The director’s great-grandfather emigrated from Sicily to Tripoli in the 1930s, in the midst of the colonial war waged by Italy against Libya, and decided to stay. Martina Melilli paints the picture of a distant city from conversations with her grandfather in Padua, photos, street sketches improvised coram publico, Polaroid pictures and memories. Since the filmmaker does not get a visa for Libya she asks young Mahmoud to be her eye in Tripoli. From the chats between the two arises a complex image of the chequered and sometimes violent relations between Italy and Libya, but also a new view of their lives. The search for the right door, the balcony that fits her grandparents’ memories, the empty plots where cinemas used to do business in Tripoli, are set against the present: stagnation in Libya, death in the Mediterranean, communication via Internet: “I want to get as close as I can,” a superimposed handwritten note claims. The closeness is achieved: on circuitous paths, images, writings, communicated and authentic in this communicatedness.

Fabian Tietke

Dawn in Naples, neon lamps open blinking eyes in an office, their light in the high cream-coloured old rooms waking up the registries and piles of cardboard files from which peep isolated form sheets and that indicate lengthy proceedings. The quiet yields to growing murmurs and the first sounds of discontent: a queue jumper on one of the two weekly opening days of the helpdesk for social tenants. The day is gathering momentum. The neatly dressed Signora – one of a conspicuous number of widows – and the nonchalant counsellor play their roles between snappishness and shared smiles with passion: “You don’t let us speak.” – “If I have to listen to the crap people talk, it’s better that I speak.” And the hand casually puts another sheet of paper in its proper place.

Four desks in a room whose door is open to a line of waiting people in the corridor – Silvia Bellotti’s film discretely skirts the conversations, attentively squeezes into its position on this narrow and unique stage of life. This is where the desperate, demanding, and understanding negotiate existential housing needs with the counsellors. The employees and psychologists of daily life work at the frontlines of emotion in this bustle, trying to tame the multicoloured beast of bureaucracy and find loopholes in the countless regulations for their customers.

André Eckardt

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Honorable Mention Healthy Workplaces Film Award

Pierino is a cheerful pensioner, single and a cinephile. His structured daily life follows a never-changing weekly rhythm. Shopping on Mondays and Fridays are fixed points, as are regular visits to his mother’s grave or the hairdresser – unless the weather doesn’t cooperate.

Luca Ferri follows the well-organised pensioner over one calendar year, starting in January. Shooting is fitted into his schedule, which means their meetings take place every Thursday at 10.30 a.m. on the dot and always begin with a review of the week. Pierino doesn’t mind the camera, because he likes to comment on what he experiences. He turns out to be a fellow with a detailed memory and a broad general knowledge. The protagonist’s meticulousness is not just reflected in the punctuality and reliability of the shooting dates arranged by the filmmaker, but also in the visual tools he employs. The patina of the flat in which nothing has changed for years finds a congenial echo in the 1970s music and in the materiality: shot on VHS, the film is a tribute to the analogue age which is manifest in the images as well as in Pierino’s countless film notebooks and his collection of video tapes. The warm hearted and offbeat chronicle of an unassuming life.

Annina Wettstein

The photos from the time when Fiorella and Bruno married bear the marks of a lost epoch. The bride – white dress, lace veil – looks slightly upward, like a picture of the Virgin Mary. The groom – black hair, black suit – looks straight into the lens, piercing and dark. She can’t say whether she ever loved him, Fiorella, who has just put the heavy, encyclopaedia-sized wedding album on her lap, says. 40 years lie between those photos and the presence of this film – 40 years of losing herself, as Fiorella once confesses in tears.

Valentina Primavera, the couple’s youngest daughter, returns to her parental home with a camera to expose a decade-long history of fights, insults and domestic violence. And she accompanies her mother’s attempt to finally and definitely break up with her husband after 40 years of marriage. The camera is a merciless device. Facing up to its relentlessness, that’s where the physical strength and effort of this film lie.

Lukas Stern

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Nominated for the Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize