A ghost ride through Finnish TV archives of the 1960s grazes the moon landing, American TV shows, a war in Africa. But how to connect with the world when dancing is forbidden?!
The anonymous narrator is a kind of web-adventurous flâneuse, neurotic and endlessly curious. A disturbance in the proprioception, which is the ability to sense the position, movement and location of the body and its parts, makes her perceive the world in a new way. Seemingly random anecdotes found on the internet and instructions from her cryptic physiotherapist start to come together in surprising ways. The found material forms a mosaic that reflects a world full of gazes, rules and technologies that separate us. Lines from the present and the distant past take our narrator to the 1960s, where medieval dance bans, televised wars, lost bones, space utopias and American TV stars collide. This film reflects how we can be and live in the world within ourselves and with each other. With those who are near and with those who are far. Along with all this, the film recommends dancing to everyone.
The formation and history of Lake Baikal in Siberia are re-imagined with hand-made animation, featuring the voice of a Buryat woman who can still recall some words in her endangered Buryat-Mongolian language.
Rodica (40) and her children, Maria (14) and Patrick (18), struggle to find each other's coordinates in order to have a balanced family life. Blue is a film about love, fear, anxiety, and the emotions that emerge at their intersection.
In her early twenties, Hiam Abbass left her native Palestinian village and became an internationally acclaimed actor. Years later, her filmmaker daughter returns there with her.
In her early twenties, Hiam Abbass left her native Palestinian village to follow her dream of becoming an actress in Europe, leaving behind her mother, grandmother, and seven sisters.
Thirty years later, her filmmaker daughter, Lina, returns with her to the village and questions for the first time her mother's bold choices, her chosen exile and the way the women in their family influenced both their lives. Set between past and present, Bye Bye Tiberias pieces together images of today, family footage from the nineties and historical archives to portray four generations of daring Palestinian women who keep their story and legacy alive through the strength of their bonds, despite exile, dispossession, and heartbreak.
Celestial Queer: The Life, Work and Wonder of James MacSwain
Celestial Queer: The Life, Work and Wonder of James MacSwain
Sue Johnson, Eryn Foster
DOK Film Market Exclusives
Documentary Film
Canada
2023
72 minutes
English
International Premiere open
Synopsis
Celestial Queer is a 72-minute feature documentary celebrating James MacSwain, a beloved queer artist, animator and gay rights activist. Born and raised in the “backwater” of Atlantic Canada, MacSwain has been making ground-breaking experimental films, animations and provocative art performances for more than half a century.
Through a combination of playful verité and rarely-seen footage from his archive, Celestial Queer accompanies MacSwain and a revolving cast of characters as he revisits everything from the sites of some of his most recognised works to the rocky tidal shores of Nova Scotia. The film also includes rarely-seen footage from the famous 1984 rooftop “Phallus Performance” during which MacSwain was almost arrested and charged with obscenity. New work has been made specifically in conjunction with the film, while also including restorations of over a dozen of MacSwain's 16mm films.
Jim's effusive character, prolific work, and community organising have inspired generations of artists to be fearlessly themselves. Celestial Queer now introduces audiences to one of Canada's best-kept secrets – an artist who is effortlessly charming, engagingly prolific, and subversive to his surrealist core.
Together, Zoe and her little brother manage to leave their fantasy worlds behind and stick a healing plaster on the wound left by the loss of their mother.
In a run-down neighbourhood, Zoe and her little brother Theo are left to fend for themselves. A young adolescent, Zoe is a ball of anger haunted by an intimate terror. Theo, still a child, flees reality into a fantastical world. During a scorching summer day, the two children will have to burst the abscess of their relationship so as not to lose each other.
A man on an e-scooter on the outskirts of the city. Only the rifle over his shoulder irritates. The mood of high alert is deceptive. The disaster has already happened.
Marionette master U Sein Aye Myint has practised his art for more than forty years, continuing the traditional skills passed down from his father. But the Covid pandemic and the military coup have prevented him and his puppets from performing. When the roof of his small workshop in Yangon’s North Dagon starts leaking in the monsoon, he has to clamber up to fix it himself to ensure his beloved puppets do not get wet. Observing him with age-old wisdom in their eyes, his puppets seem to sense all the things that are weighing heavily on his mind: his lack of income, his precarious future – and just how much he misses his audience.
A young Burmese woman who was trafficked to China and sold into marriage tells her story. Based on the real-life protagonist’s words and beautifully rendered in pen-and-ink, this animation portrays a woman torn between her love for the child she was forced to bear and her longing for the country to which she may never be able to return.
A young woman breaks up an ugly plywood wardrobe that reminds her of an act of violence in her past. An artefact of pain is destroyed – a powerful gesture.
Attempting to purge a bad memory, Joana decides to return to the place where she suffered an act of violence in 2013 to free herself of the last trigger that binds her to this incident from the past – a wardrobe. In this self-portrait, the director appropriates the essayist traits of the documentary as a process to deal with inner ghosts. Through a ritual established by a recollection of facts, she confronts her own expectations facing the charges she endures as a woman.
A relationship on the rocks, naked under the scorching sun and disoriented on a vast holiday sea. In search of funny dolphins, Aurora and Jeremy are paddling for their lives.
From their lookout towers, female fire wardens scan Portuguese landscapes for wildfires. An allegorically condensed, wordless study of vigilance and vision.
Looking at the tree line, a question creeps into my mind and, simultaneously, I have a desire.
What if nothing existed?
Extended Presences follows several women in their seasonal work as fire watchers in Portugal. The film comes close to their breathing, to the passing of time and to solitude, from within.
Els is in her late forties, divorced and in love again. For her, falling in love was not easy: it meant that she had to accept, that she has a life even if her twenty-year-old daughter wants to die and has already asked for psychiatric euthanasia which her mother can do nothing about. In the storm of her own emotions, mixed with guilt, anger, fear and hope, love is what teaches Els to try stepping forward even if it seems impossible.
Falling is a lyrical, found-footage-based testimony from a mother who faces not only the taboos surrounding motherhood but also the most difficult situation in her life.
In southern California, date palms from the Middle East grow, tales from One Thousand and One Nights are told and a volcanic eruption is expected. A document of enchanting simultaneity.
Along the San Andreas fault line in Southern California, indigenous palm trees and date palms imported from the Middle East flourish. The people who tend to them reflect a landscape of frictions and affections shaped over generations by agriculture, luxury real estate, and border politics. Like the infinity storytelling of The 1001 Nights, stories fold into dreams and back into stories, a constellation of voices settle over mountains and into the earth. Intertwining colour 16mm with textural black and white film hand processed with the dates leftover from harvest and plants native to the valley, Feet in Water, Head on Fire is a sensory, polyvocal evocation of place.
In Brazil, every day, four women are murdered by their partners. To tell their stories, three actresses are challenged to experience, on stage, the emotions of women who intimately live the risk of death. Meanwhile, a group of femicide survivors fight to save other women trapped in abusive relationships. Different narratives join in a single cry because silence also kills women every day.
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.