Playlist
<p>We are between Algiers and Tamanrasset, on the Trans-Saharan, and Malika reigns supreme over her twenty square meters in which she welcomes desert travelers: an intrepid Polish woman, enthusiastic musicians, a passing friend, a suspicious imam... Hassen Ferhani offers a unique platform to those left behind by Algerian society.</p>
<p>Through four characters aspiring to realize their dreams, three Armenias are brilliantly and subtly portrayed here. There is the elevator operator in a hospital who wants to travel into space, the farmer in search of the perfect wife, and the young queer and feminist women who simply want to live their lives... while waiting for the protests and the hopes of revolution.</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>The director receives a call from his elderly mother. A stubborn woman, she worries about the future of the rest of the family: first the father, addicted to gambling and in fragile health, then the brother, penniless but confident in his talents as a medium. By revisiting the reasons for her departure twenty years earlier, Elvis A-Liang Lu creates a magnificent family portrait, moving and filled with light.</p>
<p>As war rages in eastern Ukraine, the Lysychansk children's home welcomes a steady stream of new residents. The center's dedicated staff spends a few months healing the hearts of these children from families shattered by the conflict and nurturing a few glimmers of hope.</p>
<p>West of Seriana, the world's mechanics stop turning for a moment, directly above the sun, around a punctured wheel... This film is part of the Minutes 2016 collection initiated by the GREC (Groupe de Recherches et d'Essais Cinématographiques) created in 1969 by Jean Rouch, Pierre Braunberger and Anatole Dauman to support the creation of first short films.</p>
<p>Back in the family home, Wenqian Zhang sets up shop with his camera. A Long Journey Home recounts this cohabitation through a relational and temporal journey that stirs emotions and questions from within the "family-making" of contemporary China. A brilliant quest for emancipation in search of a place among one's own.</p>
<p>A Marble Travelogue chronicles the odyssey of the marble route between Greece and China. The director takes a humorous look at an absurd economic cycle, from raw material extraction to manufacturing and retail, where the search for authenticity and tradition are now a distant memory.</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>Composed of 10,000 images found using Google Reverse Image Search, Abyss is based on the misunderstandings caused by the interpretation of images by artificial intelligence: indeed, AI does not focus on scale, emotion or context but rather only on colour, pattern and correlations.</p>
<p>Adam Ondra is the best. Born in 1993, the Czech climber has broken a series of records and is widely recognised as the most accomplished in his discipline. No mountain or wall can resist him. But who is this young man who knows no fear and never seems to encounter failure? Jan Šimanek and Petr Záruba deliver an intimate portrait, beyond the usual sensationalism of sports headlines.</p>
<p>Afric Hotel (VdR 2011) focuses on migrants from Sub- Saharan Africa transiting through Algiers. One of them is a lift operator—always with a book in his hand—, another is a shoe- maker and the last works in construction. Hassen Ferhani and Nabil Djedouani’s camera follows these protagonists who are all too often ignored as they interact with the people of Algiers.</p>
<p>Agave Amica transports us to Indonesia in the midst of the pandemic. With an excellent eye and a unique form of narration, Gembong Nusantara follows the daily lives of workers and their toil both in graveyards and in flower fields, inviting us to a larger reflection on the contrast between day and night, life and death, flowers and graves.</p>
<p>A staggering odyssey told as an essay on grief, and on how humans and nature rebuild after trauma. It moves from the shores of Japan where Sachiko, Yasu and Satoko try to find ways to accept their loss; via rarely seen places thousands of meters below the sea level where new life-forms thrive; to one of the Hawaiian islands where a group of volunteers gather to clean a beach from Japanese trash floating in from the Ocean.</p>
<p>Thailand’s strategic position and political orientation made it the ideal ally for the United States during the Vietnam war. Through an astonishing mix of contemporary and archival images, All the Things You Leave Behind deploys precise criticism to analyse a little-known page of modern history, emblematic of contemporary power games and warfare.</p>
<p>An Ornithologist’s Daughter merges private memories and history to paint the portrait of a woman. While observing her life, we gradually discover her identity as daughter and mother who has chosen to live far from people but close to nature. Erik Nuding’s strong debut fills the spectator’s eyes with a moving family portrait of rare grace and intelligence.</p>
<p>The submarine images reveal the mysterious beauty of the aphotic zone, where less than 1% of sunlight reaches. The footage of the Gulf of Mexico at the depth of four kilometres follows a coral thriving off the warming ocean caused by human activity.</p>
<p>A desert landscape, as if from another planet. A few lonely, rusty shipwrecks. Low desert scrub grows around them to hold the sand together during the merciless storms. Aralkum, the Aral Desert, is the bare seabed, the last thing left of the Aral Sea.</p> <p>By weaving together different cinematic textures, the short film Aralkum re-imagines the dried-up Aral Sea, allowing an old fisherman to set sail one last time.</p>
<p>In Lausanne, Switzerland, a group of young women and queers in their early twenties are making pornographic films, camera in hand. Between their jobs for some and their studies for others, they do everything possible to produce ethical and dissident films. Very quickly, the country's media, and then the public, became interested in the collective. In the eyes of all, they are now involved in a fight for a different vision of desire and sexuality.</p>
<p>Suddenly, a woman needs to write about her youth. In a curt way, far away from moral, Ardenza is the testimony of sexual liberation and political commitment, during the 90's in Italy. The young woman moves, bangs, suffers and comes. Her story is made of meetings, short and heady moments. She tells her glowing path through desire and bodies. This movie is full of sensual energy coming from a moment of her life that still resists and quivers. In the background, Italians are about to give power to Forza Italia, battles between the left and extreme right wings are more and more violent. Thanks to a plastic and mixed language, it's a wild and free voice, a coarse femininity, which is at ease and singular that the film shows.</p>
<p>Daniele, a young man from Sant’Erasmo, an island on the Venice Lagoon, dreams of a record breaking “barchino” (motorboat). In this beautiful and cinematic piece, Yuri Ancarani transports us to a musical and choreographic univers and succeeds in portraying a rootless generation, seen from the timeless perspective of the Venetian landscape.</p>
<p>Recently arrived in Paris from Mali, Bintou stands up to her husband and her mother-in-law, who want to excise her young daughter Aïssata. The community then becomes involved, between the weight of tradition and progressive arguments to stop this mutilating practice. This fictional documentary is Kirsten Johnson’s first film, shot when she was studying at La Fémis.</p>
<p>In remote Idaho, Colie and Hollyn embark on a long summer season working as range riders herding cattle. We follow them closely through the immensity of the landscapes and intimate moments of friendship. Emelie Mahdavian masterfully revisits the genre of the western and invites us to rethink the challenge of nomadism from the perspective of two young women.</p>
<p>The director Rudi Van der Merwe returns to Calvinia, the small town in South Africa where he grew up; an opportunity to once again tackle this familiar and conservative territory, fuelled by injustice. This generous and elegantly constructed film, portraying encounters, moments of solitude and flirtation, blends past and present in what appears to be a farewell journey.</p>
<p>Kirsten Johnson has worked as cinematographer for more than 60 documentary films. She uses these captured moments to compose Cameraperson, a film record of the images that have stayed with her over 30 years. This is a deeply moving work of great humanity, delving into the private life of the woman behind the camera and the people she has filmed.</p>
<p>Playful and incisive, Casting di un padre highlights the shooting process; and more specifically, the search for an actor who can embody the director’s recently deceased father. In this way, Giulia Goy generates scenes that allow her not only to establish new dialogues with her father, but also to begin the grieving process.</p>
<p>Amid the lunar landscapes of the Bolivian mountains, the few traces of human presence seem minuscule, anecdotal. Shot by shot, Miguel Hilari’s camera follows these clues that lead to the city and its sonic confusion, where faces are captured with the same attention and poetry as the environment in which they live.</p>
<p>It is 1995. In a district in the suburbs of Algiers, 12-year-olds Samia and Nouara enjoy a happy friendship until violence suddenly appears in their life and tests their bond. With a background in documentaries, Amal Blidi creates an intense first fictional short film that uses the prism of adolescence to sensitively allude to the “Black Decade” and the end of innocence.</p>
<p>In summer, two teenage girls are exploring an uninhabited house in the country. In the attic, they discover the diary of the French-speaking Swiss writer Monique Saint-Hélier. Her written words come to life in their hands, bringing this exiled literary woman, weakened by illness and tormented by war, back to life for the duration of the film.</p>
<p>Dahbia is attempting to give her youngest son Naoufel a better life. Her daugher Chahra has the same hopes for her young daughter, Douaa. Asma Benazouz paints a compassionate portrait of these two single mothers with difficult and similar experiences, living in a run-down building in Algiers, as they struggle to offer their children a different fate.</p>
<p>A wise old man recites poems. A young man bangs into the walls of the tangible, hesitating between suicide and escape. Another navigates between realism and cynicism. The colours are stunning; the setting, striking. We are in Algiers’ largest abattoir, where employees exist between dream and reality. Hassen Ferhani patiently teases out their stories.</p>
<p>Sofia, Hedvig and Maja have grown up with bereavement; they were only eight, ten and sixteen years old when their mother took her own life. In this sensitive and graceful film whose images unfold over ten years, Jenifer Malmqvist carefully accompanies the girls, putting their loss into words, and capturing joy, sadness, and the passing of time.</p>
<p>A group of scholars in Illinois expose the judicial system’s failings regarding the death penalty to Republican Governor George Ryan, who then reconsiders his beliefs. A few months before leaving office, he finds himself facing a no-win situation in which he can ignore this report or fight for an extensive reform of the system, thus damaging his political career.</p>
<p>Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman followed the philosopher Jacques Derrida for five years, not without calling into question their filmmaking process, especially given they were confronted by one of the most visionary thinkers of the 20th century. How do you film a man thinking, and how do you film a thought? This fascinating attempt at a portrait turns into a cinematic game, for which Kirsten Johnson holds the camera.</p>
<p>Kirsten Johnson watches as her father Dick's body and memory fail in his 80s. Preparing for the end, she films a comedy in which she imagines the various possible deaths of her father, staging him in often absurd or improbable scenarios. A joyful film about family love, full of humour as a foil against the inevitable.</p>
<p>A young Indian filmmaker, who has been living in Europe for a long time, returns to his native land to tell fragments of the history of his family and of India, until the next national elections. He finds himself on a journey through the country, meeting his friends and family as well as local inhabitants. A humanist "home"-movie imbued with melancholy.</p>
<p>A young man returns to his native Romania to make a fresh start as a shepherd. Jannes Callens’ film moves at the same pace as a pasture crossing, between expedition, pause and contemplation. Striking images of this profession merge with existential considerations. How can you guide a flock when you’re a little lost yourself?</p>
<p>Set between Hong Kong, London and Frankfurt, this is the intimate portrait of five women working in the highest spheres of finance. Regularly stigmatised as “dragon-women”, they reveal the survival mechanisms they use and the personal battles they fight in this ultra-patriarchal professional field where they represent a tiny minority.</p>
<p>While staying in Switzerland, a Dutch director is overcome with a numismatic passion at the sight of the one-franc coin. This coin, which has hardly changed in appearance in decades, bears national symbols that remain obscure to him and the Swiss people he encounters. The director weaves all these life stories and symbols into a hilarious investigation.</p>
<p>In 2022, Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her 70 years of reign; her “Platinum Jubilee”. Bringing together incredible archives, the director of the romantic comedy Notting Hill has created for this occasion – and just before his own death – a nostalgic, playful, fresh and modern chronicle of the woman who has spent the most time as a Head of State.</p>
<p>In a small town, a documentary shoot takes a turn at the same time as the life of its protagonist, whose residency permit is revoked by the French State. Zohra Hamadi must consequently disappear, become invisible and inaudible. Choosing to use fiction to convey violence and absurdity, Philip Scheffner (Atelier VdR 2018) delivers a powerful political film.</p>
<p>As he turns thirty, a penniless young man is overwhelmed with artistic doubt. In order to forget a recent break-up, his slim figure drifts aimlessly through the streets of Taipei, buzzing with the rumours of the autumn 2019 general elections. Wang Chun-Hong has composed a bewitching piece of documentary autofiction, enhanced by a glossy black and white.</p>
<p>Triggered by a dream, and through the use of photos, 3D animation and refined sound design, this moving first-person work evokes the relationship between Argentinian state policy—in the wake of the wave of privatization in the 1990s—and the death of a young father, a worker dismissed from the state-owned gas company.</p>
<p>Dinora left Honduras for the United States in one of the migrant caravans leaving Central America. Settled in a suburb of Washington D.C., she speaks on social media of the difficulties she has encountered integrating, as well as of the presence around her of a film crew which has thus unwittingly become the subject of its own film.</p>
<p>Following several years of absence marked by tragic events, Yukie returns to her grandmother’s house in Japan. With Fuku Nashi, the Swiss-Japanese filmmaker Julie Sando offers a moving encounter between two lonely souls, in an intimate account built around identity and reconciliation, somewhere between documentary and autofiction.</p>
<p>Peter Entell has been almost compulsively filming his father Max for years. Max is a cheerful man, a hug addict, who suggests to his son that he direct a film about old age called “It’s Fun to Be Old”. Getting Old Stinks is a moving filmed letter taking the form of an imaginary correspondence with the director’s absent mother, of whom all that is left are some photographs.</p>
<p>During the San Fermín celebrations in Pamplona in 1969, a man died when the bulls were let loose. There was nothing to identify him, except for the letter “H” on his keyring. Carlos Pardo Ros imagines this man’s last night: a drunken nocturnal stroll with the ghosts of H, at one of the world’s biggest folk festivals.</p>
<p>I pugni in tasca paints the portrait of a family stuck on a horizonless estate at the foot of the Apennine Mountains. Against this tired and incestuous bourgeoisie, Alessandro mounts a eugenic rebellion, holding up a mirror to pre-68 Italy and its lingering authoritarianism. Bellocchio’s ardent debut is shot through with masterful dissonances.</p>
<p>Every month, hundreds of unemployed nurses travel from the south to the north of Italy in search of work. Two of them organise the trips by overnight buses; a long journey of hope that often leads to nothing at all. Shot as a road movie, the two filmmakers paint a pitiless portrait of modern Italy before, during and after the health crisis.</p>
<p>Il traditore opens with the imaginary mafia dreamed up by Hollywood: ostentatious parties and Sicilian songs, the faces of the family empire all lined up. Except that by focusing on the repentant Tommaso Buscetta—Judge Falcone’s ’mole’ at the heart of the Palermo Maxi Trial—the fiction manages to deconstruct the myth, thus restoring the real.</p>
<p>Former labourer Jean-René is now retired. He has lived in Mâcon, France, since emigrating from Réunion aged seventeen. For the first time, he breaks the silence and tells his daughter his story. His account reveals mysterious dreams and sorrow that are rooted in the wounds of French colonial history.</p>
<p>A highly secure conference centre, nestled in the mountains. Hugo Radi combines a creative way of filming this locus of power with two fictional voice-over accounts to construct a dystopian world with real contours. This speculative film seems to draw inspiration from the most frightening elements of our contemporary societies.</p>
<p>Jean Genet spent the last ten years of his life in Larache, Morocco. He was buried in the Spanish cemetery facing the sea and the local prison. Dalila Ennadre, who died in May 2020, faithfully filmed the people who continue to visit the poet whose memory reigns over this sun-scorched place, and where they come to find some inner peace.</p>
<p>This film traces the life of Jan Kapr, a prominent Czech composer of the 20th century. A documentary opera with an ambitious libretto and playful and refined editing work, Kapr Code is an unexpected celebration of creativity that shakes up our ideas of biography and pays tribute to the importance of resisting homologation and censorship through art and creation.</p>
<p>Places. People. Songs sung like a liberation, fragments of happiness, memories that are sometimes funny, sometimes painful. These moments of life are captured on camera during karaoke performances throughout the Finnish landscape. Joy and melancholy merge in this film’s friendly approach, which will leave a lasting impression on its audience.</p>
<p>In the district of Katanga, in Addis Ababa, Amele and her makeshift hostel welcome young people seeking refuge in the Ethiopian capital. Every day sees the arrival of a new person, a new experience, a new story. The filmmakers sensitively paint the portrait of a place and its residents.</p>
<p>For mysterious reasons, two watchmen are made to guard access to the river in an area of Lausanne where retirees and immigrant families live. Through the different people they encounter, a territory takes shape and a friendship is born. Tizian Büchi creates a fable—part documentary, part fiction and tinged with magical realism—to subtly question our surveillance society.</p>
<p>“If God is everywhere, how can we be free?” Ernesto, a fervent atheist, is invited to reconsider his position when a Church dignitary tells him that his family is attempting to get his late mother—whom he hated—canonised. Through the use of fiction, L’ora di religione is an exploration of the archaisms of contemporary Italy and a vow of sedition against its moral conformism.</p>
<p>Amadou, a 16 year old from Guinea, has just arrived in Switzerland. Far from his friends and family, he must adapt to his new life and go back to school in an integration class. Louise Carrin paints the portrait of a young man who must reconcile his migration journey with the torments of adolescence, its joys and heartbreaks.</p>
<p>Jointly produced by four Italian filmmakers and critics, La macchina cinema is a conscientious demystification of filmmaking. By creating a counter-view to the industry's success stories and dividing it into several episodes oscillating between the serious and the pathetic, they create the portrait of a machine fattened by its own illusions.</p>
<p>Jointly produced by four Italian filmmakers and critics, La macchina cinema is a conscientious demystification of filmmaking. By creating a counter-view to the industry's success stories and dividing it into several episodes oscillating between the serious and the pathetic, they create the portrait of a machine fattened by its own illusions.</p>
<p>Younger sister of La Lanterne Magique, La Petite Lanterne allows 4 to 6 year olds to discover the joys of cinema.</p>
<p>A teenager describes the painting he sees off-screen. He highlights the thoughtful nature of the person facing him. Two other young persons then engage in the same exercise. Projections and fantasies, social and cultural issues. We are in the Museum of Fine Arts of Algiers where Hassen Ferhani casts his simultaneously tender and lucid gaze.</p>
<p>Jules Guarneri grew up in Villars, with two adopted siblings, in a chalet haunted by the ghost of his mother who died when he was 20, and where his solitary father still lives; the latter presents him one day with his filmed diary. A cumbersome gift that the “filmographer” uses to make it resonate with his own images, thus forging his own emancipating path towards adulthood.</p>
<p>In 1982, Patrice Berthelot reports on the conditions of his detention in Sion prison through a correspondence with the director Anne Theurillat, who now transforms his words—by turns cheerful or imbued with mellow bitterness—into images, through an inspired cinematic construction. A question remains: is it possible for humanity to exist between four walls?</p>
<p>Between the walls of a prison, a man takes his time: cleaning the floor, drinking tea and telling his story. He remembers his childhood in his homeland and the sea where he grew up. Salah El Amri offers a disturbing perspective on the deprivation of freedom, through a man’s words recorded with striking temporality and chiaroscuro.</p>
<p>How do the middle and upper classes kill time when they’re not working? Adam Paaske puts together an answer by filming the residents of summer houses in Denmark. This fictional ethnography, comprised of short scenes edited together—including the 2022 Festival trailer!—takes a detached and ironic look at the leisure civilisation, haunted by the absurd, boredom and solitude.</p>
<p>A panoramic shot over the terraces of Algiers. The camera zooms in and out, seeming to unexpectedly capture the private daily conversations of the inhabitants of Algiers. With this short essay, the filmmaker wants to show "Algerian society’s openness to the world and to modern ways, as well as its contradictions with regard to traditions.”</p>
<p>In 2016, China gifts Algiers an opera house. Karim Moussaoui, bewildered by such costly facilities while his country remains so far removed from this art form, reflects on the kind of opera to which Algerian musical culture might give rise. With a film crew, he sets off to Timimoun in search of the mysterious cave-singing “divas”.</p>
<p>The Libende Boyz are young rappers from Beni in the DRC, who are trying at all costs to bring a form of artistic expression to life in an environment in which everyone fears for their life on a daily basis. Wendy Bashi creates a rich portrait of a resilient young generation bursting with dreams, which wants to transform Beni into the new capital of rap.</p>
<p>Liberland tells the unusual history of a territory located in the Balkans, a micronation proclaimed by the Czech Vít Jedlička. Does this fanciful gesture conceal the willingness to construct a communitarian ideal, or the desire to build an empire of pernicious interests with impenetrable contours? This film skilfully combines geopolitical questioning and spirited satire.</p>
<p>Five Chinese workers recount their dreams. Their nocturnal suffering reflects their difficult and precarious professional experiences. ZHAO Xu builds a deft and disturbing mise en abyme that conveys a surreal sensation, comparable to that caused by a science-fiction film, overtaken by reality.</p>
<p>In 2016, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist Marianne Wiggins suffers a sudden stroke and must move in with her daughter, Lara Porzak, an artist herself. Lara undertakes to support her mother, helping her to complete her new literary work while filming. This intimate and painful huis clos sketches out the gentle intricacy of family relationships.</p>
<p>In early 2022, Lithuanian filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius returned to war‑torn Mariupol, Ukraine, to document life under siege. Using observational footage captured in a makeshift church refuge, the film eschews politics in favor of intimate human detail—portraits of resilience, communal rituals, and stark beauty amid destruction. Co‑edited posthumously with his partner Hanna Bilobrova and editor Dounia Sichov after his death at the hands of Russian forces, Mariupolis 2 is both elegy and testament.</p>
<p>Barbara Marcel runs a film workshop at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. Starting with a discussion of the film The Lion Has Seven Heads by Glauber Rocha (Congo Brazzaville, 1969), the filmmaker questions the relationship between her country, Brazil, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Marlene offers an impassioned consideration of militant filmmaking.</p>
<p>Camillo Bellocchio took his own life in 1968, shortly after alerting his twin brother Marco to his distress, inviting him to take a step back from his political struggle: “Marx can wait”. The filmmaker confronts his family with this deep-seated wound during a gathering that holds the key to reading a body of work that has never ceased to converse with reality.</p>
<p>Teresa works on a farm in the heart of the Catalan mountains, an environment threatened by the intensive exploitation of resources. The departure of her dog underscores the gradual disappearance of the links that the inhabitants maintain with this peaceful territory. Adrià Expòsit Goy creates a humanist fable haunted by ghosts.</p>
<p>A major transgression in the representation of psychiatry, Matti da slegare films its “madmen” in the outside world, its ethics at odds with sensationalist views of the asylum apparatus. The filmmaker uses speech to reject oppression, through a long-term approach: standing against internment, for the individual and for collective intelligence.</p>
<p>In 1990, Vytautas Landsbergis, the charismatic leader of the independence movement in Lithuania, successfully wrested his country away from the USSR and compelled Gorbachev to recognise its sovereignty. The ambition and precision of one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers—and impressive archival footage—match the scale of this historic moment and struggle.</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>Rudi Vit belongs to an endangered species: he is a senior executive who is due to retire after 43 years during which work was the centre of his life. Steven, his son, follows this moment of transition with his camera. He paints a clinical and sensitive portrait of an ordinary 20th century man who reconnects with family life, from which he has long remained a distant figure.</p>
<p>Men risk their lives breaking into moving freight trains to recover leftover grain and sell it on. Nightwalker translates into film these nights of endless work in which bodies disappear, swallowed up by the striking industrial landscapes of the Rio Grande port and ensnared by the Brazilian economic crisis.</p>
<p>With a sharp eye and by letting the protagonists speak for themselves, Nikolay Stefanov takes us to Pernik, a once flourishing mining center in Bulgaria, now the home of the FC Minyor soccer team. The film closely follows the lives of three hooligans: Tsetso, a skinhead and single father, the gang leader Dado, and Mimeto, the only woman in the group.</p>
<p>Abou and Nawal Lagraa want to create the country’s first contemporary dance company at Algier’s National Theatre. Laurent Aït Benalla follows the ten young self-taught dancers, hailing from the world of hip-hop, from the rehearsals to the show, which he films from behind the scenes, where bodies emerge from the shadows to soar towards the light of the stage.</p>
<p>This is the story of a film-making dog. In a series of return trips between Brittany and Lisbon, the protagonist, along with a producer, conjures up a film through the prism of ethology, in search of the sincerity of the animal gaze. An animal comedy that includes hundreds of images of dogs that have appeared in films over the history of cinema.</p>
<p>Spring 2020: in Mexico City, a group of friends get together to rehearse a play. They gradually find themselves connected to the history of the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán valley, home to the world’s largest cactus forest. Somewhere between a phantasmagorical fiction and a historical investigation, Ollin Blood challenges our relationship with nature and all its contradictions.</p>
<p>Two men meet around a camera: the old man recounts a lost love to the young director. To remember this love, the old man reads his texts, one of which alludes to a place that holds special memories: Ostend. The director then summons a third man and in turn creates the pictures of a lost love, in a shift towards fiction.</p>
<p>In Sweden, the Kiruna iron ore mine, one of the largest in the world, is eating away at the city’s underground. Some of the centre’s large houses are at risk from landslides and must be relocated in their entirety, in a slow and majestic ballet captured by the camera of Théo Audoire and Lova Karlsson, architects of a constantly moving urban landscape.</p>
<p>Born during the first wave of the pandemic, this gem by artist and filmmaker Roberto Fassone takes us on a trip that ranges from classical surrealism to the Simpsons via Yoko Ono and bathing monkeys. Ironic and provocative, Pas seul meditates on our visual nature and plunges the viewer into a hypnotic flow of images that never cease to astonish.</p>
<p>On the Jos Plateau in Nigeria, the British mined tin and columbite which sustained local generations until the end of the 20th century. Mining is now an artisanal activity. Karimah Ashadu portrays the harshness of manual labour while questioning the harm caused by the uncontrolled extraction of natural resources.</p>
<p>With great humour and acuity, Pili Álvarez explores her own puerperium—the period of adjustment after childbirth. Using the tools of cinema language and precise sound design, she transports us to this particular state overwhelmed by repetition and new routines. Personal experience contrasts with the constructed paradigm of motherhood as a state of grace.</p>
<p>The life of a farmer in north-western Spain is turned upside down when his son returns home from the city. Under the guise of a western opening in bright light, the film gradually plunges into a darker world to relate what remains of farming culture today. The situation crescendoes to a dazzling, dramatic final shot.</p>
<p>Does it begin with the camera she received aged seven, or when life collapses in Damas, splintered by dictatorship, war and international political corruption? Republic of Silence is like a fresco that encompasses more than a decade, interweaving the daily life of a humdrum existence in Berlin—lulled by solidarity and love—with the memories of a lost time.</p>
<p>Where does the feeling of guilt come from? Starting from the account of a medical condition, Farah Hasanbegović resorts to animation to search for the origin of those sensations that accompany us throughout our life, whether we want them to or not. Through eloquent pencil strokes, Ribs is a sensorial meditation on the material dimension of our feelings.</p>
<p>Throughout history, rivers have shaped our landscapes and influenced our paths. With majestic cinematography, River offers a poetic journey over six continents, led by the voice of actor Willem Dafoe, and accompanied by music by Jonny Greenwood and Radiohead, as well as Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.</p>
<p>Mysterious images shot around a wadi (a waterway in North Africa or the Middle East, often dried up), perceived as too calm by the filmmaker and his brother—hence the “windless” of the title—, are the setting for excerpts of audio conversations. In these, three men painfully describe their unmentionable traumas, which they have buried since childhood.</p>
<p>What is the relationship between the thought of Jacques Lacan, Samuel Beckett and robotic machines? Paola Michaels proposes a possible cinematic response: using archival footage, she creates with grace and intelligence an a priori unimaginable dialogue which holds up a mirror in which we can reflect about our own existence.</p>
<p>Anouk Aimée and Michel Piccoli throw themselves body and soul into this dizzying huis clos by Marco Bellocchio. The silent, uneventful routine of these melancholic siblings crumbles when Giovanni, a brilliant actor and scoundrel, insinuates himself into their orderly life. This modern and ethereal drama scooped up both acting awards at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980.</p>
<p>At the death of her mother, Aga decides to leave her life in Germany with her partner Maja to look after her younger brother in Poland. To do this, she has to hide her love for another woman from the authorities. Closely following its protagonists, Silent Love delicately narrates their discreet struggle against a prying and viscerally homophobic society.</p>
<p>Through interviews with his father and his grandfather, Lei Lei looks back at a tragic family past marked by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its ensuing violence. In this animation film fuelled by pop art and propaganda images, the director sets out to construct and deconstruct the archives of his own memory, taken directly from his own gaze as a child.</p>
<p>A series of old photographs awakens memories of childhood in post-war Spain, where a daughter and mother are struggling to find their place between grief and prejudice. Smells ambitiously attempts to stimulate our senses to help understand the protagonists' lives. With very few elements, the film succeeds in wafting off the screen, suffusing our memory.</p>
<p>Between 2002 and 2010, more than 10,000 civilians were killed by the Colombian army and thrown into mass graves—with the aim of demonstrating the success of the offensive against the FARC. Felipe Monroy offers a voice to the families of the victims of this unpunished state crime, thereby creating a heartrending film that stands against the worst crime of all: oblivion.</p>
<p>Sorelle Mai is a gift of a film. It offers spectators a glimpse into the early years of the director’s daughter, Elena Bellocchio, whose charisma overflows on screen. This gentlest of stories unfolds over a ten-year-long shoot, entirely dedicated to its protagonists. Sorelle Mai drifts, intangible – just like life.</p>
<p>In the heart of the Mediterranean, the song of cicadas barely covers the noise of cars and summer hits. In this landscape lulled by sunshine and routine, a grandmother attempts to make the most of every minute she still has to live with her grandson Ariele. Marco Piccarreda creates a film full of poetry and tenderness, on the pursuit of happiness.</p>
<p>When the coronavirus hit Europe in 2020, Laura and Daniel were not ready to spend 24 hours a day together in the same place. After the first days of romantic and culinary idyll, their relationship begins to suffer, with jealousy and bursts of ego undermining what seemed like a perfect love story. With complicity and empathy, Supertempo depicts an experience shared by many.</p>
<p>After crossing the Mediterranean, three West African men are protected remotely by their marabouts. In Mali, Bakary performs the same rituals in order to reach the European “paradise”. Taamaden reveals the unexpected role of the smartphone, a veritable modern gris-gris, which connects the protagonists in exile with their African spiritual roots.</p>
<p>In a bar, while visiting Algiers with his wife, Simon recognises an Algerian man that he tortured in the past. Mixing fictional scenes with archival images, Mohamed Zinet deviates from a city commission to make what will be his only, unclassifiable work, rather disliked by the authorities at the time, before it became a cult film and was restored and digitised in 2016.</p>
<p>The Tara is a river on the outskirts of Taranto whose waters are believed to have healing properties; bathing there is a tradition for the inhabitants of the city. Starting from this bucolic place, Volker Sattel and Francesca Bertin take us on a journey through a territory where myths clash with reality and where so-called “progress” has taken a heavy toll on nature and society.</p>
<p>A stroll through the Cervantes district of Algiers in search of people and stories that may have been born there: from Tarzan to Don Quixote, reality and fiction intertwine. A neighbourhood’s collective memory intersects with that of the history of cinema. This whimsical and charming short film falls halfway between cinephile comedy and urban legend.</p>
<p>With great expressive freedom, Diana Toucedo transports us to a seaside village in Galicia. We are invited to observe the work of the women who collect shellfish, and hear from their own voices their relationship with their trade, the heritage of matriarchy and their sense of belonging. Sailors at sea complement this genuine and devoted community of workers.</p>
<p>In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, the American artist Jill Magid interceded in the national economy by minting 120,000 new pennies, their edges engraved with this phrase: “the body was already so fragile”. The pennies gradually scatter across the five boroughs of New York, as the virus spreads</p>
<p>The American army flew a tethered blimp above the city of Kabul for several years. Its functions are highly classified. Its effects are less so: inducing a feeling of permanent surveillance among the population. The director then sees the same kind of disquieting blimp in the skies of Maryland…</p>
<p>The Demands of Ordinary Devotion is a meditation on care and love, a beautiful riddle of shapes and gestures where creation and labour are playfully celebrated. Shot in majestic 16mm and featuring creators of different kinds – a ceramist, a mother-to-be, a carpenter, a film director – Eva Giolo’s new opus is a much-needed gem of beauty and freshness.</p>
<p>In Spring 2020, Ukraine is in lockdown. Returning to the family household after three years away, Olena Kyrychenko finds a depressive mother and an ill father, who is drowning his forced unemployment in alcohol. Her film chronicles with precision an extimate territory, located on the edge of the lost world of childhood and the disenchanted reality of adulthood.</p>
<p>Abu Jandal was Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard before being arrested and repenting. His brother-in-law Salim Hamdan, held in Guantanamo, awaits his trial, which will prove historic. The Oath, the second part of Laura Poitras’ trilogy about the United States post-9/11, is a gripping political thriller interweaving the fates of two men once involved with Al-Qaeda, for which Kirsten Johnson holds the camera.</p>
<p>Jola and Wiesek are a flamboyant couple running Poland’s largest pawnshop. Their business used to be profitable, but now generates only losses, since pawned objects are difficult to sell. They decide to launch a big spring marketing campaign. A humorous look at the ups and downs of a society of plenty… of second-hand things!</p>
<p>A portrait of the disenchanted youth of the city of Tolyatti, once a symbol of Soviet progress and the automobile, now devastated by economic decline. Laura Sistero encounters an aimless young generation, who express their dreams of escape through crazy races in old patched-up Ladas. A cinematic object is propelled by spectacular skids to the rhythm of an electro-rock soundtrack.</p>
<p>Louisa, in her fifties, puts up missing person posters in search of her daughter, Souad. In a few shots, Fayçal Hammoum portrays a night of wandering through the streets of Algiers. The quest of his heroine—the magnificent Djalila Kadi Hanifi, her face lined by melancholy—underlines the profound divide between the generation of independence and the Algerian youth.</p>
<p>Political activist Kader Affak—the unforgettable surveyor of Tariq Teguia’s film Inland—runs a charity on the same premises as Le Sous-Marin literary café that he is renovating. In powerful chiaroscuro, he tells Yanis Kheloufi about the final days of his mother, a constitutive episode that gave birth to his unshakeable faith in the Algerian people.</p>
<p>Following an argument with his wife Gisella, Marco Bellocchio turns his hand to acting in a summertime meander through his native Bobbio, shot through with wounded nostalgia. The director diverts himself in this film overflowing with love: a riverside film full of hot coffee, squirrel hunts and legionaries dreaming of emancipation.</p>
<p>Vedette has hitherto reigned unchallenged over her herd, but the “queen” has now aged. To prevent young rival cows from deposing her, the filmmakers’ neighbours entrust them to look after her for a summer. Thus begins the study of a comical cohabitation between Vedette and Claudine Bories, mischievously observed by Patrice Chagnard.</p>
<p>Opposite the imposing Andes stands Santiago de Chile, with its six million inhabitants, its clouds of pollution and its social housing high-rises stretching as far as the eye can see. During the lockdown, Felipe Elgueta and Ananké Pereira create a mosaic formed by moments from the daily life of immigrants living in cramped accommodation, the profile of a fragmented urban landscape.</p>
<p>Interweaving fiction and archival images, Vincere follows the Mussolini years from the perspective of the dictator’s relationship with Ida Dalser—decisive in the creation of Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper that would soon become the mouthpiece of the National Fascist Party. Abandoned by the Duce and eventually sectioned, she is witness to the struggle against an unstoppable fascist future.</p>
<p>After losing his dog, an eccentric artist from Belgrade embarks on a journey to look for his pet. Throughout his quest, we will get to know a number of strange characters. The filmmaker’s humorous approach opens up a dialogue about different philosophical questions related to art, representation, identity, nature, history, ethics and politics.</p>
<p>A fully loaded car leaves Portugal for Senegal. On board, the driver is connected by cell phone to the people left behind and those he will meet in Dakar. A journey full of surprises, immersing himself in the physical and human landscape of the Maghreb. Once the mission is complete, the man returns home with wooden masks as his traveling companions.</p>
<p>Chiara is a passionate, Utopian and revolutionary youngster who hides her true identity as a member of the Italian Red Brigades in the late 70s. At first sight she is a normal girl who moves into a new flat with her boyfriend. However, her friend Enzo starts to suspect that not all is what it seems. One of Marco Bellocchio's outstanding takes on Italy's political and criminal fabric.</p>
<p>A python slithers and curls over the abandoned control room of Chernobyl’s sister, the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, its radioactive core an unleashed monster that will slither through time for a million years. From Etruscan ruins and sunken cities to the most modern of underground repositories, director Emilija Škarnulytė follows our attempts to bury the immortal. Addressing the epochal effects of nuclear technology on all levels, Burial follows the cycle of power, an eternal return, another serpent eating its tail.</p>
<p>The mother of writer Félix Bruzzone disappeared in 1976 from Campo de Mayo, one of the main clandestine detention centers of the then established Argentinian dictatorship. Today, it is one of the largest military units in the country. Bruzzone is determined to find someone to help him explore this space, a symbol of a very particular and also collective pain — his experiences inspire Jonathan Perel, who accompanies him.</p>
<p>Filmmaker Paul Heintz sets off in search of Winston Smith. When he publishes a classified advert in the English newspaper <em>The Sun</em> searching for namesakes of the hero of George Orwell’s novel <em>1984</em>, he causes a collision between fiction and reality. The daily life of these illustrious strangers becomes dystopian, absorbed by the imagination of each and every one of us.</p>
<p>Lens, in Northern France. 23-year-old Chaylla is fighting to free herself from a violent relationship. However, her determination comes up against a part of herself that still hopes to share her life with the father of her children. And if Chaylla, head held high, decides to press charges and reclaim her rights in the face of the society and the patriarchy in which she has no confidence, it is also thanks to the support of a duo of women – her mother-in-law and her best friend – who accompany her on a daily basis. It is with them that she shares her sorrow and passions, that she holds back her tears, smiles softly or sings at the top of her voice. The camera, always as close as possible to her face, enhances its strength, while the expressivity and magnetism of the close-ups are reminiscent of those of Renée Falconetti. Clara Teper and Paul Pirritano have made a magnificent first feature-length film shedding upsetting light on violence against women and the difficulties of finding one’s own way to justice. This social drama is infused with the extreme humanity and sincerity of a woman, Chaylla.</p>
<p>Di is a 12-year-old girl from the mist-shrouded mountains of northern Vietnam. She belongs to the Hmong, an ethnic minority in which girls get married at a very young age. This is often preceded by a controversial “bride-kidnapping,” where the girl is abducted by her future husband on Lunar New Year Celebration. Negotiations between the families follow.</p> <p>This also happened to Di’s sister and their mother, so it doesn’t seem strange that in preparation the women and girls discuss sex and married life without embarrassment. But Di also goes to school, where she learns very different values. And in her own way, even Di’s mother tries to warn her daughter about child marriage.</p> <p>Director Diem Ha Le tells a story about the clash between ancient customs and modern values, in a place where children from a traditional culture also have access to the outside world. Her first full-length documentary is a moving film about the challenges faced by a young Hmong girl, but above all is about a teenager with a strong character, and who is not just a victim.</p>
<p>The town of Churchill, Canada, becomes a hotspot for polar bears from October to November. This fact gives rise to both tourism, the possibility of seeing a bear up close, and unexpected attacks, blurring the line between civilized and wild.</p>
<p>Single mother Anna and her four children live in the front-line war zone of Donbas, Ukraine. While the outside world is made up of bombings and chaos, the family is managing to keep their home a safe haven, full of life and full of light. Every member of the family has a passion for cinema, motivating them to shoot a film inspired by their own life during a time of war. The creative process raises the question of what kind of power the magical world of cinema could have during times of disaster. How to picture war through fiction? For Anna and the children, transforming trauma into a work of art is the ultimate way to stay human.</p>
<p>For a long time, vessels crossing the High Risk Area on the Somali coastline would hire private mercenaries in order to protect themselves from pirates. Nowadays, the attacks have dropped off and the mercenaries encounter a new problem: the lack of action. Daily training to face a non-existent enemy creates a sense of absurdity, captured by Gregoris Rentisʼ camera with great inspiration and precision.</p>
<p>The Asojá the bird-god-woman of Ayoreo culture, who can transmute her spirit—flies, bringing with her memories of the past, present and future. She was a tiger; she was a plant; she was a jaguar: today, she is Eami, a five-year-old girl whose name means forest and world. She has lost her own kind a people displaced from their shrinking forest home. They have become coñone an Ayoreo word that translates as “insensate,” the term they use to refer to those outside their culture. In a trance, Eami hears the voices of her grandparents and is joined by a lizard, who guides her. He knows she must leave the forest. She must leave everything behind, so she will not die there.</p>
<p>La Petite École in the heart of Brussels welcomes children aged six to fifteen who have never attended school, and who are often in exile. Marie and Juliette have created this place outside of the conventional structures of learning, where children can learn to be or become children again, with the aim of entering a conventional school one day. First and foremost, the challenge for these two “leading lights” is to teach the young newcomers, sometimes suffering from post-traumatic stress, how to leave the family circle and follow a rhythm within a community of similarly aged peers. To do this, Marie and Juliette fill their days with rituals and activities during which they observe, assess, readapt and propose. What kind of school do you offer children who have never been to one? From failures that do not seem to be such, to small victories, they thus succeed in preparing the children to “be, by themselves”. Lydie Wisshaupt-Claudel captures the patience and experimental approach of these two extraordinary women, with sublime framing and light that portray the hope and humanism that reign in this place.</p>
<p>Katia and Maurice Krafft loved two things — each other and volcanoes. For two decades, the daring French volcanologist couple roamed the planet, chasing eruptions, documenting their discoveries. Ultimately, they lost their lives in a 1991 volcanic explosion, leaving a legacy that forever enriched our knowledge of the natural world. Director Sara Dosa and the filmmaking team fashion a lyrical celebration of the intrepid scientists’ spirit of adventure, drawing from the Kraffts’ spectacular archive. Fire of Love tells a story of primordial creation & destruction, following two bold explorers as they venture into the unknown, all for the sake of love.</p>
<p>It is Palestinian custom to harvest and forage for plants but they must do so illegally under Israeli law—a process documented in this visual feast, from field to kitchen. Under Israeli law, it is illegal to harvest wild plants that are traditionally used for cooking, such as za’atar (thyme) and akkoub (gundelia), though the practice has been an age-old tradition among Palestinians. In the occupied Golan Heights, Galilee and Jerusalem, locals show their resilience despite the prohibitive law, refusing to be further alienated from their land. From field to kitchen to courtroom, Foragers reveals the joy and knowledge embedded in this Palestinian custom. Imbued with suspense and humour, Foragers is an important commentary on the extent of the Israeli occupation of Palestine—where violence is not only physical, but also cultural.</p>
<p>Filmmaker and anthropologist Céline Pernet questions her relationship with the men of her generation. Responding to an advert, men aged 30 to 45 years old answer her questions, in a quest as personal as it is societal. Garçonnières casts an amused and caring eye, reflecting an urgent need to discuss current models of masculinity.</p> <p>After three years and 476 matches with men on dating applications, and a certain number of “short relationships that were as nice as they were brief”, director and anthropologist Céline Pernet decides to take the time to investigate her relationship with the men of her generation. Through an advert, she brings together around thirty men aged 30 to 45 years old, living in Switzerland, who agree to talk to the camera about their relationship(s) with masculinity. The director questions them about seduction, sex, couples, love and even paternity, in a quest as personal as it is societal.</p> <p>The protagonists show an urgent need to discuss contemporary masculinity and share their secrets, cry, doubt and laugh. In <em>Garçonnières</em>, toxic models of masculinity are put into words while inspiring interpretations of masculinity are considered together for the future. With welcome frivolity, the director casts an amused and kindly eye on the masculine world. This film asks us to listen attentively to each other and, one day, to be something other than what is expected of us.</p>
<p>In 1970, Léopold Senghor – President of Independent Senegal – wants to create a “Senegalese” architecture... and commissions two Frenchmen to build CICES, a modernist masterpiece in which the Dakar International Fair is held every year. In static shots, Laurence Bonvin captures the spirit of place and its modern usages, which interact with the ghosts of a glorious past.</p>
<p>As an excursion to the work of botanical and film preservation, "Herbaria" explores in its invisible processes the artistic and political derivations that connect them.<br /> Sustained in a narration where times and spaces seem to merge, the records invite us to the fascinating universe of preserving the beauty and memory of a world that insists on disappearing.</p>
<p>A couple find solace in each other amid an alienating existence where hope at times feels out of reach as despair threatens to overwhelm.</p> <p>As 16-year-old Marusya contemplates ending her life, she meets Kimi at a gig. The two kindred spirits discover the possibility of happiness despite a difficult existence. Filming over the next 12 years in what they call the ‘Depression Federation’, the pair traverse Moscow music subcultures while battling drug abuse and depression.</p> <p>Against the backdrop of autocratic Russia and alienating social conditions, we see the transformations of the couple and their life paths. Through the careful editing of home videos and street footage, the documentary recounts their joys and struggles with bracing honesty and emotional intensity. If there was an emblematic film to Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, this would be it.</p>
<p>In military terminology, INNER LINES are parallel routes near the enemy lines, enabling evasion. Around Ararat, “the white centre” that illuminates “the darkest times”, they are used by messengers and their carrier pigeons to connect the communities scattered by conflict. Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd continues his powerful political and poetic body of work (LES TOUMENTES, LES ETERNELS) with this film shot in 16mm between Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey and Nagorno-Karabakh. Remaining faithful to a formal approach blending the outline of the film-image with the asynchronous sonic off-camera – harrowing testimonies, biblical narrative, whispered secrets, political discourses and rants, close or distant explosions –, he walks alongside Yazidis or Armenians ravaged by the insatiable Moloch of war. Voices bring humanity to bleak landscapes, bodies lean over to listen to age-old stones laden with memories and gazes burn with inextinguishable inner sorrow. Vandeweerd remains the essential and exacting filmmaker-geographer of lost territories.</p>
<p>INTO THE ICE is a journey of discovery to the vast masses of ice and the secret of our future that the ice harbouring. Director Lars Ostenfeld accompanies three of the world’s leading glaciologists on pioneering scientific expeditions to and INTO the Greenland ice sheet. Cool and hardworking Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, sensitive and politically engaged Jason Box, and daring and fearless Alun Hubbard are all working to collect new crucial data that can help us answer some key questions of our time: How fast is the ice melting? How quickly are sea levels rising? How much time do we have left to change the course of the Earth? As the scientists are caught in the dilemma of collecting new evidence to an inconvenient truth while people in power are not prepared to take action to prevent the earth from dying, the film brings us breathtaking images from a place that soon will be lost as we know it now. A documentary tale about science, nature and adventure.</p>
<p>In her studio, artist Johanna Monnier tells us about her relationship with her work: living sculptures, costumes made of imaginary beings… Through her creations she has found security, a way to exist and to love. Her words unlighted the sensitive universes she brings to life with the help of the director.A movie about the act of creation as a life force.</p>
<p>Jaime, a 33 years old man, has been in a mental institution for almost half of his life. Through a series of conversations, Jaime shares his world view, his fears, his feats and a secret.</p>
<p>Nothing really survives here. The bottom is so deep that no light ever reaches it. Very few boats go through. It is unknown when the falls will take place. This experimental documentary portrays a space object and its fall into the darkness of a space cemetery. A woman scientist reveals her attachment to this object and the absence of images documenting this mysterious place. As a reverse sci-fi journey, this essay mixes real and fictional archives to guide us, like a stalker, to the outskirts of an invisible place.</p>
<p>Mother and daughter Silvia and Andrea are also ufologists. Together, they run a UFO research group and stand guard every night near the Paraná river, over which mysterious lights often appear, which they attempt to chase down. Merging scenes of sometimes quirky conversations between the two women – for example when they wonder what they would do if they were to adopt Alf from the eponymous television series – against a backdrop of sunsets, with amateur images of UFOs and appearances of characters from another world, Maximiliano Schonfeld paints the portrait of a community, with humour and great tenderness. In keeping with his previous documentary LA SIESTA DEL TIGRE (2016), this new work is a poetic immersion into a place, into his region of Entre Rios, an artisanal documentary of science and of fiction. One day, Andrea will go, leaving Silvia to dream alone.</p>
<p>An Iranian filmmaker befriends a Syrian family in Brussels and they communicate past traumas and future dreams through drawings.</p> <p>Artist and filmmaker Vida Dena’s subtle and intimate film focuses on the two eldest daughters of a Syrian refugee family living in precarious conditions in Brussels. Within the pink walls of their temporary home, Hala and Rima tenderly co-create a poignant and playful world drawn from a past that they knew and a future they imagine. Remembering their old home, and the journey from it, while dreaming of future studies and marriage, their colourful drawings take flight and come to life. This is a nuanced and involving sketch of lives unfolding between two realities.</p>
<p>When director Eugenio Polgovsky passed away in 2017, his sister Mara stepped in to assemble his surviving film footage into Malintzin 17, an absorbing documentary about nature, observation and the wonder of childhood.</p> <p>A beautifully patterned Inca dove has made a nest on a power line overhanging the road in the unassuming and quietly affecting documentary Malintzin 17. As filmmaker Eugenio Polgovsky trains his camera on the bird from his Mexico City balcony, he uses it to gently prompt discussions with his five-year-old daughter, Milena, in what becomes a sensitive snapshot of parenthood. Constructed from footage shot over a week in 2016, the film has been assembled by his sister, Mara Polgovsky, after Eugenio suddenly passed away in 2017. Knowledge of this naturally influences how we understand the finished film, but it only serves to heighten the impact of this absorbing and serene work.</p>
<p>An exploration of Portuguese emigration and its materialization in an object imbued with ideas of success. In this documentary, the director travels 2000km to people who have left Portugal in search of a new life. The car is the starting and meeting point for a discussion around symbolism, identity and community.</p>
<p>A documentary that covers the work of Soviet film crews in Africa, from 1960 to 1990, identifying and undermining their perspective, or their bluff, when it comes to the recurring themes and motifs of propaganda associated with this continent.</p>
<p>Kurdish-Canadian filmmaker Zaynê Akyol interviews some members of the Islamic State in Syrian Kurdistan, as well as some of their wives, in the aftermath of the defeat of ISIS. “This absorbing and admirably even-handed documentary looks the beast in the eye to weigh the context, cost, and consequences of fundamentalism.” (<em>POV magazine)</em> – <em>Jaie Laplante</em></p>
<p>An old painting is the last trace of the lagoon that has dried up, its contours are blurred. The memories of the people who inhabited it are evoked and intertwined in the search for a place now absent. When the landscape has faded, where to look?</p>
<p>Steel Life is journey across Peru aboard a freight train; an incredible descent from the Andes, at an altitude of 4,800 metres, to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Set amidst staggering scenery, Steel Life alternates between a road movie peppered with encounters and the social x-ray of a country victim of the neo-colonial system.</p>
<p>Amateur girls’ vaulting team takes on the overwhelming and costly challenge to become professionals. On the way they learn about friendship, team spirit and womanhood which become their real victory.</p>
<p>Humaira Bilkis has a problem: after a pilgrimage to Mecca, her mother, who was previously an emancipated poet, has now become devout. The filmmaker has to fight to get her to accept the camera since her religion forbids images while hiding her relationship with a Hindu man from Calcutta. Her film plays out like a closed-door documentary, spot-on and moving.</p>
<p>The idyllic Swiss family estate – Sonnenhof – no longer feels like home to Dijana, now that her daughter has moved away. She slowly begins to look beyond its borders and seeks comfort in the fragments of a past life she left behind in former Yugoslavia.</p>