What if from one day to the next, you’re no longer seen but instead, you're stared at? The leading characters in All You See have ended up in a new world where suddenly nothing seems to align. In their new lives in the Netherlands, they unintentionally provoke reactions on a daily basis. Even after many years, they still hear the same questions over and over again: Where are you from? Do you speak Dutch? Do you tan in the sun?
The Apocalyptic Is the Mother of All Christian Theology
Jim Finn
Though consumed with antisemitism and fascism, historically the Apostle Paul was a revolutionary. A psychedelic montage, a wild ride through 2000 years of rabid propaganda.
The Apocalyptic Is the Mother of All Christian Theology
The Apocalyptic Is the Mother of All Christian Theology
Jim Finn
Camera Lucida
Documentary Film
USA
2023
64 minutes
English
German premiere
Synopsis
A psychedelic portrait of the founding theorist of Christianity. The story of Paul the Apostle’s life, ideology and influence is told by piecing together 20th Century 16mm and cassette propaganda, board games, animation, reenactments, Roman Empire doom metal and covers of Catholic liturgical music. The gentle Paul themes with flute, acoustic guitar and mellotron contrast with the Demonic Roman Empire themes of electric guitar, drums and synth. Performance artist Linda Montano and filmmaker Usama Alshaibi portray Paul on his journeys. The film tries to capture the disturbing reaction Paul and his letters had in the early days of Christianity. The use of live-action, animation, found footage and original music was a way to recover his biography from the brains of 20th Century humans so that in some perhaps misguided Utopian impulse, we can build something new out of it for the future.
In heated, often hostile debates about homosexuality, trans and sex work, a young Armenian family tries to assert some kind of queer normality for themselves and others.
Carabina, a gay artist, transvestite, and ex-sex worker, is married to Hasmik, a heterosexual lawyer. They have just become parents and are facing a dilemma: Should they raise their child in Armenia, where 93% of the population is against homosexuality?
Sorbian life in Lusatia, today. Encounters with a population who are reclaiming their identity, language and culture out of the local museums into present-day Federal Germany.
Bei uns heißt sie Hanka / Pla nas gronje jej Hanka / Pola nas rěka wona Hanka
Grit Lemke
German Competition Documentary Film,
MDR Special Screening
Documentary Film
Germany
2023
92 minutes
German
World premiere
Synopsis
What makes us who we are? Origin, mother tongue, nationality? What if we lose them?
In search of her own roots, the director explores an indigenous people in Germany: the Sorbs, the smallest Slavic people. Their language and culture have either disappeared or are severely threatened by centuries of oppression and pressure to assimilate. But a new generation no longer wants to accept this: Anna, a law student, becomes a Sorbian Hanka and joins the family of Ignac, who is committed to Sorbian self-determination. Petra comes to terms with the trauma she suffered when her village, like many other Sorbian villages, had to make way for a lignite mine. The young artist Hella redefines being Sorbian as alternative, anti-fascist and feminist. Former hooligan Měto turned his life around after discovering his Sorbian roots. His grandfather, who was beaten up as a child for speaking Sorbian, is battling dementia. National Sorbian poet Jurij Koch reflects on survival against all odds. Ginter, whose parents had to provide an “Aryan Certificate” in the 1930s and raised him speaking German, wonders about his identity today in old age.
Metaphorical images of nature, poetic reflections of a first-person narrator and archaic but experimental Sorbian music interplay in the first-ever film about Sorbs.
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.
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.
Srećko, Mirza and Mejra are survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Their fates are revealed in the contrast between innocent everyday moments today and archive images from that period.
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.
Nahid is 15 years old and fleeing the Taliban with her family. Stranded in a Bosnian border town, she meets Ferida, an elderly bosnian woman struggling with her own war trauma.
August 2021. The world watches as the Taliban come back to power in Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people flee. Many of them end up trapped in the non-EU state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Like Nahid, a 15-year-old girl who is stranded in this nowhere place after a nerve-wracking flight from Herat. The voice messages from home increasingly sound like a distant echo. But there is no time for nostalgia in this daily life between illegality and pushbacks. There is just one goal: get her family away from this ramshackle camp. Luckily, there are people like Ferida and the shady but good-hearted coffee shop owner Elvir in town.
Ferida lives right at the border and as she watches people return humiliated from their attempts to cross the border, memories of her own past slowly come back to her.
While Ferida loses herself in reminiscence, Nahid discovers that the cycle of war and loss connects her to the place more than she expected.
Vasyl is a former ski jumper who now works as a coach at the ski jumping school for children in the Carpathians. He is a loner, and sports is his whole life. Zhenya is Vasyl's favourite trainee. In the last 5 years, he spends a lot of energy making her a champion. With her success, his dreams can come true. When the girl grows up, she decides to try in another area of life not connected to sports. Vasyl's work seems to no longer make sense. But he finds the strength to start all over again.
Danielle's raw-filmed diary and Moe's vibrant queer memory of living with a sexually transmitted infection, ignite a collaborative exploration of bodies, intimacy, and shame.
A Beirut rooftop conversation about living with sexually transmitted infections opens into a cinematic dialogue, as Danielle and Moe draw raw and vibrant images from their personal experiences. Danielle filmed herself in sober and melancholic images to grasp what is going on, while Moe plays with memories and sensations of a queer body “invaded” by a virus.
While they engage with five actresses and actors to embody the testimonies of individuals who also lived with STIs, “forbidden” stories begin to exist and enter a collaborative exploration of intimacy, bodies, stigma and shame.
Emile Zuckerkandl talks about his grandmother's salon, Hitler's arrival, and his escape to Algeria. A network of personal memories interwoven with world history.
Emile Zuckerkandl jotted down in his diary, “I write it down, so that I can remember it later.” Eighty years later, his memories are vivid and clear when he talks about his grandmother's salon, Hitler's arrival after the “Anschluss,” and his escape to Algeria. Rainer Frimmel stays very close to his charismatic protagonist in recording a network of personal memories interwoven with world history.
When she was 16, Agata was told that she would most likely bleed to death within 2 years. On that day, she was born anew. 20 years and over 30 face surgeries later, she lives in London and works as an artist who turned her struggle with a lethal disease into art. Her disease and the pain caused by it continue to accompany her, but more and more promising treatment options are being developed. Nevertheless, the most important form of therapy is her art. Her face becomes even more deformed with recurring angiomas, which is the major theme explored by the protagonist in her art.
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.