When the Algerian War for Independence broke out in 1954, El Hadi, the protagonist of this cleverly constructed film about killing in times of war, had just turned 14. Six years later he was a Fidai, a fighter for the Algerian National Liberation Front FLN by whose orders he assassinated two people in Paris. El Hadi was a volunteer, his motive was simple: colonialism is intolerable. 50 years later director Damien Ounouri takes up his uncle El Hadi’s story again and together they embark on a journey into his past. Much has been buried, but the memories begin to return when they visit the sites of the Paris assassinations, where the director presses a gun into his uncle’s hand: I am your target. Show me how you shot him. El Hadi takes the pistol, which at first feels as alien as his memories, loads it and once more lives through the pivotal moments. Follow the victim, hold the pistol to his head, pull the trigger, run away. In this moment he is not aiming at his nephew but at the traitor who was sentenced to death by his superior officers. The situation may be contrived, El Hadi’s feelings aren’t. This filmic method works like a time machine which prepares the ground for the essential question: did you do the right thing then? Damien Ounouri respectfully follows up on this question posed to his uncle, embedded in the historic context of the anti-colonial movement of the 1960s and its countless victims. There is not even a hint of accusation or justification. Only the serious work of remembrance.

Matthias Heeder

The slow travelling shot along a stone wall through whose openings we get only occasional glimpses of the azure sea suggests an antique excavation. But appearances are deceptive, for this is 1948. The world is still under the shock of the World War when old frontlines re-emerge in Greece and a violent civil war begins. The Communist Party and the National Liberation Front, who just fought the Fascists in a gruelling partisan war, are banned and 80,000 Greeks are deported to barren islands like Makronisos. The crackling loudspeakers broadcast perfidious prohibitions and the mantra of the ten commandments which demand that people renounce communism and join the patriotic fight for “God, country and freedom”. Their goal: re-education. In reality this is psychological terror, combined with harassment and torture. But the walls of Makronisos aren’t silent. Their cracks used to hide poems by many poets like Yannis Ritsos, Tassos Livaditis and Mikis Theodorakis, who were interned here. Their yearning metaphors and powerful poetry are an attempt to stand up to the crude propaganda permanently broadcast throughout the tent camp. The Swiss director Oliver Zuchuat lets the texts clash and speak for themselves in a strict and consistent composition.

Cornelia Klauß

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Preis der Ökumenischen Jury 2012

There’s a rumour that the employment market is looking for bold individualists. Within limits, of course. The reality is: if it doesn’t fit, it’s made to fit – or rejected.
Lolita does not smile readily. Kevin doesn’t know how to sell himself. Hamid can’t abide bosses. They are twenty. They have no qualifications. They are looking for work and will be trained by a consulting agency over six months to learn the behaviour and forms of expression today’s employment market demands.
The consultants’ motives are more than honest: to enable young people to lead a decent life in the existing system. The kids see a new and strange world open up before their eyes. Both sides practice the best intentions, but now and then there are still glitches and sometimes there’s even the risk of a crash.
We’ve seen films about the admission process of acting schools (“Addicted to Acting”, et al.). But such situations, though exciting, are child’s play compared to the roles Lolita, Kevin and Hamid must learn to play if they want a part in the performance that is called “living (and surviving) in capitalism today”.

Ralph Eue

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Golden Dove in the International Competition Documentary Film 2014

One thing in life should be understood: that a child should be able to rely on his or her parents and grow up sheltered. That he or she should have a home. 13-year-old Spartacus and his 10-year-old sister Cassandra don’t even have a roof over their heads when the Roma family’s dwelling in the French town of Saint-Denis burns down. While the state helps them find refuge with the young trapeze artist Camille, their parents continue on a downward spiral. One side offers security, education and a childhood off the streets. On the other, a vicious circle of poverty, alcohol, self-pity and lethargy awaits them. Spartacus and Cassandra have to choose. It’s more than the old question of whether it’s possible to rise above difficult circumstances. How can children let go of their parents?
In shimmering, dreamlike images and an impressionist montage, Ioanis Nuguet shows the children poised between a family background they can’t shake off and a future that’s not easy to attain. A Caucasian chalk circle at whose end – as in Brecht’s play – something like hope is waiting. But also a bitter rap performed by Spartacus who makes it clear that this problem is not a personal one.

Grit Lemke

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Prize of the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique 2014

History is what happened in the past, they say. It can be portrayed as a longitudinal or latitudinal section. Some imagine it longish, others like a pile. Italian director Giovanni Donfrancesco sees history as a branching network of living veins that reach into the present. One of these veins links Carrara in the Apuan Alps to the American city of Barre. In the early 20th century, many impoverished Italian marble cutters and sculptors moved across the Atlantic to the granite quarries of Vermont where they hoped to find a better life. But you don’t get old when you work in a quarry. Within a short time many work migrants died of silicosis, also known as black lung. During the 1930s depression, writers interviewed the Barre stone cutters to integrate their oral testimony in the great project of the Roosevelt administration to draw a picture of America in the era of the Great Depression. Donfrancesco’s project has the same titanic dimensions: he combines narratives of Barre’s former inhabitants, spoken in the voices of its present residents, in a powerful succession of images and sounds that becomes a veritable fresco of multilayered individual and social realities – somewhere between deprivation and pride, personal tragedy and utopian hopes.
Ralph Eue