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?
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.
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.
Old Super 8 films show domestic happiness, the West German economic miracle, an idyllic home, grandmother Rose as a young woman at the centre. They do not show the violence in Rose’s marriage. Or do they?
Home Sweet Home is a film about the invisibility of domestic violence. It is the story of the director's grandmother, Rose, who, for over 20 years, was married to a man who repeatedly abused her until she finally left him. Based on Super8 family archive, the director questions Rose, who continually dismantles the image of postwar West German family happiness. The film focuses on the discrepancy between appearance and remembered reality.
As domestic violence is usually not visible, the private abyss is skilfully hidden in public.
Driven by three larger-than-life heroines, Homelessly in Love challenges conceptions of motherhood, womanhood and trauma on the margins of contemporary American society. Alyssa, Michelle, Lorraine and Cynthia, a homeless singer-songwriter whose voice envelops the film, have all suffered from institutional, intimate or domestic abuse. Over the course of four years, they overcome their past and harness the filmmaking process to elaborate their own star-making narratives.
14-year-old Kiki is sentenced to juvenile prison for violence and drug offences. His sister convinces the authorities to give him one last chance: a therapeutic trip to the desert.
After being kicked out of every available youth-at-risk framework, and after facing criminal charges for drug trafficking and violence, Kiki is about to enter a youth prison by court order. Gal, his sister, manages to convince the authorities to give Kiki one last chance. Gal is a caregiver for youth-at-risk in a framework that takes youth on experiential, therapeutic field trips through the desert. Gal and her co-workers take Kiki on a field trip to the desert. She is determined to succeed where everyone else has failed. Will the journey enable Kiki to grow and to take responsibility for his own fate?
A sensitive examination of an abuse scandal in an evangelical children’s home in Baden-Württemberg. Victims’ testimonies are confronted with the shameful relativisations of the church.
The pastor is encouraging forgiveness, many people in the parish feel that it's time to put the matter to rest – and the former child victims are fighting for recognition and dignity…
Korntal, a little town in the south of Germany, is the scene of the greatest abuse scandal ever to rock the Protestant Church in Germany. An estimated 150 former children from homes run by the Pietist Brotherhood have broken their silence: they are revealing the physical and mental horrors to which they were exposed. Many of them were victims of sexualised violence there at an early age. The 9,000-person town and its parish have responded to the accusations with disbelief and denial. They cannot imagine that this could have happened in their God-fearing town. However, pressure is mounting on the Protestant Brotherhood – which still runs children's homes – and an inquiry is initiated. There is much contention about compensation and how to proceed with the inquiry. Many victims are being re-traumatised by their testimonies being called into question and are describing the inquiry as further abuse. The film gives 6 protagonists the chance to tell their stories and to put right what they feel the inquiry report fails to disclose. A sensitive, profound treatment of a highly topical subject.
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda has traumatised generations. The children of the time lack memories, their parents are struggling to speak about it to this day. In this film they break the silence.
They were children at the time of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994. They are now in their thirties and struggling with childhood memories of desolation and violence. To carry the weight of the past and think of a future, we must be able to talk freely. Kumva is about the need to build one's own memory in order to give flesh to the dead and to build a bridge between the past and the present.
The director, a stateless Filipino, returns to his native country. For more than twenty years, he lived without papers in the USA and feels trapped in a world full of borders.
A poetic essay film through the lens of an undocumented immigrant becoming disillusioned by their future in the United States and deciding to return to an estranged homeland. Nowhere Near tracks down the origin of a family curse backtracking through the post 9/11 era, the US occupation of the Philippines and the spiritual conquest of the Spanish empire. The film is a years-long diary towards understanding the causes of migration to the United States, though ultimately this odyssey deviates far from the expected course.
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.
Diabetes: Matthew Lancit lives in constant fear of the complications of his disease, so he simply anticipates the body horror himself. The result is equally funny and disturbing.
What started as a nostalgic film diary about his diabetes has been gradually contaminated by Matthew's anticipation of possible futures. Introducing monstrous elements into his family home movies, he re-appropriates tropes from the body horror films of his youth to create an image of the invisible disease.
Rosl’s Suitcase is the story of my Jewish grandmother, who left Vienna for New York with my father in 1939 and of my own fact-finding quest about truth and what I had been told.
Rosl’s Suitcase is the story of my Viennese and Jewish grandmother, who emigrated to New York with my teenage father in 1939. The contents of the suitcase reveal discrepancies in what I had been told. With this discovery, I begin my quest to find out what really happened and what had been hidden.
Rosl’s Suitcase interweaves current-day Vienna with home movies and recordings by three generations of women: great aunt Ada's 1947 movies after her arrival in the U.S.; Aunt Helen's audio descriptions of her youth in Vienna and immigration to New York; my own 1960's Northern California coming-of-age 8mm films and light show movies.
French-American singer of Viennese origin, Adah Dylan Jungk, reads/performs Rosl's letters against backdrops and front projections of the Vienna High Court, the University courtyard and wartime films of the city. We follow Adah to “locations of memory”, crosscutting between places today and the same places shown in historical film archives. The city's landmarks are recharged through the prism of the pre-and post-war Vienna of my grandmother, father and my own lens.
Snajka is a participative-observational documentary about a just-married Croatian-Roma couple, Tea and Mirsad, their daughter Frida, and their attempt at a life together, suspended between expectations from families and communities from culturally irreconcilable backgrounds that do not accept diversity.
Joan Tomàs Monfort, Carlos Pérez-Reche, Juanjo Sáez
Even Phil Collins cannot stop the development of a deep friendship between Juanjo and Miquel. The two teenage boys have bonded forever over Heavy Metal.
Joan Tomàs Monfort, Carlos Pérez-Reche, Juanjo Sáez
International Competition Animated Film
Animated Film
Spain
2023
80 minutes
Catalan
German premiere
Trailer
Synopsis
Juanjo is an asthmatic boy who has lived protected by his family to the point of drowning him. Miquel grows up in a family with an absent father. His mother tries to get on by herself, but she does not always succeed.
Tender Metalheads is a film about the relationship between Juanjo and Miquel, two teenage boys from Barcelona in 1991 who will take refuge from the grey world they live in in their friendship and heavy music.
Adam’s body becomes a mirror of his soul, making every grievance visible to everyone through strange deformations. A brilliant insight into the mind of a 15-year-old boy.
Adam is a 15-year-old teenager who has the strange peculiarity of having a body that changes, based on the mockery and negative comments he receives from those around him. The accumulation of its physical changes, only adds a layer of complexity to those already present in his life. The summer when Ange, his grandmother, dies, he has to work to develop his autonomy. He maintains the huge house of the family of Kevin Brousseau, a haughty teenager who left on summer vacation. He also has to maintain Mr. Bibeau's lawn, but he can no longer care for himself, because of his heart operation. In addition to his strange body which deforms without end, Adam must learn to juggle summer jobs, his friendship with Timothée, the desire that he feels towards Jeanne, the intimidation he suffers from Glazer's gang, his natural clumsiness, the family complications with his sister Karine, self-discovery and several other facets of teenage life that can be as difficult as they can be beautiful.
Jiri, a Czech physicist and a visionary handyman, has an idea of how to save the planet. But no one will listen to him. His daughter, Marta, a musician and mother of two, is annoyed at this. She takes her camera and goes “out into the world” with her dad. She wants to see if the world could work just as Jiri had envisioned it. Humour is brought to the film as they showcase their combined and inventive strategies on how they should present their idea and to whom. They meet with ecologists, activists, experts, and politicians to get to the World Climate Summit as they attempt to infiltrate public structures and expose the characters behind the powers that decide who can enter where and with what issues. Although those who were addressed agree that Jiri's vision of the world would be the most ideal, after four years of wandering around with his idea of a Uniform Global Carbon Tax and Dividend for all, they find themselves in an anti-everyone situation. Had they come up with the idea much too late? Or too soon?
A strong personal story: Jiri's humour and charisma, Marta's original songs, raw film material, and an inspiring idea to save the planet will make for an unmissable film with the potential for planetary social impact.
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.