Dokufest - Edition 23

A deep family taboo is shattered when Ado Hasanović discovers the pages of his father's diary and the images recorded by the latter in the midst of the Bosnian war. By retracing his father's steps in the lead-up to the Srebrenica massacre, this monument to memory reveals, through the prism of one family, the wounds and undimmed pride of an entire people.

Letters from Silivri draws on letters of the Turkish philanthropist and public intellectual Osman Kavala to document a timeline of his imprisonment. By separating voice and image the film intends to create an echo chamber that allows audiences to listen more carefully to Kavalas letters, while at the same time place his words in context to a civil society.

This short film was born from an installation by Argentine textile artists Chiachio & Giannone. In it, a group of dancers, wearing dresses crafted and sublimated by the artists, challenge the choreography of the "Pericón," the national folk dance, to question the portrayal of a homeland projected as white, binary, and civilized.

This short documentary captures moments of artisans at work.

Blackouts across Cuba set the stage for this eerie plunge into darkness.

New Lodge: seven 12-storey towers each stuck in the heart of Belfast. One of the areas that were the most severely affected by the Northern-Irish conflict during three decades. One of those where the number of casualties per inhabitant can make your head spin. Today, this small Catholic neighbourhood is marked by some kind of social abandonment. Yet, a touch of madness and hope, even idealism, still floats around, supported by the humanity and caustic humour of the locals.

At the height of the Peruvian armed conflict, a mother's world shatters when her son vanishes without a trace.

Leo and Diana, a wealthy couple, meet Salif and Yousef, two scrap dealers, at a recycle center. Offering them more junk, Diana invites them to their mansion, but the immigrants actually might be the ones with something she wants.

When residents of a remote Siberian city discover an abandoned coal mine has caught fire beneath their neighborhood, pushing toxic gas into their homes, they turn to homemaker-turned-journalist Natalia Zubkova for help.

At the crossroads of documentary and fiction, Hello Stranger relates the transition journey of a young trans woman named Cooper Josephine. With humor, the film revisits key moments of her life from her childhood in a small fishing village of the east coast of Canada to her tumultuous medical process. Through the re-enactment of her memories, Cooper Josephine attempts to make peace with the last masculine imprint on her body: that unfortunate deep voice that sticks to her skin.

A caring cinematic homage to the filmmaker's ancestresses, and the neglected region of their origin.

Brainless Rabbits live in Rabittland, a perfect world ordered according to the most successful examples of war zones, ghettos and slums. They are intensively pink, have holes in their heads instead of brains, and they are happy regardless of what happens to them. They are the highest stage the evolution has ever reached. Their everyday life is completely fulfilled. The Rabbits spend days voting on free and democratic elections, which take place in Rabbitland once a day, because Rabbitland is an ordered democracy. Nevertheless, it gets disclosed that the elections are organized by the Evil Girls, just for their fun and laughter.

When Russian troops were entering Ukraine, the famous playwright Andriy Bondarenko wrote a play about life interrupted by the war. He focuses on his family's life. The peace and tranquility which the author knew since childhood are succeeded by historical trauma, revolutions the war. And now, as an adult, Andriy faces a threat witnessed by the previous generations of his family. These thoughts were embodied in a single-act play written in response to the events that were unfolding.

A charming tour of North Macedonian folk music and a fascinating insight into the creative process of the Danish band Efterklang.

In the desolate wilderness of the disappearing islands along the Brahmaputra river, 12 year old orphan Afrin is coming of age. When heavy rainfalls and flood waters ravage Afrin's island, she refuses to surrender to its deadly tides. Afrin rows herself in a wooden boat toward the teeming metropolis of Dhaka to find her estranged father among the millions of climate refugees. Forced to grow up fast, Afrin must confront the mysteries of a sinking world.

In the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas, moths are whispering something to us. In the dark of night, two curious observers shine a light on this secret universe.
Deep in the pitch-black forest, a few hundred moths are drawn by a single source of illumination to a piece of hung canvas. Only through this intimate examination can their existence, and the happenings of their world, be made visible. Though moth life spans are measured in hours and represent only a small amount of the immense biodiversity of their species, in these small beings lies a history of our planet. With a transportive and experiential visual style and immersive sound that brings you to a place few people can travel, co-directors Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan's Nocturnes gives us a multi-millennia vision of time nearly beyond our human-scale perception.—SS

The documentary "Escapee" unfolds the story of Shkurte Krasniqi, who ran away from her home in Vranoc at the age of 17 due to her family discontinuing her education. Shkurte recalls the most challenging moments of her life on the train to Peja, which she took for the first time when she pursued her university education in Pristina. This conversation between Shkurte and her niece serves as a symbol of resistance against the denial of the right to education, which is still denied to 10% of girls in Kosovo today.

"Saving Some Random Insignificant Stories" is a goodbye film to my parents' house. One night in December 2021, after an unusually extreme weather event, my parents' house flooded, and they had to be rescued by a boat. They lost almost everything that night, including their dog and their cat. Two days after the flood, when the water level went down and I could finally enter the house, I tried to extract as many objects as possible, and for the rest, I made this film. (Anna Vasof)

In February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the apartment my friend and I were renting in Lviv became a transit point. Friends, acquaintances and strangers were leaving for safer cities in Ukraine and abroad, and we began to host people in our apartment. Some stayed for one night, and some for several. No one stayed for long, but they all left their stories. That's how our home became a shared home.

Over 25 years and 10 studio albums—using brute sonic force mixed with subtlety and grace—Mogwai have defined their own musical genre. Described as "The blueprint for what an independent group should be" (John Doran, The British Masters), Mogwai built a cult following by staying true to their sound and true to their roots. The film takes us on a journey from their very beginnings, in the mid 1990s, to the band writing and rehearsing their tenth studio album in their hometown of Glasgow, Scotland in 2020 - a record made during lockdown. While at first seemingly impossible to make, they ultimately made history with it.

In their short, Arnit Likaj and Jasmin Rai explore their feelings and thoughts about what it is like to be caught in between two cultures. They have a migrant background and do not feel like they belong completely in either Germany or their parents' home country. They work with self-written and self-spoken texts in their native languages, while the production process in a potato farm is shown.

'And still, it remains' is a new artists' film that examines time, toxic colonialism and how we survive the end of our world. In 2021, radioactive sand resulting from French nuclear bombs travelled in the winds all the way from the Algerian Sahara back to France. The bombs had been detonated in Algeria back in the 1960s. These returning winds were a reminder that the environmental legacies of colonialism cannot be forgotten or contained; it also raised the more pertinent question of how do people live with the afterlife of toxic colonialism?

As Mustafa, a troubled former running champion, seizes his last chance to purchase residency papers through a shady dealer, he encounters ambitious young Reda, who dreams of a singing career in a European country. While Mustafa clings to his final lifeline, he witnesses Reda succumb to the system that once shattered his own dreams.

In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, 'Preemptive Listening' is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 contemporary musicians form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?

Vakıf, a 60-year-old Kurdish man who grew up in a nomadic tribe in the mountains of southeast Turkey, recalls moments from his youth that have shaped his life. He takes us back to his idyllic childhood with his mother, his first love found in a cotton field and lost in the woods, and the mistreatment suffered at the hands of the police, in a cold and dark place.

In a remote conservative village in the South of Egypt, a group of disenfranchised Coptic girls rebel by forming an all-female street theater troupe. They dream of becoming actresses, dancers and singers, challenging their families and the villagers with their provocative performances. Shot across four years, this coming-of-age story focuses on those girls, as they transition from childhood to womanhood.

A celebration and collage of lesbians, including footage of the Women's International Day march in SF and joyous dancing from the last night of the second Lesbian Conference where Family of Woman played; as well as images of women doing all types of traditional "men's" work.

This film made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective shows the destruction of the West Bank's Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities and the unlikely alliance which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel and Israeli journalist Yuval.

A taxi driver takes advantage of a sleeping passenger while he keeps the taximeter running. He drives around town to scam the passenger. However, something sinister will change the taxi driver's perspective.

Taking its title from the tactical protest strategy of the same name – "an action that seeks to achieve an end directly and by the most effective means" – DIRECT ACTION is a contemporary portrait of one of the most important militant activist communities in France – a 150-person strong rural collective that survived multiple violent eviction attempts by the French state, successfully resisted an international airport expansion project, created an autonomous zone from 2012-2018, and spawned a remarkable new ecological movement in 2021. Through a collaborative and uniquely immersive observational approach, DIRECT ACTION documents the everyday of a diverse ecosystem of activists, squatters, anarchists, farmers and government-labeled "eco-terrorists" – so as to better understand how the success of a radical protest movement can offer a path through the climate crisis facing us all.

Berke Baş, producer/director studied political sciences at Bogazici University, Istanbul, and received her master's degree in media studies at New School for Social Research, New York. Her films deal with Turkey's pressing social and political issues as wide-ranging as illegal migration (In Transit, 2005), women's political rights (What a Beautiful Democracy!, 2008), Armenian orphans of 1915 (hush!/La Chanson de Nahide, 2009) and trials of manhood (Concrete Park, 2010).

On July 22, 2017, in San Antonio, Texas, police found a truck in a Walmart parking lot with 39 illegal immigrants in its bed. A tractor had been transporting them undetected from the border town of Laredo to San Antonio. Because the cooling system inside the truck failed, resulting in extreme heat, eight people died during the transport, and two others succumbed to dehydration in the hospital.

In 2018, Chicago barber Harith "Snoop" Augustus is shot dead by police on his way to work. Incident first shows this shocking event from a distance, a view from above. This is followed by a chilling reconstruction based on footage from different angles and viewpoints, including surveillance cameras, and the dashboard cameras and bodycams of the officers present.
At a certain point, different perspectives are combined in split-screen, intensely conveying the chaos, and the anger and desperation of the bystanders. Some know the victim. They see that he's still breathing. Gradually a disconcerting picture unfolds not only of the shooting incident itself, but also of the immediate aftermath. Where do the priority's of the police officers involved lie?

The children transform into adults before our eyes. Yet they remain in limbo, haunted by memories of the war in Kosovo. Combining raw realism and staged performance, Afterwar is a meditation on the long-term repercussions of war.

The Dayton Peace Accords, negotiated at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio in 1995, ended the violent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Agreement simultaneously trapped the country in an unchangeable quasi democratic state.

The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) — a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City's Staten Island — takes on one of the world's largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionize.
Chronicling the historic efforts of the ALU, Union is an intimate and surprising story of dogged determination, unorthodox tactics, and speaking up despite David vs. Goliath odds. Capturing up-close, in-the-trenches moments with the upstart labor union leaders — including the charismatic Chris Smalls — as they try to build support for their movement on their own terms, filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing bear witness to the realities of labor organizing in the United States — challenging at best; near-impossible when facing the unlimited resources and influence of a corporate giant. They track exhilarating victories and demoralizing setbacks along the way, but foremost spotlight the far-reaching ability of collective action to inspire hope and bring self-determination to workers who've long felt disenfranchised and powerless.—BT

A hunting trip turns into a nightmare when a teenage boy has to choose between his father's acceptance or his own integrity.

Daphne was a torso ending in leaves is a playful and witty ode to a star of classical mythology: Daphne. Here, the beautiful nymph, who was metamorphosed into a tree to escape a stalking God, is celebrated as a heroine and master of her destiny. But this cinematic gem, shot on 16mm is above all a rich filmic experience, in which images and sound are meticulously intertwined to immerse the spectator in a universe of myth and legend.

Let's take a dark room. Celeste Rojas Mugica and her father Lucho lock themselves in it to develop images of the past. This past is Chile during the Pinochet years. Lucho Rojas was a photographer there but also an opponent of the regime, and therefore clandestine. His life oscillated between taking photos of the present and making himself invisible – between light and shadow. "The exercise consisted of, and still consists of: closing your eyes and imagining a place": the method and discipline of the clandestine. This sentence, the first in the dialogue between father and daughter that constitutes the framework of Une sombra oscilante , also formulates the theoretical hypothesis of the film: considering the image not from the point of view of the visible object, but from the faculty of imagination. In this singular dark room, development is no longer a solitary technical operation of revelation, but a poetic and political process of imagination for two. Developing the image means describing it not to exhaust its meaning but to flush out its parts of shadow, uncertainty, and therefore power. It is to extend it through words to imagine the story of the past, or to do it in one's head, with one's eyes closed, to project a future. The game is serious, but also very joyful: plastic inventions and ideas follow one another at an astonishing speed, all punctuated by an editing that combines freedom and rigor as rarely before. Brilliant and seductive, Una sombra oscilante profoundly renews the filmic approach to the photographic archive by inventing a cinematographic form that seems to be born from the very process of creating images – taking, developing. A dark chamber music, with four hands and two voices, draws the spectator into a captivating oscillation between the possible and the real, between what has been and what could have been, what is and what could be. In our dark times, here is a film that projects a light that is all the more joyful as it is intermittent – ​​it does not forget the shadow from which it comes.

Driven by their activism and an interest in the experiences of incarcerated women, the filmmakers designed and led a Portapack video workshop at the California Institution for Women (CIW) in Chino, at the time the largest women's prison in the United States.

To live in a trailer surrounded by vegetation, insects and slugs, in a place you'd never guess was right in the middle of Berlin, might be a lifetime's ambition or perhaps it's simply a temporary hideaway. Some of those we encounter in this intimate, but never invasive, lyrical documentary are currently in a process of transition, while others are "merely" looking for love and closeness. The observational approach makes for a truly authentically populated film, whose testimony transcends the scope of individual narratives, and whose sense of detail helps to create the agreeable atmosphere of a languid summer afternoon. Are we viewing a documentary about people once united in the now dissolved Mollies collective, or are we watching ephemerally poetic love stories as they unfold?

The owner of a new architecture studio and his team join an irreverent and unusual team-building activity. The event goes wrong, and the architect is confronted with the harsh reality of the housing crisis in the social housing neighborhood undergoing gentrification. This is the national premiere of the film that earned Daniel Soares an honorable mention in the official short film selection at Cannes.

SYNOPSIS In 1968, Asllan Gjinovci is a student of physics at the University of Pristina. After his involvement in student protests that Yugoslavia, he is forced to flee the country. His escape away from home keeps him inexorably away from his family and homeland for more than thirty years.

A 13-year-old aspiring journalist investigates his father's mysterious murder within the boundaries of one of Kenya's largest wildlife conservancies. As a ravaging drought encroaches, his quest to find the killer shifts as the collateral damage of a warming world is revealed.

Hind is a young karate athlete. One day, after she is subjected to abusive behaviour at her training centre, the world of the hard of hearing girl becomes distorted. Determined, Hind looks for a way to reclaim her power.
Inspired by a true story, Sukoun sensitively reveals what happens when a supposedly safe space is shattered. Experienced through the eyes and ears of the protagonist, the film moves between pain and tenderness, silence and noise, the hidden and the obvious.

The degree of media saturation with which we are bombarded creates an absurd distortion and distance between our daily routine and current affairs. Démontable explores this bizarre melange of realities by throwing the two worlds together: attack helicopters shred a newspaper, while a dinnerplate suffers a drone strike. They're a series of attempts to try and understand our world better by playing with its violent protagonists.

"Evolution is in the nature of things"
This sentence was enunciated by the first woman scientist in Albania, Sabiha Kasimati, according to the testimony of her cellmate. The communist regime arrested her on 20 February 1951 and a few days later was executed without trial and thrown into a common pit together with 21 other intellectuals.
Her scientific monograph "Fishes of Albania" was the first of its kind in Albania. Shortly before her execution its publication immediately disappeared; after the fall of communism the original diploma was found in the Faculty of Biological Sciences in Turin, where she studied from 1936-41, but the book is still lost.

Dielli serves community service at a library while his father battles alcohol addiction. After a car accident, they make a promise to change. But when his father relapses, their relationship crumbles, testing Dielli's dreams and loyalty. This poignant drama explores addiction, forgiveness, and the power of love, revealing the strength and fragility of family bonds. Will they rebuild or drift apart? A heartfelt film of second chances, resilience, and hope in the face of adversity.

In an indeterminate future, forbidden memories challenge "The Collective Memory" - a database containing all human memories. But which are the challenging memories?
An experimental cinematic search between past, and future, fiction, and fact, Prishtina and Tirana. The future, a glitch.

The supermarket is filled with products, but there is no one there. Oh, yes, there's one kid. But he doesn't walk like if he was in a supermarket. His friends fight with the cashier, they're looking for something she says it doesn't exist. Later on the streets they are a group again, they walk and talk like they do every night. They all want time to go by as it always does.

The accident leads a group of young boys from the high roofs of their neighborhood, passing through its destruction, to the deepest of the earth.

Trailer
Buenos Aires. Exe, 25 years old, has just lost his job and is not looking for another one. His neighbors and friends seem as odd to him as they always do. Online, he meets Alf, a boy from Mozambique who is also bored with his job and who is about to follow Archie, another boy who has run away into the jungle. Through the dense vegetation of the forest, Archie tracks ants back to their nest. One of them wanders off course and comes across Canh, a Filipino, sitting on top of a giant heap of earth and who is about to go back to his strange, beautiful home town, where he too has a miserable job.

Armed with a 360-degree camera, Argentinean director Eduardo Williams returns to the bold, time-and-continent-skipping world of his 2016 film The Human Surge (NYFF54) and constructs something even more immense, fearless, and breathtaking. As in that earlier film, groups of friends from different parts of the world interact in the downtime between work, drifting and existing in constant motion along with the camera. Yet Williams here pushes things even further into a kind of hypnotic abstraction, filming in Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Peru and achieving an unprecedented fluidity between spaces and feelings, natural splendor and human sensuality. Working as always without a locked script, Williams highlights the beauty of language and the sensations of people traversing liminal states of being, moving toward a kind of otherworldly queer utopia.

We follow a group of youngsters in Hanoi experiencing the city's freedom, sensuality and boundaries. From the supermarket to the outdoor bar, on the back of a moped, over bridges, past orchards, to the roof of a housing complex under construction. Hao and his friends climb, jump and tempt the gravity of their daily lives.

Searching for a seed, a young man emerges from the underground where he hangs out with his friends. They all embark on a long digestive trip.

As a boy looks for a cybercafé, he's overwhelmed by wild waves. A group of young men lives together, and we accompany them as they work, walk, and talk in various unidentified locales. One says: "Once I went to a place where I didn't understand anything. It was great."

After the Iranian Revolution, a movie collector in Tehran hid thousands of films to prevent their destruction by the new Islamic regime. Despite arrest and torture, he refused to give up his secret. His story of resistance is told by the boy who became his partner in crime, recollected years later from exile in London. A moving and inspiring autobiography about the subversive power of celluloid dreams.

On the way to Brezovica, two skiers reunite. Along the way, they reminisce about the years they spent together, bringing to light the overlooked problems that come with the sport.

Schlafsand (the sand that makes us sleep) is here our refutation of the existential threat linked to human induced climate change. Shot in Switzerland, a land famous for its breathtaking mountain landscapes and its comfortable living standards, the film investigates the visual evidence of this denial. From a coal mine to a dying glacier, the film uses pictorial beauty to address the political and social blindness surrounding climate change.

Every year thousands of European citizens travel from one country to another evading the restrictive laws and ethics of their countries in order to access basic human rights. Stray Bodies follows simultaneously a young student who travels from Malta to Italy to have an abortion, a single 40 years old woman from Italy that reaches a well known fertilization clinic in Greece, an old man who travels from Greece to Bulgaria to find out how to have access to cremation, and a couple travelling from Bulgaria to Switzerland to meet Dignitas, an association that assists them with accompanied suicide. Like Stray Bodies, they travel by boat, car, airplane and train, dizzily crossing borders, highways, tolls, airports, harbors and train stations, on a harrowing yet surreal journey, all searching for answers to existential questions about life and death. As the characters of this road movie cross their countries' borders, they come together in a cinematic trip through Europe about issues of vital importance: what rights do we have on ourselves and other people's bodies?

An investigation into abuse and missing children at an Indian residential school ignites a reckoning on the nearby Sugarcane Reserve.
Filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie deliver a multilayered film that invites audiences to confront profound questions about morality and justice, and to bear witness to the lasting intergenerational legacy of trauma from the residential school system — including forced family separation, physical and sexual abuse, and the destruction of Native culture and language. Drawing on their backgrounds in activism and journalism — as well as NoiseCat's own personal connection to the story and community — the filmmakers deftly weave together multiple strands to form this compelling, heartbreaking narrative. Demonstrating unparalleled humanity, compassion, and grace for the affected Indigenous communities in North America, their powerful documentary operates from a place of pure and total empathy. At the same time, NoiseCat and Kassie recognize the resilience of the survivors and their descendants, and their unflagging determination to seek answers to long-buried secrets. Ultimately, Sugarcane reminds us to respect the humanity in ourselves as well as in others.—BB

After many years of performing together in the streets of Italy, the lives of two artists begin to take separate paths.

"Wires Crossed" follows the story of two girls, reunited after a complicated past. This intimate phone call reveals their emotions, thoughts, and journey during the time when one was struggling with addiction, and how they reached forgiveness and formed a new friendship between them.

The need of belonging somewhere pushes Tana, this divorced middle aged actress, to start a procedure of returning her maiden name. Her estranged relationship with her mother makes her doubt this decision, without ever thinking how much she herself has changed, until the moment of signing.

Klodi and Mira, a young Albanian couple, decided to marry Mira to a Frenchman for 5 years in exchange for money, to obtain French nationality. They will then have to choose the right husband for her and learn to detach themselves from each other.

Documentary about Indigenous peoples' profound connection to nature and their struggle against deforestation, a grave threat to their way of life and the ecosystem they call home.

My Stolen Planet is a diary-style narrative by Farah, an Iranian filmmaker. Born during the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, she captures moments of joy and defiance in her daily life, navigating the contrast between domestic freedom and external oppression. Simultaneously, she collects 8mm archives from people she doesn't know. Relying on these recordings from other people, she gains a new perspective on losing memories. Her connection with Leyla, an Iranian professor who left Iran during the revolution, adds a name and a story to one of the faces in her archive. Farah's mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's, motivates her to continue her fight against forgetting. In the autumn of 2022, the Women, Life, Freedom uprising becomes a turning point in Farah's life, as well as in the lives of many others in Iran. This is a homemade history.

The woodchip wallpaper is pixelated, the sound heavily out of sync. The distance between Berlin and Isfahan: just under 4000 km. Not something so easy to bridge. The webcam does its best, creating the possibility of intimacy, but sometimes also simply testifing to the gulf. Over ten years, Faraz Fesharaki documented his exchanges with his family, a digital dialogue between the one who moved away to study film in Germany and those who stayed behind in the sizable Iranian city. Father Hassan and mother Mitra discuss the traditional role of the woman and present persimmons from the garden. He mutates into Abbas Kiarostami for a moment, she recalls her time in prison. Cousin Rahi supplements this intergenerational diaspora conversation from Austria with his favourite recipe: toast, mozzarella and egg. Much remains unsaid and is only alluded to. What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? also narrates between the lines, with texts on a red background that Fesharaki edits into the film like notes and messages, as well as VHS image memories. For ultimately, this debut film is also about a dilemma: the desire to be understood without being easily able to describe one's feelings.

A Tunisian interpreter working for asylum services struggles to refuse emotional connections when translating stories of survival and abuse from people seeking another life in France. With rules favoring suspicion against personal tragedies, Fatima Kaci films an institutionalized mistrust of others and a character's quest for empathy in the choice of words that carry the weight of a nation's colonial past.

Billions of years ago, an alien lifeform was born at the bottom of the oceans – they called it the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Billions of years later, its descendants come and go under a watchful sky.

Mediha, a teenage Yazidi girl who has recently returned from ISIS captivity, turns the camera on herself to process her trauma while rescuers search for her missing family members.

Jane fonda, Tom Hayden and Haskell Wexler made a journey, in Sping of '74, from Hanoi to Quang Tri. There live poets and soldiers, doctors and peasants, artists and workers. all of them people who have to reconstruct their houses which have been bombed, first by the French and later by the Americans. This collection of people is the anonymous enemy that is talked about in the USA during the war in Vietnam. Introduction to the Enemy performs the task of revealing their faces.

In the 90s, when the Serbian government forcibly removed students for opposing the curriculum, my grandfather and volunteers built new desks, ensuring education in Kosovo.

Ayman and Bilel are street peddlers who trick women abroad with Western Union scams. Bill is worried as Aymand is scamming the wrong sister. Despite his friend's warnings and a mysterious call to prayer from above, Ayman is going down a dead end road.

MUTINY IN HEAVEN is the story of The Birthday Party's ascent, apex and inevitable collapse - a thrilling tale of epic struggle, artistic genius and total dysfunctionality. Told in the group's own words, MUTINY IN HEAVEN brings the band's story to the screen for the first time. This is a twisted tale of ascent, realisation and implosion whilst dealing with issues of artistic muse, creativity, addiction, fame, interpersonal conflict and the unique relationship between creative vision and self-destruction - all underpinned by the dark, wry humour of the individual band members.
Utilising exclusive, incredibly candid interviews, a wealth of rare and unseen archives, original artwork, unreleased tracks, studio footage, animation and multimedia content - the film is as visually rich as it is narratively riveting - a revealing look back at its key members' origins, dreams, hopes and motivations.

Egyptian documentary maker Ibrahim Nash'at traveled with a camera and an interpreter to Afghanistan in 2021, just days after the U.S. Army withdrew. He came to see, as he puts it, in whose hands the country had been left. He gets permission to follow a Taliban commander who has taken over Hollywoodgate, claimed to be a deserted CIA base. The Taliban is in the process of transforming itself from a guerilla movement into a military regime.
What's the best way of working under the control of an organization like this, one that sees you as a pawn for their propaganda? This film's answer is to capture those seemingly trivial moments that serve to puncture that image—of an absurd inspection of abandoned gym equipment, and of a night-time military operation during which Nash'at is told to wait at the side of the road. Rather than stopping filming, he points his camera at the moon and records the sounds of gunfire in the distance, undermining the Taliban narrative without downplaying its dangers. A complex tightrope walk performed with great verve.

Milazim, Fatmir and Liridon are veteran manual labourers who experienced accidents in their workplaces in Kosovo, Europe's youngest country. In this poetic experimental documentary tribute to a now almost extinct class of people, Ilir Hasanaj gives voice to gentle, sincere and dignified, but almost invisible individuals, who fell prey to harsh and primitive capitalistic machinery and policy in the Balkans.

In this heart-wrenching drama, after a man drowns in the Mediterranean Sea, bureaucracy prevents his family from bringing his body home to Morocco.

In the summer of 1971, the world's best women's soccer teams competed in Mexico. Copa 71 still ranks as the best attended women's sporting event of all time. So why do we never hear about it? Copa 71 tells the incredible story of the tournament that was written out of sporting history.
The opposition to women's soccer goes back a long way. Many soccer associations even banned women's teams. After the success of the men's World Cup in 1970, the Mexican business community proposed holding a women's tournament the following year. This purely commercial venture, which was not supported by FIFA, proved to be a resounding success. Soccer-crazy Mexico embraced the tournament, and the country's two largest stadiums were filled. Copa 71 could have been the launch of women's soccer worldwide. But the male-dominated establishment wasn't ready for that.
Half a century later, the women who played in the tournament still find their experiences unbelievable. Ordinary girls, mostly from simple backgrounds, were welcomed as heroes in Mexico. It was "like a parallel universe," as one of them put it.

With extraordinary access and urgent storytelling, Antidote anchors its timely narrative on whistleblowers and activists who have worked to uncover Vladimir Putin's deadly regime — and are now facing dangerous and fatal consequences for their courageous actions.

After the fall of communism in 1989, colour TVs are no longer a luxury good in Poland. The screens in many Polish homes are beginning to look more like the reality outside the window. But is reality truly colourful?

Jan Oxenberg has been cited as a pioneer of New Queer Cinema since making Home Movie, in 1973. In this film, which features her family's home movie footage and her own trademark talent for parody, Oxenberg gives herself a cheerful lesbian childhood: "The thing I liked best about being a cheerleader was being with the other cheerleaders." Oxenberg went on to make two more breakthrough films — A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts and Thank You and Good Night — both of which were restored by IndieCollect. All three films are now in U.S. distribution through the Criterion Collection. She then turned to television and has since become a successful writer and executive producer of famous TV series, including Cold Case, Manhunt, etc.

Methadone: An American Way of Dealing, about how the rise in heroin addiction was typically addressed in the early 1970s, unfortunately remains very relevant today. Set in Dayton, Ohio, Methadone captures how social services, designed to help, in fact often neutralize those they intend to serve, as professionals treat social problems as mental illness or personal weakness. It is a sobering testament about what can happen to those unable to buy into the American Dream.

Encountering the real effects of destruction, the films in this Beirut-focused series complicate the relationship between fact and fiction, using poetry and other forms of intermediality to witness what emerges from ruins. Beirut, a city that has often been the site of sectarian, colonialist and imperialist violence, is a context which produces films that critically engage with images related to moments during, between, and after war and upheaval. At the center of this series is a retrospective of several early films by Jocelyne Saab, who uses documentary form to demonstrate the effects of violence in Lebanon and to challenge dominant western media perceptions and practices of filming and exhibiting war in Beirut. This series coincides with and honors the one year anniversary of the devastating Beirut Port explosion through the celebration of Lebanese filmmaking. The June program encompasses Palestine and the refugee camps and slums on the outskirts of Beirut.

In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America's color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to the Congo to deflect attention from its first African post-colonial coup.
Director Johan Grimonprez (Double Take, 2009) returns to Sundance with this magnificent essay film that vibrantly embodies the historic and continually evolving colonial machinations that underpin what author and Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane refers to as an ever-evolving "algorithm of Congo Inc."

"Peroni 7" talks about the transformative impact of Kosovo's liberalized visas and migration. Through personal stories of new beginnings and farewells, the film paints a touching picture of a nation in transition, striving for a brighter and more connected future.

In northern Colombia, a group of queer activists use their extravagance to denounce the disastrous exploitation of the largest coal mine in Colombia through performative actions.

The 27 residents on the tiny Danish Wadden Sea island of Mandø are used to severe weather and flooding. But climate change and increasingly extreme weather now pose a serious threat to the eight-square-kilometer island. Its last farmer, Gregers, bravely faces the inevitable catastrophe. He refuses to build a life elsewhere and instead hopes to find a wife to manage the farm with him.
As a storm approaches, Gregers and his faithful dog inspect the decaying dykes that protect his beloved island. Meanwhile Mie celebrates her 100th birthday and Niels, an avid birdwatcher, laments the rare birds that don't visit the island anymore. Tourists arrive in buses at low tide and hear from tour guide Preben how Mandø's community was almost completely wiped out during a storm surge in 1634. Today, the current generation holds on steadfastly, despite the new threats from nature.
The portrait of this microcosm is accompanied by masterly shots of the distinctive landscape, shifting skies, and seas that change with the wind and tide. In a sense, the grim fate of these islanders, presented in drily comic situations, affects us all.

Between 2013 and 2023, Slovenian Cinematheque preserved and digitized 179 short films created on a tiny stretch of land between the Alps and the Adriatic Sea in the period of socialism (1945-1991), but mostly outside the prevailing state production. Today, we belatedly recognize these films as experimental and as an important, innovative part of the Slovenian film heritage, visible again for the first time after decades. The production of Alpe-Adria Underground! has radically accelerated efforts to preserve, digitize and restore this segment of Slovenian cinema.

The film tells the story of Stasiek, a welder from communist Poland who emigrated to the USA in the 1970s to work in the world's largest traveling circus – "Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey". Having one goal in mind – earning a better living for his family, Stasiek is forced to leave his wife and daughters for three years. These are three long years of living in a cramped train car, facing the hardships of emigration and longing for a family. With the first money he earns, Stasiek decides to buy a photo camera and a movie camera to document his time in the US. His pictures and footage include circus performances, a helicopter flight over New York, and the newly opened Disneyland. "Tiger Soup" not only presents the exciting adventures of our main character in the US but also outlines a universal picture of Polish emigration of the time.

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and took advantage of the opportunity to seize the archives of the Palestinian Research Center. These archives contained many historical documents on Palestine, including a rich collection of photographs and films. These images have since been renamed and re-indexed according to the vision of their new custodians, the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Against these acts of dispossession and appropriation (one sequence shows the quiet violence of their authors), A Fidai Film offers a counter-narrative based on this loss, in order to restore the traces of the plundered Palestinian history. Kamal Aljafari re-examines these images, here exclusively cinematographic or televisual, and points out the complexity of their status as well as their mode of existence as a political object. A double movement unfolds, that of making these images resurface, sometimes precious testimonies restoring the life, the struggles of the Palestinian people, but also that of rethinking the implicit gaze of those who produced them (the colonial gesture). Kamal Aljafari kneads them, sometimes mistreats them, in order to bring out the underlying ideology, the exoticizing gaze as well as the gestures of dispossession: crossing out the comments of the victors and occupiers (from the British mandate to today), adding, colorizing, removing superimposed texts, modifying sounds, recombining, editing. A gesture of anger and struggle in action as much as a restitution of a distorted or erased memory, A Fidai Film claims to be a form of cinematographic sabotage, a combative film as the title unequivocally indicates. Nicolas Feodoroff

In a small village where people don't seem to get enough entertainment, a young man is engaged to balance on his head at the top of the church tower and thereafter fall to the ground and die. For doing this he will receive a great deal of money. The people gather enthusiastically at the church to watch the young man perform the task. It's all over in a couple of seconds. And to everyone's dismay the young man really dies in the end. Now their enthusiasm is switched into disappointment. To put up with such horrors should actually be forbidden, the people say and leave dissatisfied.

In the interior of the island, a group of women coming from different ex-Yugoslavia countries live in an unusual community trying to create safe space for them and for generations to come. The islanders call them Witches of Brač. They do not believe in private property or hierarchy, and manage the community by direct democracy. They share the land and together try to build their own small self-sustaining oasis. Interpersonal relations and challenges brought by coexistence in nature, bring the survival of the community into question.

"Boots on the Ground, Hands in the Soil" is a multimedia project which evolved from the academic research of Ukrainian traditional ecological knowledge and the role of gardening during the war. It consists of a physical installation and a documentary film.The film centres around the spiritual bond shared by me and my charismatic grandmother, Zoya, a proud Ukrainian pensioner who cherishes her non-capitalistic peasant lifestyle. In the winter of 2021, Zoya presented me with a package of her harvested tomato seeds. The next gardening season, however, coincided with the devastating invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

Iraqi writer and director Kassem Hawal's 24 minute film Our Small Houses is one of the few surviving works made by the cinema group Hawal founded and led under the Central Information Committee of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Badly damaged and often overlooked in histories of revolutionary film, it combines lucid Marxist-Leninist analyses with striking montage techniques.

When his wife, the outspoken feminist Miyuki Takeda, announced that she was leaving him in order to find herself, Kazuo Hara began this raw, intensely personal documentary as a way to both maintain a connection to the woman he still cared for and to make sense of their complex relationship. Granted at times shockingly intimate access to Miyuki's personal life, Hara follows her wayward journey toward liberation as she explores her sexuality with both men and women, becomes pregnant and raises a family as a single mother, and grows increasingly disenchanted with the constraints of traditional social structures. A film as radical, complicated, and uncompromising as Miyuki herself, Extreme Private Eros explodes the boundaries between subject and filmmaker to create a stunningly candid portrait of a woman willing to risk everything in her quest to live on her own terms.

Set against the backdrop of escalating farmer suicides in India, Sanjeevani, a young farmer's widow, discovers strength, joy and companionship in a group of resilient women who share the same loss. During peer-to-peer sessions with a local psychologist, she finds the courage to overcome her grief, tackle social taboos, and strive for financial independence and a better future for her children. While new suicides in her community test her determination, she finds healing in the act of confronting her grief and helping other women farmers like her in a deeply patriarchal society.

Libuše has been capturing her "rock-n-roll" life full of twists and turns in thousands of pictures and autoportraits. Yet the sudden photographic success after 53 years of work has not helped her to see her real self in the mirror. She is still searching for herself, the place where she belongs, as she goes through piles of negatives and diaries while working on a new book.

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.
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.

To dance is to remember. To dance is to remind. As the Palestinian identity continues to be threatened with violent erasure, young Palestinians turn to their folk dance, the dabke, to assert their existence. From its humble beginnings as a worker's dance, the dabke has come to represent an evolving history of cultural resistance, and is needed now more than ever. Dancing Palestine is a document of this embodiment of collective memory – as those who piece together a dabke choreography also piece together their identities. Together with the film – a performance in itself – the dabke is a testament to Palestinians' deep love of life and an insistent act of contribution to the archive of Palestine in the present.

Found in the first dictionary of the Egyptian language, is the hieroglyph 'sr', meaning 'giraffe'. The tallest living terrestrial animal, its oldest ancestor roamed the Earth some twenty million years ago. In Lea Hartlaub's endlessly fascinating film the animal is contextualised in terms of myth, fable, and both natural and human history. The result is as far from the anthropomorphic-centric trend in contemporary nature documentaries as you could get – and all the better for it.
Divided into diverse episodes, the giraffe is present more as a link between the diverse entries than the main subject of them. A plethora of narrative-driven tableaux, across thirty locations, spirit us through a sweeping history of the world, a genuinely epic story traversing millennia and continents, all anchored to this one creature. One of the remarkable strengths of Hartlaub's narrative tapestry is its refusal to adopt a rigid formalist approach, instead remaining flexible and agile. This fluidity enhances the storytelling experience, allowing for a diverse and engaging exploration of history. Meditative, immersive, sometimes mischievously witty and often breathtaking in its visual and narrative sweep, sr is as contemplative as it is informed and as captivating as the animal that inspired it.

On this hot summer day, 17-year-old Nayla is faced with the same dilemma every Lebanese youngster is faced with today – to leave or to stay. Two men in her life have set ideas about it, but both might wake up to a surprise.

A bird called Memory has forgotten how to fly back home. Lua, a trans woman, tries to find Memory in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, but the city can be a hostile place.

A Palestinian poet, Rashed Hussein and an Israeli journalist, Amos Kenan met in the basement of Rogosin's Bleecker Street Cinema – old friends and representatives of two nations that in the 1970s set off on a long journey to mutual understanding and co-habitation on a shared territory, a journey which remains unfinished even today. To recall their remote homeland, inaccessible to Hussein, who emigrated, Rogosin edits in the iconic scenes of the discussed locations and people. Similarly riven is the dialogue between the two intellectuals who fundamentally refuse the role of each other's enemy that is forced on them.

"ARTISTRY" explores AI's impact on music creation, showcasing AI's speed and precision in composing and mixing. It examines AI's innovative capabilities and efficiency while questioning its ability to replicate the authenticity and emotional depth of human musicians. The film invites viewers to reflect on technology's role in music and the unique qualities of human creativity.

It is a coming-of-age tale where youth grapple with their first profound loss. Filmmaker Yi-Shan's best friends Chun and Yueh were trapped in a Nepal cave for 47 days. Chun died three days before Yueh's rescue, prompting Yi-Shan to take up the camera and retrace her friends' footsteps in Nepal. When Yi-Shan reaches the cave, what awaits her there?

The Swedish gang conflict seen from the inside over five years by a filmmaker who is at home portraying one of Sweden's most dangerous areas, which he is now moving out of. A poetic and existential film about life, death and brotherhood.

Fiction, reality, the private, and the performed overlap on a routine but emotional day at a medical center.

A young director films a year and a half out of his ground floor window in Berlin. He observes the light on the asphalt, construction workers on the other side of the street and accidentally, via the soundtrack of the recordings, himself.

A young woman measures her strength against the king of chaos himself. The more she wants to win, the less she succeeds. Through a mythological story, the author looks back to the time when she discovered that there are things in life she will never control.

Deserted landscapes, ancient ruins and abandoned shipwrecks at sea. Elefsina's archeological sites don't come close to being as hauntingly beautiful as these dead ships. They stand majestically like memorial sculptures and bring a magnetism to the eye. In fact, these are the neglected refugees of Elefsina. For how did they end up there, anyway? What's their story? That's the story I want to know. Elefsina Notre Amour is a short sci-fi essay, a timeless archive, filmed on 16mm color Kodak.

A conversation between two friends about the effectiveness and implications of publicly stating support for the cultural boycott of Israel. One friend is wracked with worry having signed a petition asking Radiohead not to play Tel Aviv, the other is more sanguine. Through their conversation we catch a glimpse of what it is to be a Palestinian in today's world.

Set in the harsh yet beautiful landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina, At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking reveals inner, intangible realms through the patient observation of the natural world. The film follows an elderly man living in isolation, weaving together a tapestry of dreamlike visuals as it records the routines of his daily life. Surrounding mountains, a burning stove and animal companions offer solace and warmth. Told through a blend of slow, observational footage and evocative reenactments, Novaković's film is a poetic meditation on solitude, loneliness and aging, and a rumination on both the impermanence and transience of life at large. Ultimately, as each exquisite detail of this world slowly unfurls, the film offers a unique portrait of the nature of human existence.

Written upon testimonies, rumours and fake news, this film questions architectures of energy shaping the Algerian territory from its colonial history to the rise of Chinese extractivism, underlining the multiplicity of reality in our post-truth era.

A poetic portrait of contemporary wildlife conservation, JUST ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH reflects on empathy, agency, and the role of hope in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. This debut nonfiction feature examines scientists and citizen scientists who conduct surveys of frogs, which serve as an indicator species; study sea stars threatened by disease; track bats whose populations have been decimated by white-nose syndrome; and collect data on insects declining at unprecedented rates. Set primarily at night, the film weaves together observational and lyrical sequences, texts written by authors including W.S. Merwin and Adam Nicolson, and an otherworldly soundscape. JUST ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH is a visceral, sensory meditation on what it means to live in a broken world.

When Russia began bombing Kharkiv, Ukraine, some members of a 50+ women's cheerleading team chose to stay while others escaped, and through their sport they keep sane and connected even as cracks appear. Witness true strength in this exceptional study of sisterhood.

The 30min cinema verite documentary is about climate activists that occupied several construction sites in Vienna, Austria for almost a year to stop the construction of two highways, crossing the nature reserve Lobau. The documentary gives an unfiltered view on how the daily life of an activist looks like and what few individuals can achieve in an extreme situation like an occupation.

Director Max Kestner explores the essence of life, questioning the human connection to other species and delving into the profound interconnectedness of all living matter. How does the killing of a giraffe challenge notions of empathy and self-understanding and what are the philosophical implications for our existence?

Across more than 40 years, two invasions, eight assassination attempts, nine U.S. Presidents and the fall of the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro has held on to power in Cuba. Explore his remarkable and infamous rise and seemingly unshakable reign through this gripping film in which a trio of filmmakers aspire to meet with the Cuban dictator in order to set up talks for relations with the United States-but Fidel never showed up.

Steeped in the isolation of suburban Tasmania, Imogen and Audrey reflect on their lives, families and dreams between puffs on bongs, vapes and cigs. Dark clouds approach in the conversation and landscape as local wildlife looks on indifferently. Beyond the drugs and arcades, what possible routes of escape remain?
– Leonie Woodfin

Following the shooting of a documentary on the death of her daughter, a mother reflects on her own life and especially on the passing of time.

Prepare for an eye-opening journey into the heart of the American Midwest. Filmmaker Mitch McCabe returns home to Detroit to capture the essence of a nation divided during and after the 2020 presidential election. From anti-lockdown protests to post-election chaos, 23 Mile shows the unraveling of societal norms through the lives of everyday Americans. With captivating scenes and unfiltered voices, the film challenges our preconceptions and urges us to confront our biases.

In Zenica, a giant steel factory belches toxic gasses into the air day and night, making the city one of the world's most polluted, and people are dying. Samir Lemes and citizen activists from Eko Forum fight an uneven fight for change against the reckless corporation, the local politicians who focus on jobs, investments, and re-elections, and the EU who co-funds the corporation without enforcing laws and international standards. Instead, they name Zenica 'A Green City Project', building bicycle lanes in a city where breathing is a health hazard. A film about financial cynicism, political pragmatisk and greenwashing, in which West European countries play a surprisingly big role.

In one night, we are let into the bedrooms of 8-12 of Amsterdam's inhabitants. In these bedrooms, the inhabitants are sharing an intimate experience with another: a new partner, an old partner, a friend. A gravitational pull takes us through the night as through their separateness, the various inhabitants become more and more linked – a phone screen in one room brings us to a TV screen in another –a window overlooking canal-side houses brings us to the interior of another – the holding of a face in one bed follows through to someone tracing another's nose in another bed – the receding hairline of one person takes us to the baldness of another.

Amid the ongoing struggle for "Women, Life, Freedom," the Iranian people use their cell-phone cameras to capture scenes of urgent protest and brutal retaliation by the regime. In the act of bearing witness, they risk the loss of their vision, as authorities are known to target the eyes of their victims. Narges Kalhor aggregates these images, which have been flagged as "sensitive content" on various social media channels, a form of censorship that sanitizes and erases violent events from the record.

When Ryuichi Sakamoto died in March 2023 at age 71, the world lost one of its greatest musicians: a classical orchestral composer, a techno-pop artist, and a piano soloist who elevated every genre he worked in and inspired and influenced music-lovers across the globe. As a final gift to his legions of fans, filmmaker Neo Sora (Sakamoto's son) has constructed a gorgeous elegy starring Sakamoto himself in one of his final performances. Recorded in late 2022 at NHK Studio in Tokyo, this filmed concert is an intimate, melancholy, and achingly beautiful one-man show, featuring just Sakamoto and a Yamaha grand, as the composer glides through a playlist of his most haunting, delicate melodies (including "Lack of Love, "The Wuthering Heights," "Aqua," "Opus," and many more). Shot in pristine black-and-white by Bill Kirstein and edited by Takuya Kawakami, this stirring film brings us so close to a living, breathing artist that it feels like pure grace. A Janus Films release.

Autumn again on planet earth. A couple of rosy rose petals in eternal solidarity enduring great trouble of a heavy thunderstorm.
A Romantic Conceptualism Bedtime Fable of resistance & redundance, or the awkward ambivalence of truth, dream, life and love. Let's unite to inflorescence.

Along the Bosnian-Croatian border near Velika Kladuša, the paths of mine disposal experts, migrating families and locals cross. Director Nicole Vögele hones in on these encounters, laying bare the wounds of the war of the 1990s and those of the refugees of today. A deeply telluric film, a kaleidoscope of landscapes haunted by the fury of past and present.

This personal short documentary tells the story of a soldier who never wanted to be one. His decision never to pull a trigger led to resistance and ultimately to military prison. Pretending to be mentally ill, he leaves the war zone and returns to Belgrade via the insane asylum. On the day NATO begins bombing the entire country.

A filmmaker and former dancer returns to her family home to make a film with her parents, but when they fail to live up to unrealistic expectations, and when her mother's cancer metastasizes, she hires professional dancers to play them.

A mesmerising account of the lives of women in Kosovo made from archival VHS footage.

The destruction caused by the war against Ukraine is shown in lengthy tableaux. Intercepted phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families set up a shocking parallel world. Sound and image stare each other in the face, stunned.

Stone filmed the documentary about thrice-elected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that encompasses the ruler's incarceration between 2018 and 2019 and his return to power. (IndieWire)

Enver is disturbed by the 'smell' in the building and believes that the new tenants at the basement are the reason. He starts collecting signatures for a petition from all the residents in order to move them out.

A close-up study of radically different life forms that puts our own human scale in a new and thought-provoking light. Lichens are amazing organisms. A combination of a fungus and algae, two life forms that once upon a time decided to enter into symbiosis with each other. Fungi have difficulty photosynthesising and algae have difficulty incorporating sugar. Therefore, their union is beneficial for both parties. Or in other words: It is better to live together than to live alone. 'Lichens are the Way' is a loving and thought-provoking close-up study of radically different life forms, and of what happens when we turn our attention to beings and life forms outside our own scale. Czech Ondřej Vavrečka shot his radically imaginative, organic film in Canada, where lichenologist Trevor and his partner have created a home together in the symbiotic spirit of the object of their studies.

Reflecting on the construction of oral history and its relation to the land, The Soldier's Lagoon dives into the misty Páramo region and offers an elusive living archive that navigates the dense fog separating Simón Bolívar's past and Colombia's present.

In the boredom of a wandering evening, three friends have fun reflecting on the symbolism of the Jeddah fountain in Saudi Arabia. A film about Saudi youth who moves in search of freedom.

Six months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army withdraws from some occupied regions and settlements, leaving a trail of shockingly similar traces of war crimes. In the reports from several human rights organisations and independent groups of journalists, there is increasing evidence that Russian and Belarusian troops in the occupied territories have also been pursuing the systematic destruction of the civilian population's national identity. Based on accounts from civilian victims, the filmmaker addresses this system of oppression. The individual statements are voiced by two Ukrainian actors, while the streets of his Berlin neighbourhood serve as the film's backdrop. To determine the responsibility he himself might bear for this war, the filmmaker reflects on his childhood and school education in post-Soviet Belarus.

When Iranian actress and director Pegah Ahangarani (1984) was growing up, she thought every soldier she saw on television might have been her father. During her earliest years he was fighting at the front, and a portrait of Khomeini hung in a prominent place in the house. But one day the image of the Ayatollah disappeared without explanation and another photo took its place.
In this personal essay, Ahangarani (I Am Trying to Remember) talks about how the Iranian Revolution, and the turbulent times that ensued, affected her and her family. Illustrated with archive footage, news excerpts and family photos, she narrates her personal story, first from the point of view of a girl living in a world of fairy-tale heroes, then gradually shifting to the perspective of an adult who could interpret the complex events.
With poetic tenderness, she explains how much the lives of generations of her family members and friends have been affected by the past 50 years of Iranian history.

FILM IS DEAD. LONG LIVE FILM! explores the vanishing world of private film collecting—an obsessive, secretive, often illicit world of basement film vaults, piled-high with forgotten reels, inhabited by passionate cinephiles devoted to the rescue and preservation of photochemical film.

Amidst the traditional pomp and circumstance of Filipino elections, a quirky people's movement rises to defend the nation against deepening threats to truth and democracy. In a collective act of joy as a form of resistance, hope flickers against the backdrop of increasing autocracy.
With the end of Rodrigo Duterte's presidency and his attacks on democratic institutions like a free independent press, some Filipinos hoped for a new beginning. In contrast, others yearned for even more autocracy and a return to an era before the People Power Revolution and the restoration of democracy just a generation before. In this companion piece to A Thousand Cuts, which helped introduce the world to online news site Rappler and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, director Ramona Diaz returns to Sundance with a film that takes you inside the fight for democracy in the modern media age. As elections threaten to be simulacrums of democratic processes, And So It Begins chronicles what the defenders of democracy in the Philippines have experienced and is a haunting depiction of what is at stake in elections around the world.—SS

Formed around four main stories, the film combines visually impressive segments with the testimonies of female partisans. Nanica (18) died young during the war and left behind a diary. Marija (87) gave an audio interview a couple of years ago and we have her audio recording. Hilda (105) and Zdenka (96) passionately testify about their war and post-war experiences. The film searches for hidden feminine principles, forms and meanings in the stories that we know, that we think we know and that we have yet to find out. This film is a monument to the stories because those stories are not important only to them.

Cássia lives with her alcoholic father and his illegal fighting roosters. Between taking care of her father, driving his taxi to make a living, and tending to her favorite rooster, Cássia lives a life devoid of any hope. Gradually, she will try to free herself from what seems to be a life condemned to a spiral of familial subjugation. This film marks Rita M. Pestana's debut as a director and her first participation in Curtas.

Hassan is a successful journalist who lives in Zagreb. But he is tormented by his past, the wars he went through as a boy and the scars of lost loved ones and years. He returns to his native Beirut, to his Sabra neighborhood, where he unravels the past. While meeting his comrades, and in meetings with his brothers and sisters, he puts together forgotten images of his own past and recalls how as a boy he joined the PLO, fought in the city streets of Beirut and dreamed of how his comrades would celebrate his heroic death. While the camera creeps into the most hidden corners of Shatila, a Palestinian camp in the heart of Beirut that cannot be entered without an armed escort, part of the film crew disappears in Rehab, a part controlled by drug gangs and former ISIL members, and it itself faces all the possible challenges of this turbulent world

On Rue Clignancourt, a street light goes out. Gloom and mediocracy prevail. In this new darkness, a cineast must rediscover his humanity and a man must continue to invent his cinema. The rest doesn't matter.

On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down by Russian forces over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. The reality of this attack, and its possible ramifications for the then-ongoing war in Donbas and the West's relationship with Russia, was immediately questioned by the Russian government and media. As voluminous evidence — including physical artifacts like the butterfly-shaped shrapnel found in the bodies of the pilots — piled up, the lies denying reality only became more outlandish and incredible.
In a world where violence can only be defended by lies, and lies only maintained by violence, Iron Butterflies presents the truth of what happened to MH17, but also what was at stake by not confronting it. Director Roman Liubyi uses a wealth of visual material and individual testimonies to craft this artful yet evidence-driven examination of a turning point in recent world history. This act of mass murder not only destroyed so many people's lives and the possible future that they could have built — it contained the seeds of the future we now live in.

A girl wakes up in her nightmare about her unspoken trauma.

The title of this film is also the name of iconic singer Mariem Hassan's song, an exuberant rally cry for revolution and freedom in Western Sahara. The result of a collaboration between filmmaker collectives RåFILM from Sweden and Saharawi Voice from the Western Sahara refugee camps in Algeria, HAIYU interweaves Mariem Hassan's music and her personal quest for her country's independence with larger historical events dating back to the region's Spanish colonisation, and subsequent occupation by Morocco. Archive footage and interviews with family, artists, friends and revolutionaries detail Hassan's commitment and compassion, while her evocative music and poetry not only represent her spirit, but that of the Saharawi women, and a people who continue their struggle for self-determination and the battle for their land and resources.

Edouard and his daughter live with a cassette received from his wife in the United States, a long time ago. After years of absence, what can we expect from a distant love?

Close to nightfall the fourteen-year-old Margarita moves through a deserted village in northern Tyrol. Through the brightly lit windows she observes the everyday life of others. Under her gaze, a play between what's inside and outside begins - imitating and pretending.

"The Quality of Image" is an participatory art project that draws inspiration from Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to explore and analyze the markers of modern society's quality of life. Focused on both the quantity and quality of individual needs and their fulfillment, the project aims to delve into the subjective and objective aspects of life indicators and standards of living. Through a process of deconstruction and dismantling, indicators will reconstruct the image of quality of life in Athens. Every individual will create operational images, in order to transform a data (percentage) into image, the data which was created by the European Commision on the Quality of Life report in 2023.

A true story of love and loss, "Adrianne & The Castle" documents the unique life of the St-Georges who built a castle to their love in rural Illinois. Now facing the future without the love of his life, Alan grapples with his grief through creative musical re-enactments of their story, transporting him into the fantasy world they created together.

A sensitive vampire decides to leave eternal life by committing active euthanasia. She gets assisted through a mercy killing ritual in a vampire matriarchy in Brussels. Taking on her human form for just an instant after years of immortal existence, she recounts her death in this experimental short fiction.

Stones are at once the most foundational and the most overlooked parts of our lifeworld. When a retired nature documentary narrator passes a kidney stone, she decides to tell one more story about this forgotten world of stone . A hypnotic essay film asking urgent ecological questions, Apple Cider Vinegar takes the viewer on a journey meeting Palestinian quarry workers, passionate Britisch Geologist and People living on the lava fields of Fogo.

Fran and Verka are the sole inhabitants of Vërnakollë - the place they first met many years ago, got married and have been living ever since. They remember a lively village where children played in the streets and weddings lasted for a week. After the 1999 war in Kosovo, it all changed. Everyone but Fran and Verka left the village. Their story is a testament to the unbreakable bonds that tie us to what we call home and to where we belong

Svitlana, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, examines the colonised part of her consciousness and tries to find answers to the question of how Soviet totalitarianism and Russification influenced the relationships within her family.

Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, is a land border between the African continent and Europe. In transit, Malik and his friends, underage youths from Morocco, try to reach Europe by any means necessary. At the same time, day and night, they survey the city like seismographs revealing the most burning present as well as the movements of the most distant past...

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

Two young women in a desolate village discuss the recent, mysterious vanishing of Leela.

Surfacing Images is an experimental documentary about film preservation and the destiny of images that are left on their own. Through a phone conversation between a women's rights activist and a former political prisoner, as they discuss the works of filmmakers, Dušan Makavejev and Bojana Marijan to the films of the 1979 Revolution in Iran and the videos of the Iranian Women's uprising, this film portrays the irresistible urge of images to resurface and be seen.

Three individuals share their unique experiences of losing someone close. Despite their different relationships and circumstances, their stories reveal a common pattern in coping with grief.

Alice is a totally paralyzed teenager who can only communicate through the movements of her eyes. Her brother and sister try an obscure method to treat her...

Once Upon a Time in a Forest is a film about brave young people who are defending one of the last coniferous forest areas in Europe. It is a morality play and a love story of a younger generation whose main object of love is the Finnish forest. This cinematic documentary explores environmental feelings and witnesses how the 22-year old protagonist Ida grows up to be the leader of the new Forest Movement.

Sandstorm blows, waters scarce. In a remote mining town without any radiosignals, a quirky teenage girl gets curious about a passing truck driver.

This film is about a Ukrainian woman, who during Russia's full-scale attack put her travel business on hold and began transporting killed military men. Like the mythological Charon, who transfers souls to the other side of the river Styx, she transports the bodies of the dead soldiers. Overcoming thousands of kilometers without any stops and sleep, she transports those who have finished fighting in this world and are on their last voyage.

The only memory left to Mori from his father is the audio recording of the story he told him. Mori listens to this tale from time to time. One day, a new teacher comes to school. When Mori sees the teacher, he thinks he is his father. Mori's insistence on this issue turns into an emotional bond between him and his teacher.

The film tells the story of a group of Ukrainian soldiers from a territorial self-defence battalion that is heading to a battle position in a "gray zone" that is located several hundred meters from enemy positions. Their task is to spend 2 days hiding from enemy fire, stealthily monitoring the enemy, helping to adjust the artillery fire, and simply living. And, if the enemy attacks, to be the first to accept the fight.

After enduring three years of the Zero-COVID policy, the Chinese government suddenly relaxed its pandemic control measures in early 2023. The lives of many elderly individuals faded away before the onset of spring. Following the careful handling of the funeral arrangements for both parents, a young man decided to purchase fireworks for the imminent Spring Festival, despite the prohibition on igniting fireworks and firecrackers.

The story of Sister is told through a montage of various home-movie and instagram-like smartphone footage captured in the period of 2020 and 2023. In these years, the director, after experiencing Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Covid-19 era struggling with the highest pandemic death rate in the world, decides to emigrate and start a new life in Germany. There, the footage is assembled into a film. With the dreams of home, faces from the past appear; places, images and feelings, too.