The setting and cast of characters seem like the prelude to an unusual fairy-tale. An elderly man, a hermit living in a remote cabin, is visited by a young woman, almost a girl, who can understand and imitate the language of birds. Deep in the forest, Jean and Mana record and catalogue the calls of the different species day by day, night by night. But then they hear the voice of an unknown animal and set out to find it.
The focus is on birdcalls and their classification. But instead of making the meticulous analysis of sound events look like a quirky hobby, the film inspires us to listen closely. The two scientists’ unperturbed curiosity is catching, and as we watch, we are gradually infected not just with their enthusiasm for their object of research but also with their childlike desire to discover a secret.
The four people introduced by Aren Malakyan and Vahagn Khachatryan in their debut feature-length film embody the contrasting faces of Armenia today. Some of them are making plans for the future that might even be realised, others strive for seemingly unattainable ideals. What unites them all is the dream of a self-determined life – a near-impossibility in a country where the government tries to control everything and everyone.
Once, Myrid Carten’s alcoholic mother Nuala disappears for two weeks. The daughter recognises her, curled-up in the middle of the Belfast pedestrian zone, by her shoes: the only street-drinker in high heels. She does not know what to do, keeps the camera rolling for a few minutes and leaves. How do you behave towards a mother who needs mothering herself? Carten tackles the question by making a film about it – as an intervention, exorcism, declaration of love, manifest of powerlessness.
Nuala is the centre of a complex, fragile family dynamic that revolves around the run-down family home where the camera obsessively crawls upside down along the walls again and again. The material is haunted in myriad other ways: scattered traces of past art projects, nerve-racking phone recordings and faded television images stand next to childhood memories on MiniDV cassettes that diffuse almost seamlessly into the present. At one point the mother’s voice even seems to take complete control of her daughter. Carten’s creative exuberance is enormously compelling, kept together by a fluid montage that lays bare the deeply sincere emotional core of the film.
An overcrowded dog shelter in Serbia. It’s hard to see how many animals are kept here behind wire mesh in desolate kennels. They are cared for and trained by prison inmates who are shown doing their job without further comment or explanation. However, the camera never focuses on the men’s faces. Observations take place at eye-level with the dogs. Especially shaggy Vanja and his training progress are at the centre of Dejan Petrović’s short study of freedom. The uniform, concentrated shots leave plenty of space for questions, above all whether this (dog’s) life is really unfree or whether the desire for freedom must take a backseat under these circumstances, since there is a roof over one’s head and a task that fills the day. While we are still thinking about this, Vanja with his alert eyes and engaging nature has already found a place – not just in the heart of his initially rather dismissive trainer.
A huge, glowing structure bearing the face of Rocky Balboa drifts through the night, mysterious and seemingly from out of this world. Its actual size is revealed only gradually. Sissel Morell Dargis tells the incredible story of the “baloeiros”, an underground culture in the heart of Brazil’s favelas. These loosely-knitted groups are dedicated to building, launching and chasing hot air balloons. This does not sound very spectacular? Anyone who sees the giant objects made of fine tissue paper, which often depict popular figures like Karate Kid or Superman, will be amazed! Such a balloon launch, sometimes preceded by years of welding and gluing in secret workshops, is not just a complex logistical endeavour. It is dangerous, too, for the “baloeiros” whose passion does not earn them one centavo, are prosecuted as a criminal organisation.
It takes a while for Morell Dargis to win the trust of this secret community. The balloons also serve her as a metaphor for a country that finds itself in a politically fragile and deadlocked situation in which those who struggle at the margins of society can barely assert their rights. An intimate, multilayered and action-packed film that turns conventional notions of life in the favelas upside down.
Summer, dust, a burning sun. It is stock car race season, a loud, aggressive show that leaves only smashed carcasses of cars in the end. After each lap, the dents are worked over with heavy hammer blows before the damaged racing cars are sent back on the smoky track. The audience are standing at the edge of the sand pit and can’t get enough of the pile-ups.
From off screen, the director gives a matter-of-fact account of the violent relationship in which she got caught up at the age of 18 and from which she only managed to free herself two years later. She analyses precisely what happened to her back then, using the dented, destroyed vehicles as a powerful metaphor for her injured body. The interplay of images and words is spot-on – like precisely placed knife stabs.
Trucks crawl along the road, decorated with garlands of flowers, loaded with the mortal remains of people who were murdered at the Srebrenica massacre. The bereaved receive the coffins to bury the only recently exhumed and identified dead in the sprawling cemetery of the city which also doubles as a memorial. This is the overwhelming opening of a film that goes on to concentrate on three of the few survivors of this mass murder which claimed the lives of thousands, mainly men and boys, within a few days in that small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina in July 1995.
Srećko returned and now lives in the woods on a hill above the town. Mirza escaped by wandering through the mountains for days and now resides again with his wife in their old house. Mejra has lost her husband and sons and, aged 85 now, still supports herself only from her field. Their quietly observed everyday activities alternate with poignant archive material which shows the inconceivable events in minute detail. Shaky and blurry videos contrast with clear images of fieldwork and an enchantingly innocent nature. The past still weighs heavily, but the tenacity of the human spirit in bearing up under the most horrific circumstances emerges.
In Afrikaans, “fokol” means “nothing” and is a promise made by security companies in South Africa that with their service there is nothing to fear any more – fear fokol. In South Africa, there are far more security guards than police officers and soldiers combined. Tuva Björk undertakes a grim but at the same time involuntarily entertaining journey into the world of non-state security services, where the illusion of protection is hard currency in this tense climate of inequality, anxiety and masculinity in crisis. Björk observes with a touch of voyeuristic curiosity and lets the security employees talk freely – the absurdity of their job is revealed all by itself. The high demand for private protection in countries with great social inequality like South Africa drives an industry that continuously invents new, indispensable products, gadgets and services. Built on the failure of the public authorities and fired by the ruthless promotion of suspicion of the “other”, the illusion of security slowly unravels.
Twelve-year-old Mikal lives with his father Jason, mother Tonya and cat Smokey in cramped conditions in a run-down hotel room. So-called “flophouses” offer accommodation to all those who cannot escape the radical inequality of the US real estate market and are forced to lead their lives on the margins of society. The few square metres serve as bedroom, living room and kitchen, dishes are done in the bathtub. Nothing but a thin curtain separates Mikal’s “realm” from his parents’ bed, and the only escapes from the confines of his home are the lonely hotel corridors and the vending machine in the lobby. But their family life is put to the test not only by the precarious living conditions but also by his mother’s alcohol abuse.
Despite these difficult circumstances, moments of love, affection and dreaming shine through. It seems almost harmonious when, after a fierce argument, father and son kneel in front of the bathtub, washing a mountain of dishes and jokingly adopting the language of commands in a canteen kitchen. In her three-year observation, director Monica Strømdahl captures such ambivalences in fragile and intimate images whose immediacy is always palpable.
If a child is born at 24 weeks of gestation, it is in the so-called grey zone. The parents decide whether the treatment should be curative or palliative, in other words, whether it is to be kept alive or gently accompanied until it dies. Daniela Meressa Rusnoková has fifteen minutes to decide. She chooses the former. From that moment on, she, too, is in a grey zone, floundering without orientation in a blind spot of society where the issue of premature births is ignored and undiscussed.
Rusnoková’s film diary of an ongoing extreme state is radically intimate and vulnerable. It makes emotional cycles of pain, guilt, desperation, and anger almost physically tangible as it traces how daily life with a severely disabled child rearranges one’s value system and opens up a different approach to life itself.
While studying in Belgium, Daryna Mamaisur witnesses Russia’s attack on her home country Ukraine from a distance. It is getting warmer, the chestnut trees are already in bloom, here in Brussels as well as there in Kyiv. Because she cannot find the words, she makes a film that records this spring – in the distance and nearby. She starts a visual correspondence with Tanya in Kyiv who would rather talk about an argument with her partner or the singing of the birds than the droning of the bombs.
The filmmaker, too, is searching for a way of speaking commensurate with her helplessness and shock. She takes voice lessons and interweaves the shots of recital and vocal exercises with the observations she exchanges with her friend. She directs our attention to the fragility of everyday life – and the experience of war that weighs down even the most relaxed, banal moments.
February 2022, the beginning of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine. When the fighting comes closer, director Alina Maksimenko flees from the district capital of Irpin north-west of Kyiv to her parents’ home in the countryside, where she gets stranded with her cat and her camera. It would be better to move even farther away, beyond the border, to be really safe, the daughter urges. Nonetheless, they decide to stay – hoping for the situation to get calmer on the one hand, trusting in the remoteness of their village refuge on the other.
The three of them hold out in an increasingly empty village. Fear spreads, tiredness. The parents refuse to change anything about their usual routines. It is an unbearable limbo that is inherently self-destructive. They try to hold on to their everyday life as best they can. Father Tolya takes care of the animals in the neighbourhood; dozens of abandoned cats gather at the front door every day. Meanwhile, mother Tetyana gives piano lessons over the phone, unless the mains is down again. And Alina, the daughter, makes a film. She is not interested in the fighting. Rather, her documentary of those first weeks of war is a minutely detailed portrait of waiting. The eye is on a microcosm where survival is in question, which makes it universal.
Director Nikola Spasić explains in an interview that in this film he was interested in the fluid boundaries between documentary and fiction, and that he found the perfect protagonist in Kristina: someone with an interesting personal story who can also act. And so she plays herself, Kristina, a transsexual sex worker in Serbia. She lives alone with her cat in a beautiful old house, collects antiques and practices ikebana on the terrace of her garden. She meets friends, visits a cloister, lives her religion, arranges a crucifix.
This idyll is regularly interrupted by the obtrusive ringtone of her work mobile. But the meeting with the client who appears at her door a short while later is well-orchestrated and no contradiction to Kristina’s elegant, graceful and serene existence, which she shapes according to her own ideas. All in all, these flawlessly framed and composed tableaus have an element of transcendence. But with his aesthetic directing, Spasić emphasises the incontrovertible freedom of this modern woman whom he captures in a portrait that is both intimate and daring.
Alyona, Alik and Katya belong to a generation of young Russian women who demand what they are not allowed. They are part of a global youth that dreams of self-determination and freedom. Sybilla Tuxen followed her protagonists between 2018 and 2022, up to the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the three young women find themselves in a new reality. Now more than ever, they are rebelling against Putin’s state and have since lived life on the go.
One of them has made it to Georgia, another goes to Spain, while the third stays at home. They keep in touch by smartphone and social media. One hears from their conversations that they, like many others, don’t believe that political engagement can change anything. Their resistance rather consists in leading modern and western lives in which gender, sexuality, pop music and identity issues play important roles. Tuxen’s darkly poetic debut film is set in nocturnal cars, flats and backyards. The transit in which the three find themselves becomes physically tangible. Their stories allow us rare glimpses into an almost invisible side of today’s Russia and the complexity of lived contradiction.
The situation lasts only a few seconds, but it is meticulously reconstructed over 15 minutes. In a French city, a police command raids a neighbourhood at night and shoots a young man without checking whether he is armed or has committed a crime. One of dozens of surveillance cameras in the area records the incident. The time between two shots taken by this camera is 67 milliseconds: One image shows the bullet, the next does not. The directing and artist duo fleuryfontaine use this surveillance footage and combine it with images retroactively animated using the Blender graphics software to take an almost forensic look at the positions that each of us takes in today’s artificial and security-fixated environment and that determine our behaviour, our body and our relationship with the world and other people. With its elegant and austere structure, the film insistently questions the excesses of the use of violence and its legitimacy in the police and other public organs.
She left Serbia a long time ago and never looked back. But then Nataša Urban discovered her father’s hiking diary and began to connect his entries to the events of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The 1999 total eclipse of the sun is the central motif, employed by Urban as a metaphor for the way a dark past remains part of the present.
