. It is based on the true case of the so-called &ldquo;Golyanovo slaves&rdquo; which came to light in 2016 and remains a thorn in the side of Russian justice and politics. This film could save lives</p>

<p>Star, a suicidal teen now too old for foster care, develops a candid rapport with An, a student from Shanghai who is assigned to watch her while she is in hospital. A nightly exchange of secrets, text messages and possessions quickly expands the boundaries of their relationship, altering their inner chemistry.</p>

<p>Rabiye Kurnaz is someone you might generally call an ordinary woman, except that she is a real dynamo. Taking care of her children and much more, she is the one running the show in her terraced house in Bremen. Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, her son Murat is accused of terrorism and is (one of the first) shipped off to Guantanamo prison camp. This marks the beginning of a journey into the heart of world politics for this resolute German-Turkish woman. Together with human rights lawyer Bernhard Docke, whom she soon has completely on her side (like almost everyone around her), she battles for the release of her son &ndash; using her very own brand of self-taught English &ndash; all the way to the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.</p>

<p>Over the past twenty years, thousands of young people were recruited in North Macedonia to work in the kitchens and laundries of the US military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their wages were then invested by their families back home in the construction of small palaces and lucrative real estate. With the withdrawal of the last troops from Afghanistan in 2021, many of them returned home &ndash; bringing with them their traumas and war experiences. This documentary depicts the complex connections between supposedly far-off and abstract wars and their very real effects at home. It demonstrates the price of labour migration and exposes the gains and losses of decades of political and economic crises.</p>

<p>We are in the Italian coastal resort of Rimini, it&rsquo;s winter and tourists are here because they managed to book a cheap&nbsp;room. Cheering up the ranks of female senior fans is Ritchie Bravo, a past-his-prime lounge singer with an alcohol problem. Everything goes downhill when his mother dies, his dementia-suffering father is alone, and Ritchie&rsquo;s grown-up daughter demands a sum of money to make up for his abandonment.</p>

<p>The rain falling on the windowpane of the old building-site trailer, passionate kisses on the beach, the dream of Paris and the click of a Polaroid camera. These are the fragments of memories that Zo&eacute; has painfully tried to forget. But now that she&rsquo;s back at that place by the Baltic Sea with her new boyfriend Lars, she finds herself secretly following the traces of a past love, and it makes her feel like a traitor.</p>

<p>A is for apple, as Mahdi learns on his very first day at school and immediately agrees to bring the class a whole basket full on Apple Day. After all, his older brother Saeed and their father sell many kilos of the bright red fruit in the streets leading through the high-rise buildings of the Tehran outer-suburb. At home, the boys&rsquo; mother earns money washing clothes. When the truck gets stolen, the family&rsquo;s already precarious existence begins to crumble. Meanwhile, Saeed feels responsible to fill the basket of apples promised for his little brother&rsquo;s class. A complex tapestry of neorealist narrative strands, Mahmood Ghaffari&rsquo;s film tells the story of a new beginning filled with setbacks and loving solidarity.</p>

<p>Digital reconstruction by film historian Michael Witt of a remarkable montage film created by Jean-Luc Godard, composed from his film Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut (la vie)) and reels from five other films: Old and New (also known as The General Line) by Sergei M. Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov (1929), The Moving Day by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton (1922), La Terra Trema by Luchino Visconti (1948), and Man of Marble by Andrzej Wajda (1977).</p>

<p>An intimate documentary on friendships, language, love, youth, resistance, and identity of class, caste, religion, and gender. Set in the backdrop of the nationwide 2019-2020 student protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India.</p>

<p>Anja is undertaking her forestry internship in the forests of the Upper Palatinate, of all places. This is where, twenty years ago, her father disappeared in unexplained circumstances. After a threatening encounter with Xaver, a person with a learning disability who kills his bedridden mother shortly afterwards, Anja begins to suspect that he might have murdered her father as well. Her suspicions are reinforced when she comes across traces of excavation on the forest floor while carrying out mapping work. Childhood friend Rupert falls in love with Anja, but he is wary of her ability to read the forest and, just like the older villagers, has no interest in further investigations. The risk of damaging the region&rsquo;s reputation is too high. When Anja&rsquo;s father&rsquo;s skeleton is found, everything points to Xaver as the perpetrator, especially when he commits suicide a short time later. Sceptical about how quickly and miraculously the case appears to have been solved, Anja cannot shake off the feeling that she has stumbled upon a secret.</p>

<p>The journey of a man through time and infinite space. Paths appear as you walk.</p>

<p>Shooting the breeze, Shabu (14) hangs around the Peperklip, a striking residential complex in Rotterdam&rsquo;s Feijenoord neighbourhood. This Rotterdammer with Surinamese roots knows everyone here, and thinks he&rsquo;s already a star. Later, Shabu is convinced, he&rsquo;ll become rich and famous. But not just yet, because this summer he&rsquo;s in the doghouse: he &lsquo;borrowed&rsquo; his grandma&rsquo;s car and crashed it, and now he has to pay for the damage. When selling ices and stacking shelves doesn&rsquo;t bring in enough, Shabu decides to draw on his musicality, charm, and network.</p>

<p>Shadowboxing builds on Abdi Osman&rsquo;s ongoing research surrounding the gaps between experiences and representations of queer cruising, space-making, and place-making in the city of Toronto. A projection of lush green park environments documented by Osman from sites across the city appears. Osman&rsquo;s holdings and records of queer, locational fortitude speak to the countless compounded sites around us where bodies have forged connections in time and space in spite of the continued realities of homophobia, racism, and white supremacy that exist in Toronto, and beyond. The projection is augmented by an online audio work that features oral histories about cruising from the perspectives and experiences of Black, queer, and trans community members, as recorded by the artist in the city.</p>

<p>In 1892 New York, Lady Lou is a singer in the Bowery saloon owned by Gus Jordan. Her boss is running for sheriff, but he also runs a counterfeit racket &ndash; something Dan Flynn, his rival for office and for Lou, threatens to expose. Flynn tells Lou that a detective nicknamed &ldquo;The Hawk&rdquo; is on Gus&rsquo; trail. Flynn also has an axe to grind with Chick Clark, another of Lou&rsquo;s paramours, now in prison. Lou currently has her erotic sights set on Captain Cummings, the handsome director of the mission next to the bar. It&rsquo;s an explosive situation that comes to head after a young runaway tries to commit suicide in the bar. Lou comes to her aid and the young woman is drawn into Gus&rsquo; criminal business</p>

<p>For Masha and her girlfriends, the party invitations are a game: they get to drink for free and are even rewarded with a bonus when it&#39;s all over. Sure, every now and again a grown man mingles with the young girls during the wild get-togethers, whatever &ndash; a fact that Masha chooses to ignore, smitten as she is with seductive Ram, the middle-man who organises these celebrations. But then Masha herself becomes a victim of this predatory arrangement. Farkhat Sharipov, whose work explores the hopes, dreams and dark sides of new-rich Kazakh society, constructs complex shots to depict an Almaty of shopping malls and anonymous apartments, a cold yet tempting world full of consumerist allure &ndash; and fraught with the danger of losing one&rsquo;s self.</p>

<p>During the early years of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, an industrial junkyard near Kladno serves as a re-education camp for &ldquo;bourgeois elements&rdquo;. In addition to recalcitrant intellectuals, a group of female prisoners spend their time dismantling and melting down undesirable relics like crucifixes and typewriters to make &ldquo;peaceful steel&rdquo; for the good of socialism. Although the men and women are strictly segregated, a tender relationship develops between a young cook and a female labourer</p>

<p>Famous novelist Junhee&rsquo;s reunion with two acquaintances would appear to be tinged with a slight sense of acrimony. The first of these colleagues gave up writing to open a bookstore on the outskirts of Seoul and has not given her any feedback about her last book. The second, a filmmaker, never adapted Junhee&rsquo;s novel as planned. But the more pressing issue is that Junhee has not published anything in a while. Instead, she has begun to question her approach to writing and is having doubts about the sensibility that forged her style and her charismatic, scathing personality. During a stroll in the park with the film director and his wife, she meets a famous female actor who is experiencing a similar hiatus. The two connect so deeply that an idea for a film, which would be her first, soon begins to germinate in the novelist&rsquo;s mind.</p>

<p>Sol sees Afrofuturism as a link between past and present, and as a rebuttal to a world in which &ldquo;we are all commodities within a same architecture of violence&rdquo;. Diffracting their observations, dreams, beliefs, and poetry through an ambiguous, collectively imagined figure named &ldquo;Lascar&rdquo; &mdash; an antiquated term referring to Southeast Asian sailors on European ships, a present pejorative for diasporic, suburban French teens, and any other number of definitions depending&mdash; Yehouessi assembles a team of incisive young collaborators whose multiplicitous views yield a fluid and aesthetically bombastic imagining of Blackness along the space-time continuum. These ideas, sounds and images may be individually familiar, but as the film obliquely states, &ldquo;The difference? Is (precisely) in the plural.&rdquo;</p>

<p>Three girls from Vienna try to balance a fine line between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. Two of them are fascinated by something that is foreign to them. One is torn between the culture practiced at home and the one practiced in the rest of her world. Adding to this explosive mix a viral video and an encounter with two overly patriotic young men,&nbsp;things cannot&nbsp;but start to go sideways. But isn&rsquo;t youth the time to test the limits?</p>

<p>Archaeological excavation of the many layers of narratives surrounding uranium, with threads back to the Soviet Union and nuclear weapons programmes.</p> <p>The white, radioactive metal uranium radiates like a sun in the darkness under ground while the planet Uranus travels across the sky. From 1946 to 1990, the Soviet company SAG Wismut operated mining operations in Germany. The company dug for uranium, which was used in the Soviet Union&rsquo;s nuclear weapons programme. But how does the mining of the past haunt the landscape today? And how is it all connected to the spectre of socialism? Examining the earth as if it were a vast archive, the aesthetically accomplished &lsquo;Sun Under Ground&rsquo; takes us on a contemporary speleological journey. A journey where the sedimented narratives surrounding uranium materially, metaphorically and geopolitically are unearthed and re-examined along the way.</p>

<p>Three young squatters set out to occupy an abandoned bank. While waiting for the period to elapse from which they will be able to assert their right to domiciliation, they invest the building with their memories and performative games.</p>

<p>A Hollywood villa on a sultry summer night. The escort does what he was hired to do and gives his client the illusion he has paid for. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll make you a star&rdquo;, the customer says, before the tide turns abruptly and the power dynamics are unsettled. A revenge movie of the queer kind.</p>

<p>The nurse gives them a familiar nod as they enter the emergency room. Derek and Ethan have brought their mom to the clinic again &ndash; not the first time the brothers have spent the night in their car worried to death, singing their favourite songs, driving around to the usual places until they pick their prescription drug-addicted mother up off the street. Despite her addiction, the three manage to share a sort of everyday life together. When Ethan gets accepted to a far-off university, the brothers are faced with the dilemma of escaping the vicious circle of co-dependency. Set against the backdrop of the prescription drug and opioid crisis in the USA, Jamie Sisley depicts the individual consequences of a societal tragedy, while taking an unflinching yet gentle look at a complicated web of relationships.</p>

<p>As soon as school is over, Sasha&rsquo;s otherwise relaxed and complicit mother pressures him to enroll at the university. Sasha, however, lives in the moment. Plus he currently wants to hone his graffiti skills with his friend Max. And maybe get to know his father. But then, he meets the dazzling Zhenya. Carried by the light and the ease of the summer in Kaliningrad, they fathom their feelings, talents and fears together. In her sensitive debut, Julia Trofimova tells of young people in today&rsquo;s Russia who cannot possibly please everyone. Parents&rsquo; need for security is countered by a variety of possible paths and identities.</p>

<p>In his dreams, bathed in a brilliant glow, Manu and his best friend Felipe are inching closer and closer together, yet they never kiss. A confusing desire, as Manu is dating Azul, and the two are about to have sex for the first time. In Mariano Biasin&rsquo;s Sublime, a niggling desire simmers beneath the surface of 16-year-old Manu&rsquo;s everyday life, his emotional turmoil bubbling up and revealing itself in indirect ways - during his attempt to find the right chords for his latest lyrics and in his flights of melancholic introspection, at band practices with the rest of the guys or during supper with his parents. Cautiously, with increasing resignation, Manu keeps trying to solve the conundrum: how do you avoid losing something precious, when it&rsquo;s the very thing tearing you up inside?</p>

<p>A young Slovakian immigrant opens a uranium mine near Elliot Lake in northern Ontario, Canada, and later builds a massive replica of the modest church from his childhood village. Stranded amongst suburban streets named after prize-winning Holstein cows, now sits this monumental cathedral, unfinished and private. Teenage zombies emerge from lakes and rivers around Serpent River First Nation, once poisoned with uranium waste. There is talk of eugenics at a Holstein pageant, and a retired dairy farmer and his wife remember a recurring dream where their work is never done.</p>

<p>A faceless, nameless videographer tells a love story set in Shanghai. Mardar is a motorcycle courier, Moudan is a young woman, whose father has hired him to drive her around. They fall in love. When Mardar takes part in a plot to kidnap Moudan, she throws herself into the Suzhou River. Years later, Mardar thinks he recognises his lost love &ndash; in the person of Meimei, the girlfriend of the video narrator, who performs as a mermaid in a nightclub</p>

<p>A remote, one-horse town in Iceland. A female corpse lies in the black sand. The local authorities assume it was an accident; it would not be the first time that reckless tourists have fallen off an unsecured cliff. Police officer Anita, who has just returned to her hometown from Reykjavik, is the only one who smells a rat and stubbornly continues to investigate. When another woman turns up seriously injured, it becomes apparent that Anita is right. Monumental Icelandic vistas alternate with detailed observations of police work. Corpses stink and are heavy as lead, but at work the talk is also, or even above all, about relationships. Here, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone has a common past, one that seems to weigh heavily on Anita in particular.</p>

<p>Fereshteh is studying and works at a printers&rsquo; shop in Tehran. She wants to go to the US but is having trouble finding the time for a language course. This is because she also has a two-month-old baby that her parents know nothing about. When they announce at short notice that they are coming to visit, Fereshteh has to find another place for one night for her illegitimate child and everything that would give away her existence. What at first seems resolvable with a phone call to a few friends soon develops into a difficult undertaking. Fereshteh&rsquo;s quick-witted friend Atefeh offers her support, but their ensuing odyssey through the city only reveals to the pair how limited their options are. In a society that does not grant everyone the same rights, young women have to weigh up carefully who their allies are. Director Ali Asgari stringently packs his narrative into a single day. Not only does he portray his intrepid protagonists, he also depicts what it means to lead a life outside traditional family structures &ndash; and the extent to which these structures shape Iranian society.</p>

<p>A.M. &ldquo;Mac&rdquo; MacGregor, head of an advertising agency, pays her male secretaries poorly, treats them badly and if, despite that, one of them falls in love with her, it&rsquo;s grounds for dismissal. She makes an exception for Tom Verney, a penniless painter, even letting him kiss her. Tom is good with women, so Mac assigns him the task of charming the sister of tobacco magnate Jonathan Caldwell to capture his ad account. Tom commits so fully to the task that Mac becomes jealous. Meanwhile, the southern tobacco man, a notorious woman hater, eyes Mac as a fifth wife. Seeing Tom as a rival, a calculating Caldwell encourages the painter-cum-secretary to keep Mac&rsquo;s jealousy on the boil, driving a wrathful Mac to accept the southerner&rsquo;s marriage proposal</p>

<p>Rapper Cole meanders through a toxic mix of numbness, narcissism and alienation. Having succeeded in destroying almost every relationship he has ever had, the newly divorced musician is now letting his young daughter down, just as he has everyone else around him. Just back from an exhausting tour, he is searching for inspiration for his next song. His personal assistant Ilana tries to keep him, and everything around him, together. But somewhere in between the studio recordings, the &ndash; sometimes productive, at other times disturbing &ndash; encounters with musical collaborators, the meetings and the interviews, the paparazzi, the drug dealers and the prostitutes, this musician has completely lost the plot.</p>

<p>During the 2020 lockdown, Lucrecia Martel returns to her home region of Salta in Northern Argentina. There, she follows tango singer Julieta Laso as she joins a community of feminist and dissident artists who gather together in the heart of the forest. From this timeless tale emerges a powerful sisterhood, an antidote to the anxieties of a world in turmoil.</p>

<p>&ldquo;You are miles and miles away, dozens or hundreds, your eyes light up when they meet mine, we&#39;d keep in touch alright, but someone cut the wire.&rdquo;<br /> <br /> The house&rsquo;s facade displays a map of the former USSR, while right next door a second-hand clothing store advertises &ldquo;European quality&rdquo;. Eastern Ukraine, where war has left bombed-out houses and desolation &ndash; here live Nastya and Yarik. Together with the other children they own the ruins and junkyards with playful resilience. A strip mine sprawls in the background, the grown-ups are forced to &ldquo;freelance&rdquo; as gravediggers. The conflict and traumatic experiences it brought with it have left deep marks in the children&rsquo;s psyches. Nastya&rsquo;s repeatedly overwhelmed by an oppressive heaviness for which scars on her arms bear witness, though she tries her best to sing the blues away. Always present, but undemonstrative, the documental camera opens an intimate space for the unbroken.</p>

<p>Yi-jung is in her late twenties and still lives with her mother. Having raised her daughter alone, Su-kyung is now ready to start a new life with her fianc&eacute; and leave the past behind. Not so Yi-jung, who from an early age has all too often had to serve as an outlet for her irascible mother&rsquo;s frustrations. The many years of disregard have left her with a crippling mixture of suppressed feelings towards her mother from whom she simply cannot break free. When an argument between the two escalates in a supermarket car park, Su-kyung hits her daughter with her car. Just an accident, the mother claims. Malicious intent, Yi-jung retorts. This rebellion marks the beginning of an arduous process for both women to cut the cord</p>

<p>The Lighting aims to revisit issues of discrimination rooted in technological development and image production. Three professional Togolese photographers explore how to use instruments to compensate for insufficient exposure while shooting dark skin tones. A leading software engineer, developing facial recognition algorithms at Taiwan&rsquo;s MediaTek, talks about how a newly-created camera algorithm is very popular on the African continent.</p>

<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m still here!&rdquo; shouts 19-year-old Neve Kelly at her mother, but she does not react. Neve is horrified to discover that she herself is dead. Realising that people can&rsquo;t see her, she looks on as friends and family worry why she has not come home after the party last night and form search parties to comb the forest for her. Neve takes care of her battered body, washes the blood off the back of her head and changes her dirty clothes. She has no memory of last night. What on earth happened to her? Determined to find her killer, she starts investigating her own death. She uncovers deeply buried secrets and is forced to re-examine everything about her life and the people she cared about.</p>

<p>Birth is one of the few experiences that is shared by everyone. Helping to bring new life into the world is a job that is far from mundane for head midwife Ella and her colleagues in the maternity ward of a Danish hospital. The close-knit team goes about their work with conviction and fine ideals. But all too often, the pressure and the enormous mental and physical strain of the work pushes them to their personal limits.</p>

<p>Four short 16mm films: Each Song is accompanied by an image track consisting of black film pierced with a sewing machine. The Songs are without titles or credits, at best interventions. They are satellites of the installation The Song of the Shirt (2020). Its film crew forms a choir and sings the short pieces, accompanied by music experiments from the project ZONKEY (Melitopoulos / Schroedinger). As a choir that doesn&rsquo;t gain visibility and as a film whose surface is pierced, the Songs appear as intervention, as disruption or interruption, like Luddites of film.</p>

<p>Night has fallen on a burning world. Demonstrations, earthquakes, forest fires&ndash;&ndash;fire is everywhere. Fire of struggles and pains, of rebirth and chaos. Men and women speak and de-speak from different places to honor the dead and save what remains of the living. As General Feu struts around in the middle of the scene and his interpreter repaints the outskirts of the world in the color of flames, the assembly tries to resist madness and see a new day rise.</p>

<p>Breathing has become synonymous with collective rage against police brutality, racism, catastrophic climate change, the breakdown of systems of care, state backed violence, right wing extremism, and constitutional crises. This altered breath of the world has not only manifested itself in the medicalization of everyday life and a state of viral hypoxia experienced by millions across the world</p>

<p>While getting her nails done, New York society lady Sylvia Fowler finds out that her friend Mary Haines&rsquo; husband is having an affair with Crystal Allen, a perfume counter salesclerk. With schadenfreude, Sylvia shares the news with all their Park Avenue friends, then gleefully sends Mary to the manicurist who is spreading the gossip. As expected, the unwitting Mary&rsquo;s visit to the beauty salon results in an unfolding public scandal</p>

<p>The Zama Zama Project is an experimental documentation of ruinous postindustrial mining life in southern Africa. It is also an act of witnessing. The men and women of the project are the forgotten, the ghosts in the machine of modern extractivism, the scavengers of its extravagant waste. They are also the authors of the stories told to Rosalind Morris, and form the core of this expressive and probing assemblage. Based on long term collaborative research, Morris&rsquo;s project, branching off from her feature length-documentary, We are Zama Zama, comprises five short works of various formats in which the sensuous experience of mortally dangerous labor is pursued alongside the political and economic forces that drive people to risk everything in radical speculations on life and value. From mythopoetic encounters with the underground sublime to reflections on the politics and techniques of filmmaking in tunnels and shafts many kilometers below the earth&rsquo;s surface and vociferous debates on the nature of democracy after wage-labor, The Zama Zama Project is an aesthetically compelling, open-ended address from the necropolitical world.</p>

<p>Andrew Dominik&rsquo;s career has been crossing paths with Nick Cave&rsquo;s since 2000&rsquo;s Chopper, which was scored by original Bad Seeds member Mick Harvey. Seven years later, Cave wrote the music for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, assisted by another bandmate, Warren Ellis. The next step in this decade-long friendship and partnership was the 2016 film One More Time with Feeling, in which Cave chose to present his album &ldquo;Skeleton Tree&rdquo;, having withdrawn from all promotional tours and interviews after his son&rsquo;s death</p>

<p>Ann Winters is a statistician for an insurance company and knows her way around the laws of probability. Her theory is that there would be a lot fewer divorces if newlyweds would refrain from consummating their marriage for three months while they get to know each other. Winters decides to test that thesis by applying it to her own upcoming nuptials &ndash; much to the chagrin of her groom, who tries in vain to lure her into bed on their wedding night. After a later series of unforeseen events conspire to keep them physically distanced, they both fall victim to suspicions of marital infidelity. Eventually, a separation seems inevitable</p>

<p>Tinash&eacute; wants his freedom. Away from his mother and her constant complaining. Tinash&eacute;&rsquo;s best friend Victor takes him in, he has his own apartment and some room in his bed. Their mutual friend Zarah comes over, the three of them hang out together, cook and dance. This new life feels deeply familiar and yet excitingly new. Everything matters, and nothing really matters at all. A time full of possibilities and new challenges.</p>

<p>To Be or Not to Be</p>

<p>Abracadabra, the coin is gone. Abracadabra, there it is again. The second part is the tricky one. Things have a way of vanishing on their own &ndash; just like the local industry and the jobs on the Greek island of Euboea. If Vicky could magically bring those back, her big brother Yorgos would not have to disappear. For one entire day, she never leaves his side, faintly hoping to still find the right magic spell.</p>

<p>In 1951 England, young Tommy Walker watches as his mother and stepfather murder his biological father, long thought lost in the war. The trauma renders the youngster deaf, blind, and mute, and he becomes a problem child that nobody wants. But when Tommy develops mad skills at pinball, and even beats the grand master Pinball Wizard, he becomes a proselytiser to the masses in search of enlightenment</p>

<p>They party the nights away, craving excess and letting themselves go. When Marina once again goes too far, she knows her brother Sasha will save her. He spends his days training with the Olympic squad and is trying to steal his teammate&rsquo;s girlfriend. The film captures the lives of young adults in Russia caught between drill and ecstasy, police checks and the desire to be there for each other.</p>

<p>Would-be writer Helen Bartlett is an inveterate teller of tall tales. Her husband, Ken, on the other hand, is an upright lawyer who believes in the truth, and nothing but the truth. Helen gets a job but quits immediately when her boss makes aggressive sexual advances. When he&rsquo;s found shot dead shortly thereafter, she is accused of murder. Under police interrogation, Helen confesses to the crime, but doesn&rsquo;t have the courage to tell her husband that her confession was a lie. Ken represents her at trial and pleads the case as self-defence. But there is an odd observer in the courtroom who seems to know the truth about what really happened</p>

<p>A flamboyant Broadway impresario who has fallen on hard times tries to get his former lover, now a Hollywood diva, to return and resurrect his failing career.</p>

<p>It&rsquo;s Friday night and just like every other week, best friends R&ouml;nkk&ouml; and Mimmi are busy beating back the darkness of the Finnish winter with an irrepressible lust for life and love. With her quirky wit, R&ouml;nkk&ouml; stands out at every party and has no trouble getting the boys&rsquo; attention &ndash; yet how do you turn desire into fulfilment? When Mimmi loses her temper, you might find yourself on the wrong end of her hockey stick. But when she falls in love with the graceful figure skater Emma, everything suddenly seems bright and easy. With its episodic narrative, Alli Haapasalo&rsquo;s film tells a story of friendship, and of three exhilaratingly headstrong individuals trying to wrest dreams from reality and redefining relationships and sexuality along the way.</p>

<p>C&eacute;line and Ram&oacute;n are a young binational couple who survived the terrorist attack at the Bataclan theatre on November 13, 2015. That harrowing night has left an open wound in their lives and they are struggling to regain a sense of normality and move beyond the identity they have been assigned as victims. While C&eacute;line has repressed her experience and thrown herself back into her old life, Ram&oacute;n is stuck in the past. Both are grappling with the same question: how can they survive and move on as a couple?</p>

<p>Invited to a rest home to explore their sexual issues, three women spend their days and nights trying to tame their inner demons. Under the detached supervision of a German therapist and a considerate social worker, the group attempts to maintain a delicate balance. For the young Geisha, somber L&eacute;onie and unpredictable Eug&eacute;nie, it&rsquo;s a chance to get away from the noise, to engage with the present, and think about the future.</p>

<p>No matter how warm the colours or how loud the music, worry always clouds In&eacute;s&rsquo; eyes. However, whenever she is asked what&rsquo;s going on, she has no words. The neon lights and the beeping of the EKG in her sister&#39;s room are like a glaring filter over the film image bathed in soft light. The rehearsals for the big performance of her roller skating group are supposed to bring distraction. Tummy ache and glitter are as close together as sadness and happiness.</p>

<p>Rosa is a restless girl who lives with her mother&#39;s relatives in a remote South Italian village. Her mother&rsquo;s mysterious death when she was still a child casts a gloomy shadow on her present. When the truth emerges and Rosa realizes she is trapped in a same predestined fate, she decides to betray her family seeking revenge against her own blood. However, when your family belongs to the &#39;ndrangheta mafia, a single failed step can lead to death.</p>

<p>Another time is possible! At least that is the case in the early days of industrial clockmaking in Switzerland in around 1877, when the disparity between the authorities, manufacturers and models gives rise to parallel temporal dimensions, each with their own timetable, values and ideology. In this proto-Taylorist society, where dignitaries and their gendarmes control the exact time and dictate the rhythms of production and community, a group of workers form an anarchist union in association with the First International federation of workers&rsquo; groups. This is where Josephine, who is in charge of assembling the movement, the heart of the mechanical watch, meets the Russian cartographer Pyotr Kropotkin, who is currently in the Jura valleys. Inspired by anarchist ideas, they demand the liberation of time and counter the values of the marketplace and nationalism with solidarity and pacifism.<br /> After his debut THOSE WHO ARE FINE, Sch&auml;ublin continues to refine his style, which combines meticulous composition &ndash; both in his characteristic wide shots as well as in the extreme close-ups celebrating manual labour &ndash; with a distinct political stance that uses distancing and humour to enhance the topicality and universality of the story.</p>

<p>VCR&rsquo;s Choice combines digital, post-internet video aesthetics with their analog predecessor, the VCR, and playfully investigates (sub)histories of media and technology through the lens of queerness and underground culture. The mind can be a source of entertainment during periods of isolation with a wide variety of TV channels to choose from the past, present, and future. In VCR&rsquo;s Choice devices from the last century are used to act as gates or levels of the imagination. The machines are unlocked through a series of energy exchanges which triggers emotional-like channel changes. The mind device must guide sexual impulse and practice self-care in order to free itself from old thought processes and enter into new realms.</p>

<p>The news of a terrorist attack in Clermont-Ferrand in France catches Isadora and M&eacute;d&eacute;ric in bed. M&eacute;d&eacute;ric, a likeable, unassuming man in his mid-thirties, has fallen head over heels in love with the older, married sex worker Isadora. The attack brings their lovemaking at the Hotel de France to an abrupt end. The city is in turmoil. S&eacute;lim, a homeless young man of Arab origin, is given money and shelter by M&eacute;d&eacute;ric. But then the latter begins to suspect that S&eacute;lim might have been involved in the attack, and calls the police. In the meantime, Isadora&rsquo;s husband turns up and starts to feel jealous. And so it is that Alain Guiraudie&rsquo;s lively and sometimes turbulent carousel of characters begins to spin.</p>

<p>In the film we follow 15-year-old Ruby. During her period, she doesn&rsquo;t dare to ask her mother for tampons or sanitary pads because she knows that money is tight. She tries to fix it herself. With the film we tackle the theme of period poverty.</p>

<p>It begins in the dark, in a corridor; water is flowing &hellip; voices echo in these sewer tunnels; it is the abyss of Munich, under the river Isar. The voices tell fragments of stories: about vanished people, violence, memory loss&mdash;while the camera is now above ground, scanning the city&rsquo;s fa&ccedil;ades, including those of the &ldquo;Third Reich.&rdquo; The city appears as a body winding its way through time, past and present. Like a thread through memories, a spiral runs through it: a shell, a whirlpool, the turn of a staircase, the ever-recurring voices of the past. The film is a collage: it jumbles traces of history and forms of nature, bringing images, voices, and sounds from different sources to the same level. A story of living beings and living environments, of fossils that challenge our perception of time</p>

<p>vs (or &quot;virtual spiral&quot;) deals with the dynamics between time and body in film. On digital video and non-reliable 16mm-film the processual of time and (film) body is visually transformed by spiraling camera movements. Here, contrary movements, distance and proximity or depth and surface enter into a dialogue with each other. The spiral runs like a thread through the film &quot;vs&quot;. For creating the spiraling effect the artist Lydia Nsiah invented a camera tracking machine and shot in-studio, operating the movements of the camera live while recording. On screen we see Found Footage of data centers/ recordings of the physical bodies of our omnipresent data cloud. Artist Hui Ye composed the film&rsquo;s immersive sound space interacting with the hypnotic and spiraling data body images.</p>

<p>Dane is used to everybody wanting something from him. As a drug dealer in small-town West Virginia, it kind of goes with the territory. Nelly remains unimpressed, even when he does a little business on the side during their first date. The high school student exerts fascination on Dane. He can talk to her &ndash; about dreams, regrets and the fact that maybe it&rsquo;s not so cool after all when your own life has become a rap anthem</p>

<p>Carol Ainsley has been nominated for Outstanding Career Woman of the Year. The New York agent has sold the film rights to bestselling romance novel &ldquo;Whirlwind&rdquo; to Hollywood. Now all she needs to do is find somebody to play the hero. Her first choice is the book&rsquo;s author, a dyed-in-the-tweed college professor, but he proves both unwilling and lacking aptitude. When she demonstratively kisses him, however, it awakens unimagined talents in him and, for Carol, unwitting feelings. Meanwhile, star reporter Henry Pepper, who is writing a profile of Carol, follows her predicament with delight. He has ulterior motives for goading the two towards romance</p>

<p>Twelve-year-old Bhyal works as a blacksmith, sharpening the sickles and repairing the villagers&rsquo; equipment. However, as a member of the lowest castehe is an untouchable person and subject to the hostilities of his classmates. Only his friend Laba is ready to defy social boundaries. Against the breathtaking backdrop of a Nepalese mountain village, the film tells of social inequality and friendship.</p>

<p>White Sands Crystal Foxes is an experimental film journey through the point of view of a young queer person who daydreams about the erotics of a world where humans are willfully in submission to nature, and foxes are the only mammals still able to procreate. In this speculative world, in heightened states of emotion, crystals form from human secretions, such as tears, cum, and piss, and are considered to be valuable sources of energy. Foxes are polyamorous creatures slowly becoming the dominant mammals populating the world. Holes are infinite portals, social architectures, thresholds, and energy conductors. Drawing connections between chemical warfare, climate change, sustainable energy, and queering time and space, Liz Rosenfeld transforms a 360&deg; immersive environment (a planetarium) into a speculative future lexicon of flesh, holes, crystals, and foxes.</p>

<p>An experienced Somali policewoman once again accompanies a young inmate through the procedures of the Somali justice system.</p>

<p>It may only be a tower block on the edge of a forest, but you can tell by the look on the faces of the people hoping to join the building&rsquo;s community that this must be one of the last bastions of civilisation in a world that has fallen apart. To live here, shielded from a dangerous environment, is the goal. But when the caretaker&rsquo;s dog disappears, an irrational fear spreads among the residents. Security officer Anna makes an appeal for reason and begins to search for the animal. Meanwhile, her daughter Iris locks herself in the bathroom. She is convinced that, with her &ldquo;evil eye&rdquo;, she herself is responsible for the dog&rsquo;s disappearance. When a newly formed vigilante group demands stricter security measures and a renewed suitability test for the entire community, Anna begins to fear for her right to stay.</p>

<p>This is the story of Yarokamena, a Uitoto indigenous person who organized armed resistance to rubber exploitation at the beginning of the 20th century in Casa Arana, Colombia. He invokes the spiritual and cosmic forces of war, releasing its destructive power from its container that ends up creating a spiral of betrayal and death.</p>

<p>Ma and Guiying lead lives that are similarly sheltered and difficult. He is a reticent farmer, the last of his family to remain unmarried; she is disabled and infertile, and long past what is considered to be marrying age in rural China. Their arranged marriage, uniting two people who are accustomed to isolation and humiliation, would appear to force them into a relationship that will make life worse for both of them. But instead, they seize the opportunity to rise above themselves and discover their shared destiny. They learn how to become close companions, how to speak up, how to care for each other and even how to smile. All this in spite of the hard work required of them by their quintessential bond with the land and the trials that await them on their common path</p>

<p>When the film begins, it is all over. &ldquo;We know it&rsquo;s terminal, and that&rsquo;s all&rdquo;, says Juliane of her mother Kerstin, who is in great pain and about to die aged just 64. Although the young doctor she consults acknowledges on a personal level that everyone has the right to manage their own death, he nonetheless reminds her that euthanasia is still illegal in Germany. This is even more the case at the Catholic hospice where Kerstin is staying. As relatives come to say goodbye to her mother and the emotions of memories mingle with the anticipation of grief, Juliane finds herself having to do battle with time &ndash; unbending, apathetic and monochrome &ndash; and this is superbly reflected in the convulsions of the handheld camera in wide shots.</p>

<p>Suzie loves going with her parents to the garden settlement outside the city, where every plot is different. Behind a high fence, surrounded by dense, almost spooky vegetation, is where old Bela is supposed to live. A big black dog and a shiny blue key lead Suzie onto the property, where she discovers a magical secret. Painted on glass in vibrant oil colours, a world full of small wonders and natural beauty emerges.</p>

<p><em>All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes</em>&nbsp;tracks the public administration of light and darkness as an essential policing tool. The video moves between cities like New York and Paris, with the artist&#39;s native Beirut setting the central pulse. Creating an associative genealogy that moves from whale oil lamps to gas lanterns to LED bulbs, from blackouts to curfews, the video is comprised of found footage and material from Aivazian&rsquo;s own phone. Layering, splicing, and confronting disparate kinds of sound and image, the artist generates a sensorial meditation on how the fundamentals of human vision&mdash;light hitting the retina&mdash;were mechanized into tools that capture our movements, be it in everyday life or on screen.</p>

<p>A pseudo-documentary which shows a cult of women dedicated to the veneration of the skull of the Peruvian Independence warrior Tomasa Ttito Condemayta, in the town of Acomayo, Peru, during 2021.</p>