Lee Anne Schmitt’s first feature-length essay tours through California’s former company towns, which originally sprung up to house those working in the state’s primary industries and later slipped into dereliction or oblivion with the arrival of globalisation. Ghostly shots of decaying homes and dilapidated facilities rub up against vistas of verdant nature and open horizons, just as tales of prejudice and exploitation intermingle with thwarted utopian dreams. Augmenting her own ravishing 16mm footage with archive material, historical photographs and contemporary radio soundbites, Schmitt scours this hybrid landscape like a beachcomber for all the ideological traces it holds, whereby no story nor detail is too small to be excavated.

The name of her village stands for a utopia that has shaped Noam Shuster Eliassi from childhood: Newe Shalom (Hebrew) or Wahat al-Salām (Arabic) roughly translates as “Oasis of Peace.” This small community of 300 people from Jewish and Arab families which was founded in 1969, located in Israel at the border with the West Bank, is a test of solidarity in practice. Thus, Noam, who is Jewish, and her Palestinian friend Ranin become ambassadors of mutual understanding even as children, for example when Hillary Clinton or Jane Fonda come to visit. They seem predestined for a career in the United Nations.
In her comedy show “Coexistence, My Ass!”, which director Amber Fares uses as a leitmotif, Shuster Eliassi strikes a harsher tone. Her career shift from diplomacy to political comedy – in English, Hebrew or Arabic, depending on the audience – shows her as a critic of the Netanyahu government, both before and after the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. Her example also reflects the division in parts of the Israeli left: Shuster Eliassi’s deep pain of having lost loved ones herself is followed by anger about the Gaza war. What is humour able, what is it allowed to do in this situation? Perhaps help us mourn the suffering of two nations and, despite everything, not give up the utopia of peace.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative committee of the House of Representatives, was founded in 1938 to crack down on sympathisers of Nazi Germany in the US. In the post-war period, the Committee dedicated itself to anti-communism, interrogating countless individuals it regarded as “oppositional” or found guilty of “subversion” because of left-wing views. Robert Cohen’s film both chronicles and dismantles HUAC, working with a collage of archive material, interviews passionately spoken into the camera and scenes of satirical re-enactment. He makes no secret of his criticism of this symbol of an authoritarian power structure that committed injustices under the pretext of freedom.

More than three quarters of the 650,000 inmates released from prison in the United States every year end up back behind bars within five years. Former drug dealer Coss wants to beat the statistics. After a long prison sentence, he returns to his family on New York’s Lower East Side in 2014, determined to build a legal existence for himself. Together with other former inmates, he opens a gym in his old neighbourhood which is rapidly being gentrified. If a guy like him can master this extreme challenge, can other ex-convicts do the same?
Filmmaker Debra Granik observed Coss’s efforts over a period of eight years. Through her camera, we experience frictions and obstacles, setbacks and successes, and learn what enormous stress it is to succeed against all odds in a racist environment that knows no mercy. Like a Bildungsroman – Granik explicitly refers to the social-realist literature of Charles Dickens –, the film is divided into chapters. The long form enables her to follow several narrative strands and focus on a variety of protagonists. This generates an increasing pull that soon makes us forget the time, lament every failure, and cheer every small victory.

Made at the start of the pandemic, Lee Anne Schmitt’s most recent short contrasts the tranquillity of nature with a sense of underlying dread at the state of the world, even if the former is hardly immune from the latter. The lush leaves, lithe stems and blooms of all shapes and colours seen through frames both round and rectangular feel in perfect harmony with the gentle clang of the wind chimes, until Schmitt’s voice interrupts the calm to tell of how they decided to pack the car and leave. The recurring shot of a forest, with clouds slowly billowing forth in the gap between the trees. Fog or smoke? “Nothing’s where it’s supposed to be”.

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.

A union between two artists and their respective mediums of expression: celluloid film and electronic video. Stephen Beck, inventor of his own video synthesizer, and Jordan Belson, a famed abstract filmmaker and animation artist twice Beck’s age, spent two years working together on this journey through spheres of thought, mysticism and form. Deeply psychedelic and yet with all the weightlessness of light.