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

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Nominated for Young Eyes Film Award

A young dock worker on the border between Brazil and Uruguay does everything to keep on top of his family, his job and fishing.

Songs that tell stories of love, the last draught or the lack of money. There can be no doubt that the music of José Domingos de Morais, one of the great Brazilian accordion players, is folk music in the best sense. This film constitutes the three directors’ respectful bow to the artist, who died in 2013. All through his life he retained a deep bond to the culture of his home, the Sertão in the northeast of Brazil. That’s where the film starts, too. Not so much the portrait of a musician as a dreamy trip in time through an unknown Brazil whose diversity was the soil from which something as wonderful as Dominguinhos’ music could grow. The filmmakers use a variety of sources: archive material from the 1940s about the Sertão of the farm labourers and have-nots, television shows from the 1950s and 60s, interviews with musicians from various phases of his life, great concerts in the 2000s. In fact they work in a quarry of visual memories – not just their protagonist’s, but also their own and those of their country. This work of remembrance, associative and erratic, dominates the film’s tone. An image sequence edited to a melody, a rhythm to a story, the lyrics of a song to a short biographical note. It’s a bold narrative design and the music is simply enchanting.
Matthias Heeder

It’s best to learn about the workings (and snags) of democracy by practicing it. At a public high school in São Paulo, the elections for the student council are coming up. Various teams compete for the best ideas, the coolest campaign poster and the most votes. It’s vital not to be carried away by populist actions and to put personal interest aside. Just like in “big” politics, the candidates walk the line between honest commitment and superficial show effects in election debates. But the sudden appearance of the police at the school gates instantly makes it clear how important it is that the students are able to speak with one voice.

Luc-Carolin Ziemann

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Nominated for the Young Eyes Film Award

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

“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

Rogério Duarte (1939–2016) was a Brazilian graphic designer, typographer, musician and poet. He saw himself as a popular avant-garde artist, both the tribune of Brazilian underground in film, music and painting and a folk artist. As a contemporary and companion of Glauber Rocha, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso he helped found the Tropicalism movement in the 1960s, though he later turned heretic because he refused to forgive the movement’s commercial sell-out.

José Walter Lima’s film portrait is an admiring homage to a natural born independent who practiced his art out of a deep, almost cosmic-religious attitude to life and the world. At one point the director elicits this credo from his protagonist: “Art is not a profession. Art is an approach. It is a way for you to approach things.”

Ralph Eue

The opening sequence alone, which links the past and the present like a time tunnel, confirms Lucia Murat as one of the great storytellers of Brazilian cinema. In 1999 she shot a feature film in the Kadiweu reservation in Mato Grosso. 13 years later she returns to follow up on the lives of several protagonists who played small parts at the time. The contrast between the earlier images and those recorded recently reveals the Kadiweu’s problems: electrification brought television sets, then alcohol and the Protestant church. How can tradition, language and identity be preserved when the young people move to the cities? When the ministers object to the old traditions? When white cattle farmers settle illegally on the territory of the indigenous population? The film is an associative and narrative investigation into these issues, managing again and again to measure the distance that separates the Kadiweu from their past by small events and details – the Day of the Dead, the explanation of a name. They used to be a warrior people who fought on horseback. Today they wash their Japanese motorcycles in the river and negotiate land rights with lawyers. And still remain Kadiweu. This at least is the defiant statement of this amazing film’s final shot.

Matthias Heeder