This powerful film about the Syrian revolution features a variety of borderline experiences. For example the exiled journalist who is collecting material for an oppositional television network at the Turkish-Syrian border. He meets compatriots from all population groups – deserted soldiers, Internet fighters, refugees. The camera in these live sound passages is almost frozen, the shadows on the faces sharply delineated: stories of the beginning of the revolution, of dead friends and siblings. Then there are the disturbing YouTube films produced by the hundreds every day – a system running amuck. Soldiers in heavy boots jumping on the heads of tied-up protesters. Soldiers shooting a prisoner. Soldiers taking whole cities hostage. Orders to snipers: shoot everyone filming with a mobile phone! A young man who a moment ago was recording is bleeding to death on the backseat of a taxi. His brother continues. Upload to the Web. It’s mind-boggling when the agents of the system film each other at work. On camera torture. Executions. And beatings, beatings, beatings. There are no more restraints here. Finally the panic in a young girl’s voice as she watches soldiers storming her parents’ house. And we, who are watching all this? We allow the statesmen and special envoys and commissioners to play their game of oil, military bases and geopolitics. We have become so tired of all the images flooding us, and so weak. Still – there is no alternative to publishing this horror. The revolt is circling on the web. The fever is rising.
– Matthias Heeder

When the flood of refugees began to cross the Mediterranean, the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa became a projection screen for paranoid xenophobes and a symbol of an inhumane asylum policy. In the winter of 2014, theatre artist and filmmaker Jakob Brossmann travelled to the island to find out what life there is really like. The tourists and media are gone and the inhabitants’ real problems come to the fore: the old ferry, essential for their survival, burnt down and was replaced by an even older one. That’s why the fishermen go on strike. A group of refugees who have been stuck on the island for months want to cross to the mainland. They are on strike in front of the church. Because there’s no ferry, waste is piling up and food is running out. In the midst of this tense situation two women, the mayor and a dedicated lawyer, are fighting for humane solutions out of deep personal conviction. Brossmann’s observations are unobtrusive and precise. He confidently guides us through the events of this crisis while introducing places and people that are linked to the immigrants’ fate. What’s remarkable is that the inhabitants and refugees refuse to be instrumentalised against each other. Both groups are victims of the same cynical policies. Showing this clearly is the great strength of the film. Matthias Heeder

On 31 May 2008, a quiet and sunny Sunday, the staff of a heavy metal assembly plant in Milan-Lambrate met for a picnic. They had hardly unwrapped their sandwiches when a short message from the then current owner, who had bought the plant only in 2006, reached them: “We have decided to cease all activity as of 31 May 2008.”
Luca Bellino’s and Silvia Luzi’s film sheds light on the 50 workers’ long struggle, which started with the occupation of the facility on the same day, led to continued production under a worker’s management and, after the factory was cleared by the police for the first time, resulted in an open-ended strike in front of the factory gates to prevent the secret removal of the machinery. Finally, on 2 August 2009, a large number of police attacked the strikers in a civil war-like operation, upon which five of them seized an industrial crane on the grounds and occupied it for several weeks. The activists’ determination triggered a broad wave of international support and attracted a lot of media attention, which finally contributed to a long-term resolution of this conflict. Bellino and Luzi manage to create a complex cinematic investigation of an intense, real-life example of anarcho-syndicalist theory and practice in Italy, supremely balanced between hot agitation and cold analysis.

Ralph Eue