“You can’t seem to move forward, can you?” her mother asks. Twenty years after an unfinished film, the filmmaker is still pursuing her creative callings, confronting her roots, familial expectations and silences that have shaped her. An intimate essay about identity and belonging, set in a small rural Slovakian community where her creativity and sexuality clash with strict expectations of womanhood. Through personal archives, home movies and animation, she gently attempts to untangle what holds her back. Can she move forward without damaging the roots that are hers too?

Anca Păunescu

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

In their filigree drawings populated by hybrid creatures, Polish twin sisters Alicja und Bożena Wahl didn’t just explore themselves, but also the close relationship they shared. Helena Stańczyk’s animated film brings these drawings to life and supplements them with collages and texts taken from Alicja’s diary entries from the 60s and 70s. At times directly addressing her sister Bożena, Alicja’s voice gives an account of surreal dreams and events involving her daughters while reflecting upon memories. Shot through with different physical and mental motifs, “I’m Painting a Self-Portrait, but All I See Is My Sister’s Face” is a film teeming with different elements, abruptly propelling the viewer into a place of artistic symbiosis and female self-discovery. A tribute to two women who left their mark on the Warsaw art scene and have received increasing international attention posthumously too.

Carolin Weidner

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

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