On the balcony Nele is really close to the clouds, though it would be much nicer to take a balloon ride and be even closer. The plan isn’t easy to realise, as Nele’s mother has mobility problems. They need help with every activity and their daily life is co-organised by many other people. They are doing fine together, but a trip in a hot air balloon would be something else …
After the graduation ceremony, Ba, a young musician, leaves the hall with his tuba over the shoulder. At the door he meets his teacher who makes him promise something: report back as soon as he has found a job. As nobody picks him up at the student residence, Ba makes his own way through the barren rural area. Home at last, he discovers that his father has found a new wife who now lives with him. There is no more room for Ba. He leaves his former home and sets out to look for a job. Various futile attempts to find employment follow, first as a musician, then unrelated to his training. All efforts fail in the face of the absurd requirements of potential employers. Ba would first have to buy an expensive suit and could expect to get wages only after an unpaid initial phase, as he was still a beginner. Ba can only fend off his teacher’s intrusive questions by inventing white lies.
This world, where there is not a shred of green landscape left, where the plaster crumbles from the walls, where everything is falling apart, has no use for the musician Ba. His daily expenses consume his last bit of money. Hopes of happiness and being able to earn his living fade away. Ba’s tuba falls silent.
In 2017, the “Reclaim the City” initiative occupied an empty hospital in the Woodstock district of Cape Town. Their symbolic protest against the housing shortage became a new home for hundreds of people: the “Cissie Gool House”. The work conveys intimate insights into an unusual housing project that combats criminalisation by politics and the public.
In September 1968, Fidel Castro comments on the suppression of the Prague Spring in surprisingly critical terms. He opens his thunderous speech with the statement that it could endanger Cuba’s safety. Although Santiago Álvarez was the guest of honour at the Leipzig festival, this newsreel report was withdrawn from the programme. After long research it will be shown for the first time in Leipzig in this Retrospective.
How does an undocumented individual document themself? This is the question the Filipino filmmaker who grew up illegally in Los Angeles asks himself. His extended family live scattered across the USA and the Philippines. Now he embarks on a journey to his estranged native country, driven by the desire to overcome a curse that has profoundly disturbed the family history over generations. The colonial past is a heavy burden even today, even in the diaspora. Filipino itself, the official language with its countless loanwords from Spanish and English, is nothing but a linguistic by-product of the colonial era.
By re-locating Miko Revereza tries to come to terms with the experience of distance and loss of identity with a remarkably idiosyncratic and creative approach. His psychogeographical filmic journey is dense and meandering, the camera sometimes literally destabilised as if by the curse. By means of superimpositions and improvised music a melancholic but never accusing memoir is created that lingers in our minds. The filmmaker, who showed “The Still Side” at DOK Leipzig in 2021, lives in Mexico today.
