A ghostly search for traces, based on the 1965 U.S. embargo against “communist” real hair wigs from Asia. Is every wig inhabited by a ghost from the imperial past?
This film is about the haunting memories of Asia’s late-20th-century modernisation. The story departs from a 1965 United States embargo on the hair trade, known as the “Communist Hair Ban”. In every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past.
The sun shines every day in Chagrin Valley, USA. Frozen in a 1950s-inspired artificial decor, this assisted living facility for people who suffer from dementia is home to fragile and ageing residents. Here, everyday life drags on slowly. Florence and her companions dream of an elusive elsewhere during their days punctuated by confusion, fleeting conflicts and overdue family visits. The caregivers – as kind as they are exhausted – run the show in this pastel-coloured, sanitised social theatre. Between two shifts, they confess their desire for a better future; one that is not so different from that of the residents, after all.
In this “telephone” road movie, Floriane Devigne (Ni d’Ève, ni d’Adam, VdR 2018; La Clé de la Chambre à Lessive, VdR 2013) takes us on a journey through so-called “peripheral” France. From remote villages to deserted areas, guided by telephone conversations collected from the last public telephone boxes, she casts an amused, critical and cutting gaze over our ever-changing society.
Hoping to become closer with his father, whom he hardly knows, Samir decides to accompany him on a hunting expedition in the mountains. The hunt thus provides the pretext for their difficult reunion, where time spent waiting, stalking and shooting reveals the tensions and misunderstandings between the protagonists. Despite the cultural and generational barriers that separate them, their encounter is punctuated by the occasional humorous and tender moment, set against the picturesque backdrop of the Valais region. A third man, Charlot, intervenes in the father-son dynamic, offering a different, more congenial vision of hunting and companionship. The expedition becomes an opportunity for director Juliette Riccaboni to subtly examine the complexity of modern family life, as evidenced in this father-son relationship marked by dissent.
The cutting down of a cherry tree becomes the starting point of an intimate dialogue about transgenerational trauma between a mother and a daughter. The line between the need for investigation and the desire for healing becomes blurry when a persistent camera depicts the felling of the tree. The short documentary is an attempt to find a shared language for the unspeakable consequences of child sexual abuse within my own family. Content warning: The film contains descriptions of experiences of sexual violence.
Amid the dunes of the Sahara, a Jaima, the traditional Saharawi tent. A woman, through the
tea ritual, takes us into the past and present of her people, persecuted and driven out of their
land. She offers us three teas: the first, bitter as life; the second, sweet as love; the third,
mild as death. The light of the desert is reflected on the Saharawi people, their life made up
of essentials and their struggle to endure.
Twenty years ago, the filmmaker fled from Bagdad with his family – why has always been a taboo. For his son, he breaks his silence in this filmic family therapy.
Twenty years ago, filmmaker Wiam Al-Zabari and his family fled Baghdad in the middle of the night. His father was waiting for them in the Netherlands. Since then, no one in the family has spoken about it. Now that Wiam is a father himself, he is confronted with his past life in Iraq. This raises questions. Why did they have to flee in the first place? And what are the repercussions of the escape from Iraq and their arrival in the Netherlands? To find out, Wiam breaks the silence for the first time and starts talking to his family. Can he let go of the past to embrace a future in the Netherlands?
After the coup in Uruguay in 1973, thousands of intellectuals and artists fled the country. My father was among them and left for Europe. After his passing three years ago, I came upon some Super 8 movies and audio recordings he had made. Through this archive, I started building a new family story trying to reveal and understand the silent pain of his exile and the fierce will to be a family despite the estrangement.
How do you grow up on a planet that is being destroyed by humanity? The two friends Bo and Luca are enthusiastic climate activists whom the film follows for four years.
How does one grow up on a planet that is destroying itself? Filmmaker Pieter Van Eecke provides a possible response to this urgent question. For four years, he has followed the beautiful and mischievous friendship between Bo and Luca, two teenagers who are as enthusiastic in their ecological activism as they are in their experience of the contradictory and surprising travails of growing up.
Invited by a mysterious friend, a film team sets out on a journey into a hidden Yenish Europe that stretches from dusty banlieues in France to the forests of Carinthia. Told by the voices of young and old Travellers, a kaleidoscopic panorama of their lives unfolds: Diverse people relate to each other, bound together by their love of freedom but also by deep wounds from the past. Their otherness is mirrored and reflected not least in the exchange between the filmmakers and the Yenish.
Cleaning up after a forest fire in the mountains of Portugal: New trees are planted, nature begins to sprout again. But will the fire devour everything one day?
In Portugal, in the mountainous region of Serra da Estrela, guards posted in small towers keep watch over the forest. The cyclical danger of fire hangs over the pine and granite landscape like a ghost. Some inhabitants rely on legends to explain the devastating events, while others show their resilience by rebuilding the recently burnt land with their bare hands. In the heart of this post-apocalyptic landscape, the relationship between man and nature is gradually revealed, oscillating between magic, exploitation and cohabitation.
A high-rise in Kyiv, an apartment on the 15th floor. A zoom out of a still image. On the telephone, Mariia shares her memories of this place, of coming-of-age and community – before the war.
Three windows on the southwest and a balcony on the southeast is what you can see on the facade of Mariia's apartment. In three conversations, Mariia reflects on her experiences related to the place of her upbringing in Kyiv and attempts to claim back the image of her home.
Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers takes us along on her epic quest to map the world's fungi networks and understand their behaviour before it's too late.
Beneath our feet lies a mystery. A complex underground network of mycorrhizal fungi keeps our ecosystem alive by exchanging nutrients and carbon with almost all plants on Earth. Remarkably, no one knows exactly how these sophisticated and ancient systems operate, or how they are affected by climate change.
The Underground Astronaut follows evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers, named one of the 2022 TIME100 Next Innovators, on her quest to map the world's fungi networks and understand their behaviour before it's too late. A fragrant and high-stakes journey into the soil. “No fungi, no future.”
The Underground Astronaut is part of Ammodo Docs, a series of short documentaries about original minds in arts and science.
How to create a world of your own? Push back the limits of your imagination?
The Wonder Way is an exploration in search of extraordinary territories, terrestrial or celestial paradises, intriguing and uncharted. A journey out of time, seeking encounters with those who imagine other worlds within this world.
From Randlett King Lawrence's phantasmagoria to Charles Ross's astral sculpture Star Axis, through Jugnet+Clairet's enigmatic maps, Noah Purifoy's Desert Museum, Jean Wisniewski's Garden of Eden or Didier Queloz's first exoplanet, The Wonder Way takes us to the most striking universes and draws a new cartography of the world in a great breath of freedom and magic.
Gone in search of stray and abandoned Spanish greyhounds in Almeria, I decided to deal with the theme of abandonment through a documentary focusing on the introspection of emotions linked to this trauma. Inspired by Leopardi's poem about resilience, I tried to bring together human and canine feelings in the experience of being abandoned by someone. The urge to make a documentary came after my first documentary last year. I wanted to try to give the project an aesthetic sense linked to fiction, to have two contrasting worlds in the film. The film is accompanied by a narrative voice, not a didactic one, in order to unite the reportage side with the photogenic and more experimental part.
The Zimmerwald Conference – mired in legend in the Soviet Union and erased from history in Zimmerwald itself. A labyrinth of forgetting and remembering from which history is made.
When Lenin and Trotsky met in the small village of Zimmerwald, it was not to watch birds, contrary to what they claimed. The conference was a call to the workers of the world to unite against the war that was raging in Europe. This page of Switzerland's history has long been forgotten, but new generations, such as the ones portrayed in this film, are willing to recover it.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.