One manifestation of Ivan’s burden is strapped around his leg: an electronic anklet that monitors his location. The critical moments come at night when he ought to be with his family, is under a curfew, but hears voices whispering ideas that seem realisable only outside the house – and therefore outside the law. Ivan is a tiger behind bars whose stride becomes more restless every day. He’s also plagued by an imaginary scenario: he knows men who got rid of the beeping devices and are now free. And he knows others whose attempts to free themselves failed. The consequence: back to prison. Ivan balances between Scylla and Charybdis – an excitement that has long become resentment and calls for a solution.

Carolin Weidner

---

Nominated for Young Eyes Film Award

“Live the Old Times”, Luiza’s T-shirt reads in big letters. At first the sheltered 24-year-old girl with the blue-green strands of hair leafs through an album of photos from her childhood. But soon only the presence with her boy-friend counts, and when it’s the right time for the first sex. The family’s fears, the desire for autonomy, a budding sexuality and otherworldliness are packed into an ambivalent scenario.

Esther Buss

Somewhere in the Central Brazilian savannah Paulistas is scraping by. The rural region has lost its youth, the houses are cracked, but it has preserved its dignity. Meadow, river, sparsely furnished interiors – like the landscape and the environments the sounds and images of this film expand gently, but with impressive power. Quiet, superbly framed shots and perfectly timed sounds portraying farm work and daily routines say what they have to say without becoming garrulous. In the midst of desertion they reveal a warmth kept alive by the inhabitants.

“Paulistas” may sing their praise but it doesn’t glorify anything. The televised philanthropic assurances of the operators of the nearby dam crumble like the damaged houses made uninhabitable because people meddled with nature. And then it’s July and the young people return briefly for the holidays. The mobile phone into which love messages are typed shines like a star in the nocturnal cornfield, the motorcycle leaves a curved line of dust running along the whole width of the summer meadows. A motif of hard to describe sounds somewhere between machine metal and brass instruments is heard. Paulistas is marked by circumstances, but its soul still colours everything.

André Eckardt

“I started drawing comic books at a time when I was depressed. Many people told me that it helped them a lot, helped them discover themselves.” Tailor from Rio de Janeiro is a transsexual. In his animated visual worlds he recounts his own problems and experiences and gives words and images to Miro, Tertuliana and Bernardo, too. A wild, playful, funny, serious, poetic mixture of comic, documentary and experience, by and about transgender persons.

Frederik Lang