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 film is a touching and heartfelt exploration of a grandfather and grandson's journey to uncover the truth about their past as refugees from Bessarabia.
77 Years Back follows the grandson, Dan, as he films his grandpa, Victor, recounting memories and seeking information about his birth and his relatives in Moldova. On their journey, they have emotional encounters with the people of Moldova and navigate bureaucratic challenges in their search for answers. Along the way, the bond between Dan and his grandpa grows stronger, and the film captures the significance of listening to and caring for our elders.
We follow as the grandfather comes back home to Romania to his daily life, near his loving wife. He takes his time to think more deeply about what he found in Moldova, accepts his past and bonds even more with his big family.
Far from the sea, a theater engineer builds a fully functional steampunk submarine with his friends. While escaping social reality, he questions the meaningfulness of our actions.
Theatre engineer Elias builds a fully functional steampunk submarine with his friends. While Nico rescues people from the waves of the Mediterranean, the 70-year-old artist Jim advises: “Don't do it. Don't fix cars. Rather, build something you really want to.” Elias asks himself: Is there a decision to be made between self-realisation and selfless action? On what does responsibility towards individuals or a larger society depend?
About Water and Dreams is a philosophical journey that questions the meaningfulness of our actions and dares to dream publicly in our dreamless society.
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.
A journey through places and times that shaped the life of Turkish writer and human rights activist Aslı Erdoğan. She writes against silence, especially in exile.
Shattered photos, excerpts from newspapers and pieces of words become voices that spread through the alleys of a city until they reach the house of a writer, who’s writing a page. These fragmented voices tell the story of Aslı Erdogan, a Turkish author forced to live in exile in Europe after being imprisoned for her political ideas.
The voices narrate her life, from her childhood in Istanbul and her feminist commitment to the years as a researcher in Switzerland, the fugue to Brazil before returning to Istanbul, the heart of her lost country. Footage of travel and migration in search of work, images from physics laboratories, videos of protests against the authorities in Istanbul: these materials get mixed in a visual and sound flow becoming the essence of our collective memory, shared by every discriminated person, among them Aslı Erdogan during her exile. Meanwhile, the process of writing has erupted: the page contains words.
The most profound memories are sometimes the most deceptive. That’s what Brett Allen Smith finds out as he keeps replaying the funeral of the family dogs. A baffling confrontation.
Recasting his newborn son and dog as himself and his childhood pets, a filmmaker confronts his own false memories through a collage of film, digital and video game footage.
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?
In front of a psychiatric clinic a patient enjoys his tenth coffee in the morning. Two street musicians take a break. Three boule players are waiting for their next turn. And a couple of teenagers celebrate the eve of the summer of their lives.
Ten chance encounters on Berlin benches, a brief pause in the everyday life of a restless city. What moves the lingerers? Where do they come from and where are they going? A homage to public seating and the people who use it.
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.
Frieda, Viola and Jilou are three of the most successful women in the male-dominated breakdance world. At different points in their careers, each of them faces serious challenges.
Who says that women can't break dance? Frieda, Viola and Jilou are three of the most successful women in the male-dominated breaking world. The movie shows their tough training methods, their dance performances at international battles and their personal backgrounds that drive them to fulfil their dreams. The three friends are at different points in their sports careers and thus face new challenges and decisions that will change their lives.
B-girl Jilou is at the height of her career and counts as one of the best in the world. With her extraordinary determination, she is currently winning one battle after the other, whereas Frieda is still grappling with an injury. As a B-girl ever since the emergence of break dancing, she has to come to terms with the fact that her advancing age means she can no longer rely on her body and has to find a life outside of her professional sports career. B-girl Viola is focused on becoming recognised as a dancer and combines breaking with modern dance. For her, every battle is equally a fight for her identity as an artist.
Dancing Heartbeats is an inspiring portrait of courage, endurance, the power of one's passion, and what it means to be a young woman who is fighting for acknowledgement and equal rights.
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 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.
A refugee camp built in Egypt in 1944 becomes the social model for Tito’s Yugoslavia. Archive material and contemporary witnesses tell a lived social-utopian origin story.
Frozen and starved people on boats in the Mediterranean Sea, fleeing from war. Scenes we are used to seeing in the news. But it's 1944, and refugees are travelling to Africa. Thirty thousand Dalmatians fled from the Nazis to live in tents in the Egyptian desert – making a utopian communist “model village”. This is a story about them.
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.
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.