Among hundreds of hours of unseen 1980s footage documenting the rehabilitation of Aubervilliers, a Parisian working-class suburb, filmmaker Giuseppe Schillaci recognised 15-year-old French-Algerian Fatsah Bouyahmed, then an ordinary boy who would later become an actor. Suffering memory loss after an accident, Fatsah agrees to revisit the neighbourhood he always wanted to leave through the archival footage. As the images are decoded, two recoveries of memory converge: Fatsah’s life and that of a 1980s working-class suburb. His stories of family and neighbours bring faces and lives out of the archival anonymity. A fluid dialogue between past and present, VHS footage and television archives, and fragments of Fatsah’s memory recreates the visual texture of the 80s while resurrecting forms of togetherness that, seen today, feel improbable.French and immigrant residents shared a belief in the common good through community work, neighbourhood TV, football, rap contests and collective efforts to improve life, as officials involved them in measures to tackle the “malaise of the suburbs.” A forgotten collective struggle, suspended between nostalgia, the elusive truth of memory and socio-politics, before the already lurking racism, segregation and economic inequalities hardened and later erupted in the rage of the banlieues. By connecting one man’s recovered memory to the unheard working-class voices Schillaci subtly plants a doubt: has our belief in the inevitability of today’s unjust realities made those forms of solidarity seem utopian, and is a better future still possible?

Anca Păunescu

Bára Basiková is a Czech rock icon. She left a lasting impression in the 80s as lead singer of the bands Stromboli and Precedens and continues to fill concert halls as a solo artist to this day. Numerous musicals also live from her presence. Famous for her fascinating, approachable longitudinal portraits, Helena Třeštíková shows Basiková’s turbulent life over the decades. Her love of art and her search for fulfilling partnerships are recurring themes. More than once, Basiková is forced to admit that a relationship has failed and must risk a new start. Money repeatedly proves scarce and the burden of everyday life sometimes almost forces her to her knees. Yet Třeštíková never dwells too long in any one moment: the editing is fast-paced; over feature-film length, “Bára – Diary of a Rockstar” conveys a speed and richness of experience that seem to stand in direct relation to the protagonist’s lifestyle. Basiková is driven, a romantic and a fighter. Třeštíková brings substantial themes in her own unique way to the fore: what are the consequences of deciding to dedicate your existence to a passion full of uncertainties? What roles do age and aging play for a woman? And last, but not least, how to always keep things going?

Carolin Weidner

The small kitchen table around which director Kamila Serwicka, her two sisters and their mother Agnieszka squeeze themselves has something symbolic about it: the space they each have while living together is restricted and somehow shrunk down; expansion is bitterly needed. Yet this crampedness also allows an intimacy to be experienced, a solidarity that supports and protects. In “Blossoming”, Serwicka creates a portrait of her family, who were profoundly affected by the alcoholism of the father and husband for many years. The tension when he enters the room is tangible – they all keep their distance in an attempt to shield themselves from verbal violence and emotional manipulation. Yet the film doesn’t remain in this oppressive status quo: when the addict leaves, a transition process begins which throws up sensitive questions. How was it possible to ensure such a situation for so long? Why did Agnieszka never separate from her husband? How will things now be? Over the course of five years, the Serwicka women expand their gaze, find new perspectives and standpoints – and new connections with each other, also in religious rituals. “Blossoming” bears witness to a both a challenging escape and a reawakening long overdue. A reminder that nothing has to stay the same.

Carolin Weidner

Everything seems oddly idyllic at the start: the hillside dotted with poppies where the grandfather tends to his flock, the field of purple flowers at the end of the road lined with olive trees where the grandmother cuddles her pet sheep. Their life and that of their family consists of everyday rituals of an unusual calm, even if the Afro-Palestinian Bedouin couple lives in a tent pitched illegally on unused land where the countryside meets the fringes of Amman. Their son, his wife and their children in another tent right next door. The animals are tended to, the cramped living spaces organised, the children sent off to school. But the world outside keeps creeping in: the racist comments the girl hears from her classmates about her skin colour, the grandmother’s recollections of fleeing during the Nakba massacres which come to chime with the television reports from the West Bank and Gaza, the inevitable arrival of the bulldozers. Guided by her own family’s experience of displacement, Asmahan Bkerat follows the daily lives of the Najar family with infinite patience and empathy, creating a space of calm intimacy that makes the subsequent hardships which soon emerge all the more heart-wrenching. Linking the Palestinian struggle to questions of racism, gentrification and generational conflict, Bkerat’s first feature documentary is a work of extraordinary precision and confidence.

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

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

The planning phase began at the start of the pandemic, for a new highway intended to pass right through the centre of Xiangzidian, a village in Shaanxi province. Born and raised in the village and marooned there by Covid, director Hu Sanshou could thus document the process from the start, in lingering wide shots and gentle pans of an unostentatious beauty, their all-enveloping focus punctuated by comments from the villagers wandering through the frame and Hu’s own voiceover commentary. Compensation notices are posted and graves relocated before construction begins, which stretches over years and numerous changes of season. Once the surface of the road is laid out, it does indeed resemble a stage and the local inhabitants move around on it as if being directed from afar, which is not inaccurate. Yet the great expanse of white pebbles is also akin to the pages of a vast book, which Hu fills with novelistic detail, narrating countless anecdotes about friends, family members and acquaintances that begin in the present and stretch way back into the past, capturing the cadence of that amorphous in-between phase between tradition and modernity which the traffic will soon drown out. If the violence of village life leaves little room for nostalgia, it is a sad story nonetheless. Whether tales of joy, hardship or simple endurance, folk memory and its loss touch us all.

James Lattimer