The first voice belongs to the director, asking himself what sort of film he would make about the middle class. What we see is more or less what he describes, split screen combinations of archive footage and shots from now showing unspectacular snippets of daily life: family get-togethers, his neighbourhood park. He talks about shifting the focus of the film too, which is also what happens, as more voices arrive and different formats keep moving between the two screens: the man listing mundane everyday objects; the woman separated from San José by an invisible line; the Venezuelan immigrant who talks of the bus as the great leveller; the granddaughter who inherits a vast encyclopaedia collection. Their backgrounds differ, but they all reference class either explicitly or implicitly, for each person a different category at a different time, so many meanings, so many objects and references, one term of countless shapes. When you open the termite mound, you see it’s been made by them all.

James Lattimer

An institutional portrait in the form of an elegy: after more than sixty years, the fate of the Les Lilas maternity clinic already seems sealed. Having not worked in a profitable enough manner, this private institution is now to have the subsidies it relies on withdrawn. Alain Kassanda’s film accompanies the clinic’s last flicker of resistance, showing heated internal meetings and the public protests aimed at saving it. The interactions between the purple-uniformed staff and their patients come to the fore at the same time: offering caring guidance across the entire birth process, precisely explaining the specifics of an imminent abortion or advising a young couple confronted with an unplanned pregnancy. Everyday life in the Maternité des Lilas is both eventful and moving. And it can look back on a long tradition: deeply anchored in the second wave of the women’s movement, the clinic made history for its progressive approach. Everyone was supposed be able to give birth in the way they saw fit, the patriarchy was banished from the delivery room and operating theatre – “mon corps, mon choix”. This inconspicuous place retained this forward-looking approach to the last. Alain Kassanda’s lament is far from maudlin. It is the unsentimental depiction of a loss only justifiable on paper.

Carolin Weidner

Jimena is in her twenties, a young woman who goes by the nickname La Pichi and grew up on the edge of Buenos Aires close to the port, the other side of the invisible line that separates centre from periphery. These are not mere descriptions, but rather how she tells it herself – her garrulousness knows no bounds, which makes her the perfect storyteller. Like a Scheherazade porteña, La Pichi tells a new story each night and there are so many it’s easy to lose count. With their extravagant titles, her stories of relationships, family, body issues and class might seem like tall tales, but they are all plucked from her everyday reality, the same reality lived on the fringes that we see in velvety nocturnal images during and in between her voiceover monologues, which are narrated with an infectious enthusiasm and humour that belies their ambivalent undercurrents: the tale of the boyfriend who didn’t want to be seen with her, the tale of the transvestite-loving grandmother who cooked glorious food she wasn’t supposed to eat, the tale of the father with vitiligo who at one point was no longer there. Yet this is no narrative of hardship and suffering, but rather one of irrepressible, inspirational joy, for what can be more empowering than being given space to chronicle your own biography on your own terms? As La Pichi herself says, “I wasn’t one word, I was many.”

James Lattimer

Minneapolis has become a battlefield: clouds of poisonous green billow over the wintry streets, there are wounded people, screams, vehicles that resemble tanks. Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller capture the work of the immigration authority ICE and its paramilitary operations from different perspectives and combine them into a horror film. Parts of the population organise themselves in order to stand up against and protocol the illegal actions of the perpetrators, most of them in masks. Gradually, a network of gigantic dimension is revealed, which extends to the kidnapping of minors, secret scouting trips and a steady stream of deportation flights. “They’re Here” is a genre-fluid documentary dystopia, whose darkness is only heightened by the score by Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails).

Carolin Weidner

Wugoushui, a Hakka village in southern Taiwan, is slowly losing its traditional way of life as younger generations leave. Its huofang compounds, once shared by generations of one family, grow quiet. Between waiting for children and grandchildren to fill the house and the moments of their departure, eighty-year-old Alan tends her garden, processes the harvest and shares the small chores of daily life with her lifelong friend A-Mei. Here, life has another pace, embraced with grace and quiet acceptance.

Anca Păunescu