“See you next year!” a Portuguese fire warden says as he dismantles his control equipment at the end of the season. Humans and nature in southern Europe may be used to forest fires, but that does not change the facts: The ever more massive conflagrations are caused by climate change. We have long been living in the age of fire.

In the Portuguese interior, a forest fire has just devastated a large area. Wounded nature is silent, not a single bird is heard, only the wind that makes the charred tree trunks rustle. But the vegetation recovers astonishingly fast. Where all life seemed to be gone, greenery soon sprouts from the ruined trees. The residents of the affected region are engaged in the reconstruction with great respect for their natural environment. Because plants, too, are sentient creatures. In quiet, almost melancholic, but also hopeful images, the film pays tribute to the strength of the trees and illustrates how essential it would be for humanity to learn to live in harmony with nature again.

For ten years, Belgian photographer and artist Léonard Pongo has been documenting the landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In his latest work, he enters into a sensual dialogue with them. The precise camera often focuses on light reflections that literally draw us into the moving images, while at the same time revealing the cinematographic apparatus behind them. In combination with the elaborate sound design and the restrained, beautiful music of “Bear Bones, Lay Low”, the solo project of the Belgium-based Venezuelan Ernesto González, the portrait of a landscape emerges which the captivating montage composition turns into a visual, auditive and meditative pleasure.
Nonetheless, “Tales from the Source” is not a traditional “nature film” but an aesthetic positioning inspired by Congolese traditions, art and philosophy which – as the artist himself emphasises – represents the Congolese landscape “as a source rather than a resource.” The result is best described as an experience rather than a representation.

The filmmaker’s grandmother moved into this house in 1971. When Rolande Ségalini died, everything remained as it was during her lifetime. But what to do with all the accumulated things? As her granddaughter Céline begins to film this material legacy, she realises that her grandmother has remained an enigma to her to this day. Room by room, she inventories, classes, counts, sorts the possessions retrieved from wardrobes, drawers, cabinets and boxes and arranges the objects into new still lives. It is an attempt to understand the deceased woman better and find out more about her. Step by step, the heiress discovers various connections to France’s colonial history.
The film unfurls the facets of a discreet relationship with one’s origin – searching, questioning, interpreting, at the same time investigating the construction and external perception of identity, the practice of passing. The things of a life, displayed like the findings of an archaeological dig, are laid out ready to be analysed. They express a desire: to be recognised as a white Frenchwoman.

In 2002, the filmmaker moved into an apartment on the 15th floor of a Kyiv high-rise. She was twelve at the time. Today, from the safe distance of another country, she talks to people who remember the flat and the time spent together. Coming-of-Age, the love of cinema, a sense of community and the erotic charge of individual moments combine to create an image of missing home and intimacy. With every memory, we zoom a little out of the still image on screen: three windows facing southwest, a balcony facing southeast, a rooftop protected from view, a high-rise panorama. The warm and personal gaze at the sky and houses of Kyiv is mirrored in the cold attentiveness of international war reporting.

In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered the murder of the Haitian population of the Dominican Republic. Tens of thousands were brutally killed. A language test made the difference between life and death: The Creole-speaking Haitians who could not pronounce the Spanish word “perejil” had to die, which is why this genocide went down in history under the innocuous name of “Parsley Massacre.” Until today, the region is marked by deep traumatisation, racism and classism, which are linked to the colonialist past of this two-state island.
Haitian filmmaker Pierre Michel Jean approaches this rarely examined subject with great delicacy and succeeds in creating a history lesson that combines different historiographies – from factual research to problematic narrative constructions through to the haunting testimonies of the last survivors – in a kind of montage of knowledge. At the same time, his documentary addresses the complexity of collective guilt and the important question of who can and should say “mea culpa” today, more than eighty years later. A performance workshop organised by theatre director Daphné Ménard, which brings together artists from both states, and the memories of the elderly Henry Noncent form the heart of this filmic monument whose empathy makes it compelling.