Playlist
<p>Powerful rivers flow between the Pyrenees and the Atlantic, known as gaves. Human activity is altering the water cycle and its biodiversity. Men and women look curiously and lovingly at this fascinating world of beauty and disaster.</p>
<p>On the island of La Gomera a man dreams of flying. Children imagine stories while examining archaeological remains. An ethnofiction where past and present converge, and generate echoes between the volcanic landscape and the silbo gomero.</p>
<p>Monique, Thérèse, Marie-Noëlle, Marie-Dominique, Geneviève, Jacqueline and Annie have spent over 40 years living together in their community in St Héand, in the Loire. They are about to make a major decision.</p>
<p>A little girl becomes restless as she grows up in a town surrounded by mountains and churches in northern Argentina. There has been no rain for a long time and the rivers are dry. From her room, the girl fantasises about things that are still forbidden to her. She confesses her wish to the Virgin.</p>
<p>A cycle of oppression and resistance, of funeral processions and protest marches, moves through time like an expanding mass of earth.</p>
<p>A man from a Nordic country recreates Francoist times through his memory and the memory of others.</p>
<p>For many years, Joseph has travelled around the city with his trolley to gather tons of miscellaneous papers and objects of all kinds, thus filling his flat with labyrinthine chaos. He’s gifted with vertiginous erudition. I help him unclog his home.</p>
<p>Adam, amateur-dancer and saxophone player, decides to do a remake of a ballet titled Suite Canadienne by Ludmilla Chiriaeff, that was first broadcast nationally on Quebec television in 1958, featuring ballet dancers disguised as peasants.</p>
<p>A look at the figure of the archiver, programmer and cinematographic researcher Fernando Martín Peña, although this is also a film about cinema, about a significant moment in its history, its spaces and rituals.</p>
<p>A musical, and also a reflection on watching, on trying to escape an anthropocentric gaze and also on watching itself in cinema. Featuring mares and horses: Triana, Víctor K, Bambi Sailor, San Special Solano, Buck Red Skin, Onkaia, Cool Boy, the donkey Agostino, the mule Guapa. And also Alfredo Lagos, Raül Refree, María Marín, Pepe Habichuela, Virgina García del Pino, María García Ruiz, Pilar Monsell, María Pérez Sanz.</p>
<p>Foča is a municipality in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina where women were raped and abused on a large scale during the Bosnian war. Women, and girls as young as 12 years old, were imprisoned at various locations to be gang-raped, mostly by Serbian fighters. This was cause for the Yugoslavia Tribunal to designate “systematic rape” and “sexual slavery”—war crimes that frequently went unprosecuted—as torture and crimes against humanity. As a result, these crimes can now be universally prosecuted.</p> <p>The so-called Foča case called on great courage from the countless women who testified about their horrific experiences. To preserve their anonymity the women were identified using numbers or letters. In this forensic video essay, filmmaker Kumjana Novakova uses mostly written testimonies by the women to explore the collective memory of the rape camps. In grainy video footage, the camera explores the places where these inhuman crimes took place, while the women speak about the unspeakable.</p>
<p>In this gem of minimalist and poetic magnetism, filmmaker Oskar Alegría and adorable donkey Paolo embark on a journey to bring provisions to the last shepherd of the Andia Mountains. Retracing the seasonal route his grandfather made with his flock, Alegría collects a trove of memories from a disappearing world, embodied in sounds and degraded silent images captured with his father’s Super-8 camera. Ancient songs, sounds, and encounters chart a way of life mostly forgotten. – <em>Ruth Somalo</em> </p>
<p>In the last few years, Tingbjerg on the outskirts of Copenhagen has undergone major changes. For 12 years, Tingbjerg has been on the Danish government’s list of parallel communities. A list that each year assesses social housing neighbourhoods primarily on the basis of ethnicity. If a majority of the residents are from so-called non-western countries, the area risks being put on the list, with the consequence that more housing is built to change the demographics and/or people are forcibly evicted from their homes. ‘My Next Door Neighbours’ is a collage of images and voices from people living in Tingbjerg, two kilometres from the director’s home. The words bear witness to hope, despair, uncertainty and resistance, and are accompanied by black and white film images on analogue, hand-developed 16mm film.</p>
<p>Boys dive, cats moan, an old lady smokes, a guardian of the dead sighs, young people dance. They are the people of a ghost town: Beirut, which exists only in dreams.</p>
<p>The film, based on drawings by Ariane Bergrichter, immerses us in colourful, working-class Brussels, dear to the artist’s heart. While her psychological life has been complicated, she claims to have found her energy for life in the city.</p>
<p>April 2020. In a world where it was forbidden to meet up with friends for a long time, the director decided to film every day: the modest spark of daily life with the family, fragments pieced together to form a letter to friends.</p>
<p>There is an incredible depth to Sohn Koo-young’s images—levels of both contrast and detail that would seem antithetical. They are so close to stills, if it weren’t for the movement. Night Walk’s compositions evoke a point-and-click PC game; the shots are locked off precisely and the details beckon to you. The fragments of text and poetry that provide narration, similarly, feel like an interactive text game—the tender grass aids my (your?) footsteps, the firefly lights my (your?) path. The night is dyed in a shade of indigo that I want to discover for myself, like Rohmer’s Green Ray. A bottling of a simple, yet perhaps impossible, experience</p>
<p>Synopsis:</p> <p>"It's a bird in the air, a bird that lands (...)<br /> The deep mystery, the promise of life (...)<br /> It's nothing at all."<br /> - Jobim/Moustaki -</p> <p>Note of intent:</p> <p>At once simple, profound and light-hearted, this film is a play on words; a deliberative game and puzzle.</p>
<p>Anand Patwardhan has been making documentaries about socially and politically charged subjects for more than 50 years. In 2018 he won the IDFA Award for the best feature length documentary for Reason, which examines the rise of the extreme right in his home country of India. While he stays closer to home in The World Is Family, world history is never far away. Patwardhan filmed his parents when they were elderly, and when he watches these old home movies again ten years after their death, he realizes that the story of his family extends far beyond purely personal nostalgia.</p> <p>Patwardhan grew up in an artistic and political family. His mother was a respected ceramist who as a young woman had to leave her birthplace of Hyderabad, in present-day Pakistan. His father’s brothers fought for the independence of India. Both sides of the family were at the forefront of the struggle for independence and the subsequent Partition. From the moving domestic scenes of the bickering elderly couple emerges a far broader narrative—about courage, independence, and justice.</p>
<p>Young Jonathan’s family accepts the challenge to realise his fantasy of transforming an old washing machine into a flying submarine capable of travelling through time.</p>
<p>A cinematic portrait. At one point in the film, the filmmaker types on his computer screen: “Every portrait is a self-portrait.” There is no narcissism in this statement, just a technical fact: the photographic portrait has an off-screen and, in the case of cinema, movement is added to the off-screen. The portraitist does not need to project his subjectivity onto the model, in the old pictorial way. The mere presence of the off-screen makes the positions of the portraitist and the portraited dependent, intertwined with each other. It takes at least two people to make a film. The people represented in this film, the two Argentinian artists who make up the Mondongo collective, are also professional portraitists. For the filmmaker who attempts to portray them, this means a particularly intense negotiation. A portrait can also precipitate the breakup of a friendship, and it will be further proof of the necessary bond – and this is why it can be broken – between the portraitist and the model.</p>
<p>Centuries prior to the colonization of the Americas, Purple Martins began to nest in gourds that people hung to store food and water and became companion species for many tribes. The birds that European settlers brought with them drove Purple Martins out of their wild habitats so that now they can only nest in birdhouses that people build to prevent their extinction. Without dialogue or narration, Homing follows the migration of Purple Martins from the Amazon to the Great Lakes, between the conservationists who study them and to the houses they are dependent on for survival. —Tamer Hassan</p>
<p>In a world that promises a perfect life, Marie Anne tries to escape. At that point, all trace of her is lost forever.</p>