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.
A shaman, half human, half animal, performs a breakneck dance in the jungle. Ingeniously, he tries to fool the crocodiles in the river to reach the other bank.
The film’s stop-motion animation puppets are made using Taiwan’s unique papermaking technique rooted in traditional funeral ceremonies. At the beginning of the film, a shadow puppet mirror transforms into a shaman-like animal dancer. The film uses the perspective of a fly to create a montage film language using the metaphor of the compound eye. Through the use of choreography in the style of the Taiwanese “yi zhen” folk dance, the film portrays the Southeast Asian folktale The Mousedeer Crossing the River through multiple perspectives, reinterpreting the story’s layered facets across cultures.
The audience views the narrative through the vision of the fly’s compound eye, where the folktale represents a form of container, filled with symbolic metaphors such as the mirror and shadows, reflecting the flow of cultural identity, ethnicity and the transitional nature of local and global contexts. The film interprets cultures from around the world and while seemingly different on the surface, they in fact reveal a similar structure at their core.
A poetic investigation of one of the largest e-waste recycling sites in the world as a contact zone of complex global economic, social, power-political, and technological processes.
A landscape of electronic equipment leftovers, embedded in biting clouds of smoke, burnt earth, and dirty water.
In Agbogbloshie – one of the world's largest e-waste recycling sites situated in the middle of Accra – electronics are dismantled and burnt in order to return their metals to the industrial recycling cycles.
In between, an observer who, by means of acoustic field research, investigates this place as a contact zone of complex global economic, social, power-political, and technological processes and questions this from a spiritual perspective.
A Taiwanese boss and Burmese laborers seek ways of getting rich by shrimp farming. However a life gone on the process. It's all about trust, gender power, and culture conflicts.
With 20 years of experience in shrimp farming in Taiwan, Du came to Myanmar alone. Even though he saw only endless wilderness before him, he believed that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” nothing is impossible on this earth. He did not expect that what followed were white powders and guns.
A Burmese-Chinese girl, Sue, who also dreamt of shrimp farming, decided to settle down in the shrimp farm her father had started to develop 20 years ago, after the marriage to her Burmese husband, Jojo. She was determined to carry out the unfulfilled ambition of her father. Struggling to confront the false accusation, Du encountered Sue by chance. Together, they decided to farm and rear shrimps in the wilderness and build their “Diamond Marine World.”
It took five years to shoot and produce this film, recording the turns of humanity and the conflicts falling one after the other like the rain in Myanmar.
A construction site in the Central African Republic, two career dreams: The double portrait of a native day labourer and a Chinese construction manager becomes a parable of globalisation.
Luan, a Chinese immigrant, is in Bangui, Central African Republic, facing his greatest professional challenge to date: he must oversee the construction of a bank headquarters that is expected to be inaugurated soon by the President of the nation himself. At the opposite end of the same labour chain, Thomas, a local, must dive into the river to get the sand that Luan needs for his building. Both share the same goal: to progress in their careers and give their families a better life. Meanwhile, the erratic and difficult lives of their families manifest themselves at a distance in various ways. Luan receives phone calls from his wife who, living thousands of kilometres away, is feeling abandoned and attempts to commit suicide; while Thomas' wife and girlfriend have both abandoned him, leaving him in charge of all his children. Eat Bitter fluidly and honestly articulates the daily life of both men, revealing the traces of the presence of the large Chinese community in the region, as well as the scars of a country devastated by the experience of a long civil war and poverty for which no one seems to have any answers.
A storm of queer norm-busting archive images. The creative arrangement is as sensual as the material, including purple colour explosions and a jazz music leitmotif.
Between birth and death, is the power to love and live. Political rules, religious orders, social norms and cultural taboos control who we love and how we love. The right to love is controlled and regulated by how we live. But the erotic has the power to emancipate. With spoken word and archive sources, love is unboxed from categories in queer expression and a celebration of eros as the power to change our attitudes to life and to allow others to live their lives without judgment or prejudice.
The competition between the two brothers begins at the seaside. As brothers, they know each other best and become each other's most prominent opponents. The younger brother admires his older brother's natural talents. However, the older brother secretly has a “fatal” weakness. In the three rounds of the competition, lasting two minutes each, they express their secrets to each other.
A woman lives alone with her cat in the city. The small miracles of life can be found in all kinds of everyday moments, and loneliness turns into a happy melody.
In search of memories of her childhood, Asmae El Moudir recreates her Casablanca neighbourhood as an elaborate miniature and in the process comes across a trauma of Moroccan history.
Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir wants to know why she only has one photograph from her childhood, and why the girl in the picture isn't even her. When her family refuses to answer her questions about the past, she hits on another solution: on a handmade replica recreating the Casablanca neighbourhood where she grew up, El Moudir begins to interrogate the tales her mother, father and grandmother tell about their home and their country. Slowly, she starts to unravel the layers of deception and intentional forgetting that have shaped her life. The truth is hard to face, but in this sometimes surreal nonfiction film, El Moudir begins to draw what's real to the surface.
Will the Skateboarding God descend upon a twelve-year-old child? If possible, please let the wind carry its message. Yang has prayed countless times in his heart, but reality doesn't quite match his imagination. “No risk, no reward”. Perhaps a life of skateboarding is destined to be an adventurous journey.
Little Stone, the boy from the mountain, left his grandmother - they depended on each other for life. In his lonely waiting, he counted the days that passed by. Unfortunately, there was no time for them to say goodbye.
Will time really wash everything away? Little Stone believes that time will eventually make them meet again.
The main character of the film is Tahrir Square in Baghdad, Iraq and the story is told through the eyes of ten characters during the October Revolution in 2019.
Tuk Tuk Eye is a film that documents the stories of protestors from different backgrounds and ages, that summarise the popular movement against corruption known as the October Revolution. The revolutionary journey starts in Tahrir Square, a place in Baghdad that stands for the demand for freedom and the defeat of injustice. The main character of the film is Tahrir Square and from there, ten short stories are revealed. Stories that complement each other, forming one. All inspired by the history of the monument on the Square. The focus remains on the background of the people and how they began revolting against pain and corruption. The October Revolution that took place in Iraq in 2019 is our starting point. The film aims to portray the motivations and purposes of the demonstrators and the events that are neglected by mass media.
DJ Vika is 84 and a star of Warsaw’s nightclubs. She refuses to grow old and sit at home. Instead, she wants to celebrate life, enjoy herself and music.
84-year-old Vika is a star of the Warsaw clubbing scene. A charismatic DJ and a colourful bird she surrounds herself with young people, repeating that age is just a number. But when her health suddenly begins to deteriorate, Vika can no longer deny the passing of time. Will she find meaning in sharing the joy of life with other seniors by encouraging them to live their lives to the fullest?
Vika! is a bittersweet portrait of a woman who intends to celebrate life to the very end, a true inspiration for both the silver generation and our future selves.
Heydi returns to the old hunting grounds with her nephew to retrace the path and inspect the new hunting trails. She leads Ibaw step by step into her hunting world.
This film is about Heydi Mijung, the only female hunter in the Truku tribe, who follows the ancestral tradition of Gaya, practices the traditional hunting skills of the Truku, and maintains the balance of the entire forest with her hunting methods. The Woman Carrying the Prey expresses women's perseverance and strength by extension – “carrying” is not only about the physical weight but also about the continuation of the hunter's traditional hunting culture.
The relationship between human, ecology and animal interdependence is gradually built up through the daily life of a female hunter in the mountains.
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.