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

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

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