The scene: a small wine-growing region to the east of Toulouse. The time: mid-September. The cast: a company of about 15 women and men – “short service volunteers” for the few weeks of the wine harvest, armed with shears and buckets. The group has fanned out among the vines of a medium-sized grower in the Gaillac region. The statistics list them as harvest hands; the sociological term for them is “precariously employed”. The protagonists themselves, however, would qualify this imputation. Accepting it would mean handing over a big part of their pride. This attitude may be called unrealistic, but that’s precisely what director Paul Lacoste seems to be interested in: what people do and what they literally embody because of it rather than the opinions they express. The film still demonstrates almost casually how massively the insecurity of such an existence is inscribed into the protagonists’ behaviour. They all feel constrained by the unvoiced pressures of their situation. They may have more or less talent in suppressing such emotional and mental insights – but their objective effects can hardly be denied.

Ralph Eue

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Healthy Workplaces Film Award 2014

A human-shaped deer tries to steal a man's identity by taking his head off. In the end the woman has to decide which of them is the real man.

Nothing calms the global middle classes’ conscience like the establishment of nature reserves, preferably in countries that we can confidently bully around in all other respects. Senegal, for example, whose fishing grounds are being cleared out by the EU. Making the “Delta du Saloum” national park at Senegal’s Atlantic coast a World Cultural Heritage site is cheap, good PR and brings ecotourists. The only drawback is that there are people living in the area, some of them for generations, who have found their own way of co-existing with nature and have good reason to doubt that the tourism can be sustainable.
“Jiko, a Wish” portrays this conflict between international agencies, as represented by the park management and its rangers, and the inhabitants of the village of Bakadadji. These people have a very simple wish: a fence, please, so they can protect their fields from marauding warthogs which they are forbidden to hunt under threat of punishment. Because of the ecology – at least as far as those involved understand it. But tens of millions of Euros and US dollars are disappearing down the drip filters of the national administration, which is why, alas, there is no money left for a fence. Let the peasants dance for the ecotourists instead, and then they don’t need their fields any more. What to do? The film does not answer this question. It only holds a mirror up to us.
Matthias Heeder

A long-distance lorry driver is delivering a mysterious crate to a zoo. But there is something about his cargo that doesn’t quite add up …

Where is Walter? No one seems to miss him, but his place on the bus, in the pub and at home is empty. Why is nobody interested in his disappearance?