What is the dominant feeling of our current era? Disquiet, fear of the future, boundlessly amorphous flows, a nostalgia for the simpler things of the past? Timely, perpetually shifting and oddly comforting, this first solo directorial work by editor and cinematographer Iva Kraljević seeks to tap into the mood of the zeitgeist and translates it into pure cinema, creating a free-flowing essay where form and content gently intertwine. Taking its bearings from W. G. Sebald, Naomi Klein and Robert McFarlane while possessing a wit and lyrical timbre all of its own, the onscreen text draws shimmering lines between dream, memory, historical event and present atrocity and the perpetual solace of nature, as archive footage and home movies bleed into new 16 mm images, superimpositions abound and photographs and animation infect the frame. Wood and water, rock and fire, mushroom clouds, again and again; if what we excrete comes back to consume us, at least here we’ve been fed a hearty meal.

James Lattimer

Information only trickles out sporadically from isolated Belarus. And those held in Belarusian custody seem almost out of reach. Having fled to Poland himself in the wake of state repression, Andrei Kutsila brings the fates of three detainees to light in this film testimony, which is polyphonic at both a narrative and visual level. They represent the more than 65,000 people who have been criminalised and detained since Alexander Lukashenko’s controversial re-election in 2020. There is Kasia, a student who uses her art to find a way to cope with everyday life in captivity. Rendered in dark tones, her drawings offer insights into a harrowing situation, while simultaneously serving to guide the viewer through “Letters from the Silenced Country” in animated form. Then there is the activist Witold Aschurak, who receives photographs from a friend while in prison. Footage from surveillance cameras documents his mistreatment before his eventual death in custody. Meanwhile, former detective Andrei Astapovich is in Poland investigating the crimes committed in his former homeland and compiling evidence for the Belarusian opposition organisation BYPOL. An anonymous man also gets his say; he lives in constant fear of being arrested. Andrei Kutsila’s film is a compilation of true horrors – right in the midst of Europe.

Carolin Weidner

Snow, seen for the first time, comes together with hard labour and homesickness. A Kosovo-Bangladeshi directorial duo offers a raw, immediate glimpse into the limbo of a group of Bangladeshi construction workers in Kosovo, building houses while stranded far from their own homes. In a foreign country itself plagued by economic migration, fragments of the workers’ lives emerge through footage shot on their mobile phones: family faces on the screen, dangerous heights at work and dreams of a better future. A quiet reclaiming of their humanity beyond exploitation and invisibility. For some, this is Europe, too…

Anca Păunescu