Mesa, Arizona, east of Phoenix and about 200 kilometres from the Mexican border, is said to be the most conservative city in the U.S. In 2001, Fernanda Pessoa was an exchange student in Mesa. She was 15 years old at the time. 15 years later she returned, in the weeks before the presidential election won by Donald Trump. Starting with numerous photos of that earlier time, Pessoa searches out people she met as a teenager. She finds a new approach to the United States, is more aware of everything she experiences; after all, she has grown up in the meantime. She conducts an inner dialogue with her former self as she rediscovers this country whose inhabitants are so proud of the fact that it’s theirs: America. The land of firearms and peculiar sports, the land that invented the shopping mall and the Western movie.

Pessoa quotes the philosopher Baudrillard, to whom America seemed like a fiction. With her film, she turns it into an experience of reality that ultimately makes her understand more about her own country: “Our cultural colonialism came to collect the bill.” “Arid Zone” (Arizona) opposes that colonialism with the gentle resistance of precise observation.

Bert Rebhandl

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Honorable Mention in the Next Masters Competition Long Documentary and Animated Film.

An animated documentary in five chapters by and about five female personalities. In the leading roles are their own physicality and a multi-perspective view of femininity. Because origin, environment and socialisation – with their occasionally perverted and compulsive side-effects – have a weight of their own. These autobiographical reflections gain depth of focus and impact through the choice of different haptic animation techniques. Vivid, haunting, beautiful.

Nadja Rademacher

A red light district in Belo Horizonte. The brothels are soliciting customers in all the colours of the night. The windows here are usually open, there is at most a guy in a plastic chair sitting in front of the door. The camera is admitted into one of the “running houses”. We see a long shot, almost like on a surveillance monitor, of men in a stark corridor scurrying from woman to woman. But suddenly we’re really close to some negotiations (“3 positions for 25 Real”) and at some point there’s an “impossible” cut: a reverse shot from the other side of the door, out of the woman’s room. We see sex workers tidying up, hanging around, and gossiping. They talk about violence, of pretend and real orgasms. But we also see sex scenes, played by actors, in which love for sale sometimes looks like a practiced, dreary assembly line exercise, sometimes almost like a comedy.

If this film systematically blurs the boundaries between the documentary and the fictional gaze, it has to do with the wish to leave the women their dignity and to avoid all-too-familiar images of misery. But it also has to do with the fact that sex can never be separated from fictions and projections.

Lukas Foerster

Eleven-year-old Kauan’s favourite pastimes are playing football and swimming in the sea. Two things spoil them for him: school and the sunrays that his skin can’t tolerate. Sunscreen and long-sleeved T-shirts are his daily companions. Luckily, he’s not the only one in the family who struggles with albinism. A film about sticking together and enjoying life.

Marie-Thérèse Antony