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

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

What is behind the fetishisation of Asian women? This is the question which Kiriko Mechanicus uses to structure her intense, hyper-referential essay film, taking up a criminal case at the start: Robert Aaron Long shot and killed a series of women, primarily of Asian origin, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2001. She starts writing letters to him in prison: “Maybe in some way you remind me of many of my ex-boyfriends.” By weaving together sexuality, projection and performance, the director sets off down an uncomfortable path, which simultaneously becomes a process of self-interrogation: to what extent did she slip into the role of the submissive Japanese woman in the past? Or “When was the last time I didn’t pretend to be your prey and you weren’t trying to hunt me down?” “How to Catch a Butterfly” examines the pins holding the director’s wings in place – and removes them in a charged act of self-empowerment.

Carolin Weidner

Ibrahim is back in the village he once left behind. He wants to show films. But “cinema is banned here, Ibrahim – they like playing football here,” reads the text in blue above the arid landscape. So the Sudan Film Institute organises a football match featuring four teams named after Elia Suleiman, Abbas Kiarostami, Ousmane Sembène and Abderrahmane Sissako. The winner gets to decide which film will be shown that evening. Before then, local peculiarities and bureaucracy must be overcome. And then war breaks out. “Nothing Happens After Your Absence” is the final part of Omer’s trilogy “After the Event or Post-Trauma”, which views Sudan as if suspended in time, keeping the war outside the frame. It appears in on-screen text, in children’s games and in conversations. With humour and satire, Omer gives an account of the violence that intrudes on everyday life and of cinema as a place of resistance and community.

Seggen Mikael

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

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