“I have no visual memory. I remember emotions.” In their remarkably artistically dense documentary Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo combine various statements of contemporary witnesses into the personal report of an Italian who entered Switzerland in 1965 as a migrant labourer. At the core of this representative of many economic refugees from Southern Europe of the time lies the feeling that she is an “outlaw working body”. She feels humiliated and controlled by procedures at the “border health check”, by massive underpay, dangerous working conditions, psychological pressure in the factory and openly expressed, wounding resentment against the foreigners.

The film is a collage of memories given a voice by a female narrator and kept deliberately vague on the visual level. Vague, but extremely effective and openly sceptical about the reality promised by visual evidence. Besides distorted details and negatives of a few surviving photos it’s the restful contemporary video recordings, for example of an abandoned building with all the traces of use, which offer a suitable poetic space to the narrator’s audio report and a voice performance.

André Eckardt

Revolution, mind, body, dream. These are the dimensions between which the prostitute and artist Grisélidis Réal moved all her life. Radical in her desires and debased by the wounds of the night she started to write about herself and her experiences in the 1960s, creating a body of work that speaks from the perspective and understanding of a woman who knows no fear and is ready to take any risk.

Grisélidis Réal transformed prostitution into art; director Marie-Eve de Grave transformed her life into a documentary of narrative grandeur. Diary entries, literary sketches, drawings, an address book, archive material, photos, interviews with important companions like the French writer Jean-Luc Hennig form the structure of a dramaturgy in which the different facets of her life are observed as if through a prism and summed up in one word: indomitable. At the same time the film is a journey into a past in which the social debate of sexuality had only just started and anything seemed possible. In 2009, four years after she died, Grisélidis was granted an honorary grave in Geneva, approved by the municipality – right next to the god-fearing reformer Johannes Calvin. Belated satisfaction for a revolutionary whore.

Matthias Heeder

Eden and Léandro are preemies. The world of their first days and weeks consists of glass cubes, tubes, monitors, bleeping machines, and their mother. She tries to give the children as much human contact and intimacy as possible in the sterile and cold hospital environment, all the time worrying whether her babies will make it and when she can at last take them home. Every gram decides whether the twins are diagnosed as strong enough or not. The parents balance between worries, hope, fear and joy. At the same time they are busy taking care of their three-year-old son Gabriel, who must not be neglected during his mother’s and siblings’ extended stay at the hospital. In calm and atmospheric images the film follows the family very closely without being intrusive.

Kim Busch

The audience panicked when they saw the first moving images of a train arriving at a station. Pure immersive cinema. In her ingenious kaleidoscope, Belgian artist Soetkin Verstegen employs analogue animation film techniques to arrange reminiscences to early cinema as a world that enthralled audiences through fear, thrills and delight. Her tribute goes back to the horror stories, to the circus and the showmen who played their part in the invention of a cinema that may soon be gone.

Cornelia Klauß