It’s well-established that the majority of sexualised violence doesn’t take place in the public sphere but in the seemingly protected realm of family, partnership and friends. This is also true of a young woman who was raped by a good friend on a private date. Her report was the occasion and basis of this film which interprets it first performatively, then analytically by women and men playing various roles.

In addition to the act itself, it addresses its consequences and how to deal with feelings of guilt, shame, paralysis and repression – but soon the performers’ own experiences as victims of perpetrators, too. In its directness and detail, speaking out is sometimes agonising for all participants. But talking and listening are the only chance to get hold of the phantoms and demons of the past and thus heal the wounds. Alexe Poukine’s differentiated and multi-faceted approach to an issue usually discussed in sensationalist terms offers us, the audience, a chance to dispassionately re-adjust our perspective on the act of rape.

Silvia Hallensleben

Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fusako –leader of a small extreme left-wing group, the Japanese Red Army– has been hiding in Beirut for nigh on 30 years. May, her daughter, only discovered Japan at the age of 27. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical, activist filmmaker, committed to the armed struggle. Amongst other things, he is also the instigator of a ‘theory of landscape’ – fukeiron: through filming landscapes Adachi seeks to reveal the patterns of oppression. Anabasis? This, ever since Xenophon, has been the name given to difficult or even circuitous homeward journeys. It is this complex, dark story, always full of tension that Eric Baudelaire has chosen to evoke using the documentary format. Shot in Super 8, and in the manner of fukeiron, contemporary views of Tokyo and Beirut are blended in with archive footage, TV clips and excerpts from films to spread out the backdrop for May and Adachi’s voices and memories. They speak of everyday life, of being a little girl in hiding, of exile, politics and cinema and the fascinating relationships between them.
– Jean-Pierre Rehm (FID Marseille 2011)

Ala’a Hassan, Samer, Tasneem and Waed are third-generation Palestinian refugees. They are part of “Les Chebabs”, a group they formed in their teenage years. In this spirited, staunchly humanistic film we follow these youths, living in the 50-year-old camp of Yarmouk in Syria, where rooms are left to leak and living quarters are stacked shoddily one upon the other.
With his observant camera in tow, Axel Salvatori-Sinz films these young people haunted by doubts about their future life choices, caught between loyalty to their friends and a desire to take flight, sometimes leaving the others far behind. Now on the eve of adulthood, they have a genuine thirst for life and for the absolute, while being all confronted to intricate situations.
Between the need for freedom and sticking to the group, between longing for revolt and the prospect of a well-ordered life, choices are hard to make – even more so if you’re a Palestinian refugee in the camp of Yarmouk in Syria.