What happens after abuse? Six years after the crime, the director reconnects with her grandmother – not to talk about the act itself, which everyone is aware of. She finally wants to talk about how she felt afterwards: to break the silence, to name her shame and the grief at losing her whole Colombian family – and above all, to demand recognition of her suffering.
In her first film, Matilde-Luna Perotti deals with a personal trauma shared by many women in Latin America. The memory lurks everywhere: in old home videos, in text messages, in fabrics and clothes, in the scars on her own skin. These fragments come together to form a personal and at the same time collective portrait that makes a deeply buried trauma visible – and ultimately becomes an act of self-empowerment.
Winter on Canada’s Pacific coast – a difficult season for the animal keepers at the wildlife rescue centre in Comox, British Columbia: It is hunting season. Despite massive criticism by animal welfare organisations, hunters continue to use lead ammunition. This is particularly life-threatening for the BAEA – the official Alpha 4 code used in North and Central America for the bald eagle. Because these birds of prey feed on animal carcasses left behind. Their chances of surviving lead poisoning are slim. The treatment, too, is extremely stressful for the eagles. With great patience and loving care, the keepers try to save their charges from death.
In gentle images and with respect for the suffering birds, filmmaker Terra Long observes daily life at the station, contrasting it with shots of nature – only seemingly – untouched by humans. Ultimately, this refuge raises fundamental ethnic questions: How can precisely those humans care for wild animals while preserving their dignity and wildness? And: Is the elaborate treatment any use in view of the meagre chances of a change in hunting laws?
The painted lady butterfly travels 9,000 miles over several generations. Each generation flies to the next place without knowing the starting or end point of their route. The Hakka people, whose name translates as “guest family”, share this fate of constant movement – their identity is not tied to a specific territory but to their ancestors. The director, Hakka herself, follows her family’s migration history from their roots in northern China to Canada and India. As she traces their footsteps, she encounters Hakka from all over the world who tell their own stories of departure, adaptation, and the preservation of a unique culture.
Archive material, personal reflections, and interviews with members of the global diaspora combine to create the polyphonic portrait of a community whose language, customs, and collective memory are threatened by extinction. The film asks how identity is formed when one’s home keeps shifting – and how roots can be put down at ever new places without losing sight of one’s origin.
The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in Tehran and other major cities seem far away from the place where Sara lives. But in her rural community in northwestern Iran, the protagonist of this film advocates the same feminist values in a practical, everyday way. Again and again, we are reminded by the images that her father once taught her to ride a motorbike – to the disapproval of the whole village. A small favour with big consequences: For Sara, it paved a way outside patriarchal marriage. Mobile on two wheels, she works as a midwife and has delivered many girls for whom she now wants to fight: At the start of the film and in middle age, Sara decides to be the first woman in the history of her community to run for the local council. A step which earns her enthusiastic support on the one hand; on the other, she must endure open hostilities and an interrogation by the moral enforcers of the Islamic Republic. In “Cutting Through Rocks”, Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni capture these power structures and their individual impact as precisely as the gestures of solidarity and self-determination.
When Marc confesses his love to his girlfriend Hélène, all she answers is “Later!” The timing of his confession could not be worse, as there is a whole other dimension to Hélène’s reply. Both belong to a group of activists who have just burned their mobile phones and tackled the ultimate important questions in the forest. Questions of fear, power, courage, loyalty, and doubts. Following this, they attack a rich and influential retired couple in their posh mansion, representing those guilty of the dilemma of this world in their eyes. The armed attack ends in a bloodbath. In the midst of the shootout, though, Hélène is struck with a strange kind of paralysis and soon afterwards sucked into the surrealistic maelstrom of a fatal second chance.
Canadian director and writer Félix Dufour-Laperrière says, he writes “with colours in mind, with transformations, dreamlike sequences, mental images that take shape on screen.” Hand-drawn templates unfold in a powerful symbolic 2D animation of flowing figures and silhouettes that neither shrinks from aggressively formulated messages nor from the exuberant magic of the format.
The images, whose finely chiselled materiality recalls the surface of the human skin, explore the experience of physical contact. Dark ink spots cover the paper background, disrupting its clear white colour. Flashing colours and an electrifying sound make the sensation of touch tangible. The extreme enlargement creates an intimate relationship with pigments and textures.
“The past is an endless cookie.” The past is omnipresent in this fabulously original family portrait. We feel it in the very first minutes, when filmmaker Seth from Toronto calls his half-brother Pete, who is a member of the Indigenous Cree people: The globe on which the distance between the two is visualised snips away the little sign “Dominion of Canada” to reveal the world Shamattawa underneath – the name of the First Nations community where Pete lives. The past is still present because of the injuries the Cree suffer(ed) from the white majority, including police violence and land grabbing. Nonetheless, humour is the Scrivers’ defining stylistic tool – from subtle jokes to self-irony to the detailed, lovingly surreal look of all the characters which they bestow even on racist police officers.
The brothers initially wanted to tell seven stories. At the end there are hundreds – because every sound recording is interrupted by the daily life of an extended family, every anecdote leads to the next. No matter whether the subject is building a teepee, supermarket shopping or butchering animals. This never-ending family chronicle, which also proposes a special chronicle of Canada, was produced over nine years. The result is a distinctive cookie one can chew on for a long time.
In this work, too, the technique of working directly on the film strip by scratching and painting proves to be beautiful and timeless. The sound, created by analogue interventions on the optical soundtrack of the material is charming, jaunty and organic. Two abstract creature shapes fall for each other in the darkness, come together and fade into the distance.
There is no return to paradise. There is a rupture between now and then, the realisation that this place no longer exists. Our protagonist, too, must learn this when she lifts the green of the map beneath her like a blanket to crawl under it with a tomato in her hand – back to Sarajevo, to Yugoslavia. Initially, the strangeness of the return flight with its obligatory tomato juice is as nostalgically exciting as the smiley stickers that are everywhere. But by the time she reaches her parents’ home, the past catches up with her completely: In the corridor of the deserted flat, bullet holes cast cones of light on old family photos and when she opens the fridge, the sight of a single tomato suddenly triggers memories of bombs and explosions.
Matea Radic finds haunting and original images to visualise her own traumatic experience of the Bosnian War and its confusing entanglement with her haptic and sensual childhood memories – complete with Dadaistic advertisements for Šipad furniture and Bosnian melodies. Her generous and yet spare animation style brings out the childlike wonder of her protagonist beautifully. She stalks through the world with scraped knees in a babydoll dress. And she learns that it is sometimes okay not to stick a smiley on things but perhaps a band-aid.
How does it feel when your body becomes a different one? Milla Cummings and Geneviève Tremblay explore (peri)menopause with a physical, concrete approach: The menopause they show is a living stop-motion organism, a cave with pulsating walls where a naked elderly woman gently inters her last eggs. From offscreen, a number of mature women recount their experiences – of dry skin, especially in the vaginal area, of rage against the universally asserted sex appeal of aging men, and of the increasing loss of their social visibility.
For every negative aspect, these worldly-wise narrators formulate a counterpoint or constructive course of action in authentic audio recordings. And they also report on the positive sides of this drastic transformation: The energy that the body would have reserved for childbearing along with the eggs is now released for new projects! On screen, a curtain aptly opens to offer a view of a shimmering, glittering foam of possibilities. At the end, our protagonist leaves the cave and climbs the nearest mountain. This film describes more than just arduous passages one has to go through: The “passageways” might just as well be transitions to a new life.
Step into 9-year-old Juniper’s world as she navigates complicated memories and guilt related to Magnolia, a woman who comes to work for the family. In misleadingly delicate animation and tone, “The Dollhouse” positions home as the workshop where unjust power dynamics are formed. The story unfolds in all directions, at times offering specific interactions.
In the beginning, humans seem so very far away, the only sign of them the twinkling lights of Montreal on the horizon across the water. Deslauriers Island is home to one of largest colonies of ring-billed gulls in the world, and initially it feels like a realm for them alone: a whole legion of elegant white birds gathered together on the grass, flapping, crouching, calling, mating, the camera right in their midst, right down at their level, seeing as they do. But this non-human utopia is evoked in order to be progressively undermined, as markers are placed in the ground, traps set and specimens captured. Some will be released with leg rings or daubed-on markings, but others won’t be so lucky.
The sky over the landfill site is thick with beating wings and when the beaks screech as one, the sound is deafening. No wonder the voice on the radio says they’re losing control, although that hardly justifies the solution they find. Birds hunt birds in the wild, but there’s something particularly savage about seeing it be guided by human hand. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ring-billed gull was nearly hunted to extinction, but their life circle continues unabated here – who can blame nature for finding a way? Yet the stakes are different now, and the old laws no longer apply. Will the meek still inherit the earth?
When we consider the relationship between the real world and its representation on maps, we cannot help but notice that people tend to overestimate their shaping influence. Just because a phenomenon is represented in a very simplified form in cartography, its complexity in the real world does not diminish. And just because we erase a river, for example, from the map, even contain it and build over it in the real world, it has not disappeared. It has just become invisible.
Anna-Maria Dutoit roams the urban landscape of Montreal in search of the water veins that were once a feature of this area. Centuries of settlement and urbanization have polluted, buried, and shifted them underground. Only circling seagulls and manhole covers remind us of what lies below. Guided by some of the oldest maps of Montreal, “Vanished Past” follows the forgotten rivers of the megalopolis and explores – accompanied by a sometimes burbling, sometimes splashing soundtrack – the unique aquatic universes that unfold in its hideaways. A cursory glance may find that the element of water no longer seems to play a role in the concrete urban landscape. At least until heavy rain pours down, flooding the streets – and reminding the city of its supposedly vanished past.
The activist in her awakened at an early age. Even as an adolescent, Juma Xipaia felt that she would dedicate herself to her Indigenous people’s fight for the right to exist in the Brazilian Amazon region. For the Amazon is their mother, the knowledge, and the cure. More than ten years later, Juma knows what it really means to be an activist. As the first female chief of the Middle Xingu region, she has survived assassination attempts, experienced state violence against protesters, must discover illegal prospectors who are clearing the forests and poisoning the soil and the rivers. But the 34-year-old also sees hope emerge for the Indigenous people of Brazil, because the 2023 change of government gave them their own Ministry for the first time. Juma becomes an undersecretary of state and has her second child: Yanuni.
The Austrian Richard Ladkani portrays Juma Xipaia and her husband Hugo, a special investigator working for the environmental authorities, after they let him accompany their daily life for several years. Ladkani mixes fascinating landscape shots with the explosive power of “embedded journalism”, using the full potential of the big screen in one moment and intensifying intimate moment in the next. The result is private and personal, poetic and political. Above all, the film transports Juma Xipaia’s message that despite every disappointment, responsibility for one’s life should not be placed in the hands of others but kept close to home.
