What happens after abuse? Six years after the crime, the director reconnects with her grandmother – not to talk about the act itself, which everyone is aware of. She finally wants to talk about how she felt afterwards: to break the silence, to name her shame and the grief at losing her whole Colombian family – and above all, to demand recognition of her suffering.
In her first film, Matilde-Luna Perotti deals with a personal trauma shared by many women in Latin America. The memory lurks everywhere: in old home videos, in text messages, in fabrics and clothes, in the scars on her own skin. These fragments come together to form a personal and at the same time collective portrait that makes a deeply buried trauma visible – and ultimately becomes an act of self-empowerment.

This both raw and tender work of memory ploughs through reflections, feelings, anecdotes, photos, and drawings, an attempt in cinematic images to capture the grief over a beloved grandfather who fell victim to cancer, make it manageable. Sonia Leliukh takes the liberty of speaking from a deliberately subjective perspective, refusing to tone down her statements with seemingly valid rules of language or etiquette. With her desktop documentary, which seems playful only at first glance, she confronts radical grief with equally radical honesty. By putting the old computer games her grandfather used to distract himself from his pain on screen, she does not only put herself in the role of the terminally ill, but also the audience. When my finger twitches to move the Solitaire cards to the right spot or click on another box at Minesweeper, I am already in the midst of things and must ask myself how I deal with grief, love, or rejection. In the present, but also and especially when the people who inspire these emotions have gone. Sonia Leliukh’s work is a cinematic refusal to allow these feelings to become objects in the sediment of the past.

Stars are shining in the evening sky, the sea is lapping against the shore, Esther is standing on the beach with her telescope. She cannot get enough of the celestial bodies! A fish creature appears, looks into the front end of the telescope and gets on Esther’s nerves. Whatever is so interesting about these stars, the sea dweller asks. After all, the underwater world also has some luminous discoveries to offer!

Bela from Leipzig is a real fighter – on the judo mat and in life. When he bravely defeated leukaemia with chemotherapy, he lost all his hair. Now he regularly has to go to the hospital for blood tests. It is not so bad, Bela thinks – as long as he is allowed to go to judo training. He wants to get even stronger there to become a real judo master one day.

Two quarrelsome brothers with impressively full beards live on a remote farm in the Bohemian Forest, surrounded by a rugged landscape: At one point, Franta and Ondra themselves become aware that this setting has an almost Old Testament feel to it, but cannot agree on who might be Cain and who Abel in this scenario. They rarely agree in any case: Daily squabbles are the big constant in the life of the identical but otherwise dissimilar twins. When Franta embarks on another breakneck adventure, Ondra wants nothing more than to smoke in peace. Nonetheless, they occasionally exchange hugs and nose kisses. In their early 60s, Franta and Ondra spend their time working in the fields, playing jokes with the animals, or competing in left-hand arm-wrestling duels. The facts that Franta lost his lower right arm in an accident or that the twins took part in the 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia belong to an apparently distant past. With a domestic cow as narrator, the leitmotif of a huge mirror, and a classical soundtrack, Miro Remo finds a wonderful form for the portrait of these idiosyncratic people.

There are framed wedding photos on the wall, open albums of holiday memories on the table. This is a household of gestures rehearsed for decades. The filmmaker meets life as lived in her grandparents’ Luxembourg home. She tries on her grandfather’s coat and her grandmother’s rings. Out of boredom? Or is it an appropriation of history? Time seems to stand still and yet moves inexorably forward. He takes a nap in a sleeping mask that has open eyes printed on it, she sits at the kitchen table and talks about the onset of her dementia. She enjoys a cigarette by the window to the fullest, letting her granddaughter paint her nails pink. Perhaps to look good on camera, while the grandfather swings his hips to the music from the radio. The couple wrest touching moments from the sense of transience, while a pas de deux tells of love and attachment.

The capybara family live peacefully among the reed islands near a small farm when suddenly a shot rings out – hunting season is open. Alarmed and scared, they try to shelter in the chicken-coop, but the rooster is suspicious and drives the strange animals away. Still, the capybara child and the chicklet are curious about each other. Their friendship has unexpected consequences.

The painted lady butterfly travels 9,000 miles over several generations. Each generation flies to the next place without knowing the starting or end point of their route. The Hakka people, whose name translates as “guest family”, share this fate of constant movement – their identity is not tied to a specific territory but to their ancestors. The director, Hakka herself, follows her family’s migration history from their roots in northern China to Canada and India. As she traces their footsteps, she encounters Hakka from all over the world who tell their own stories of departure, adaptation, and the preservation of a unique culture.
Archive material, personal reflections, and interviews with members of the global diaspora combine to create the polyphonic portrait of a community whose language, customs, and collective memory are threatened by extinction. The film asks how identity is formed when one’s home keeps shifting – and how roots can be put down at ever new places without losing sight of one’s origin.

Days spent at your parents’ home are not always the easiest. Director Małgorzata Goździk knows what she is talking about, because today her loving relationship with her father is mainly documented in childhood recordings. Nowadays, Mirosław has mutated into a grumpy man who spends his time reading the news and answering quiz questions. In the course of “Dance with Me, Dad” it becomes clear that his dismissive behaviour hides a substantial depression. And that father and daughter may have more in common in terms of mental health than first assumed. In her film, Małgorzata Goździk ventures a bold intervention that exposes long-simmering painful issues. Could this radically honest exchange at the round family table mark a new beginning?

We have all been there: A noise escapes in the bus, followed by an unpleasant smell – and everyone knows where it came from. But why are farts so embarrassing? At least that is what fart star Pongy Pippa wonders. She dances with tubas and trumpets in time with our digestion to show how much work and skill goes into making such sounds. A musical show for the most human of noises.

“The past is an endless cookie.” The past is omnipresent in this fabulously original family portrait. We feel it in the very first minutes, when filmmaker Seth from Toronto calls his half-brother Pete, who is a member of the Indigenous Cree people: The globe on which the distance between the two is visualised snips away the little sign “Dominion of Canada” to reveal the world Shamattawa underneath – the name of the First Nations community where Pete lives. The past is still present because of the injuries the Cree suffer(ed) from the white majority, including police violence and land grabbing. Nonetheless, humour is the Scrivers’ defining stylistic tool – from subtle jokes to self-irony to the detailed, lovingly surreal look of all the characters which they bestow even on racist police officers.
The brothers initially wanted to tell seven stories. At the end there are hundreds – because every sound recording is interrupted by the daily life of an extended family, every anecdote leads to the next. No matter whether the subject is building a teepee, supermarket shopping or butchering animals. This never-ending family chronicle, which also proposes a special chronicle of Canada, was produced over nine years. The result is a distinctive cookie one can chew on for a long time.

Fanta is 14 years old and lives in Conakry, the capital of Guinea in West Africa. Besides school and her household chores, she spends every free minute training at the acrobatics circus. One day, the return of the country’s big star is announced. Balla Moussa Bangoura, founder of the Amoukanama Circus Company, is returning from an international tour and now plans to rehearse a new show with his troupe. Training gets harder, because only the best will be in it at the end.
Of course, Fanta is determined to give everything to be one of the few girls travelling the country with Balla Moussa Bangoura. Every day, she is torn between caring for her sick mother, housework, schoolwork and what she thinks she loves best. Supported by her family on the one hand, striving to fulfil all expectations on the other, Fanta begins to doubt: What does she really want? Marjolijn Prins delivers the atmospherically dense portrait of an extraordinary girl, connected by rousing musical numbers, spectacular acrobatics and dream-like acting sequences.