First Lights

Five actors search for a playwright in an ironic, essayistic exploration of the influence of the wealthy West on the African continent. The film introduces us to a situation in which the five actors gather in the garden of a colonial villa to rehearse a play set in an alternative reality, in which all international organisations and non-profit initiatives have abandoned East Africa. However, the play’s director has not turned up. The actors’ wanderings, interspersed with shots of deserted exteriors, are accompanied by a narrative voice-over which introduces us to a series of absurd twists and turns concerning the theatre project, but above all the current situation in Africa itself. “A young man named Mahoro, which means ‘peace’. He is only a fiction, an invention of the director, and should not possess will nor power of his own. But this man of peace has driven the director to the brink of madness.“

This Hungarian staged documentary captures the day-to-day life of a community of young, progressive-minded intellectuals. We come to understand the values the group upholds and reflects upon together, but also a certain self-absorption and lack of empathy that emerge here despite their theoretical ideals. We are guided by the characters of Noémie and Petri, who, albeit fictional, have been brought to life through improvisation. The scenes of their gatherings are shot in long takes, in which the camera moves in circles around the characters, thereby emphasising their sense of community and egalitarianism.

Día de los Muertos is the focal point of this personal documentary, which takes us into a community in Mexico’s Oaxaca highlands. A voice-over, conceived as the voice of one of the souls returning among the living on the “Day of the Dead”, accompanies a series of scenes evoking the nocturnal atmosphere of one of Mexico’s most important celebrations. Remembrance of the dead, a whirl of macabre masks, night-time revelry, but also a sense of release from everyday life and renewed energy for the life ahead, all come together in a succession of observed scenes and purely atmospheric glimpses."Over time, I came to understand what the Muertada means for the communities of Ella Valley, as we believe that the souls of our loved ones return to dance with us.” 

This experimental documentary explores the themes of physicality and erotic imagination. It recalls Myeong Wol, the most famous courtesan in Korean history, who is still revered today as a prominent poet. The first part of the film is conceived as an evocative cinematic essay which, through visual montages and terse commentary, examines the status of courtesans in traditional society through linguistic metaphors involving peaches and parasites. The second part then aims to transport us into an erotic reverie. It consists of a montage of 79 explicit films on the theme of physicality, which have been converted to negatives and presented in the form of a silent film.“Porno Advertisements, Human body studies, Thesaurus of Korean Beauties. Methaphor, the compression and excision. Peach, the metaphor for female genital. A cause of the coition death. An ordeal of female genital. A myth and conservation of female genital. A rumor about Myeong Wol. A ghost ritual for female genital. A conversion of matter.”

An autobiographical, introspective documentary, composed of spontaneously filmed private footage, offers an intimate portrait of love life in today’s era of fleeting relationships.

From a series of shots of people rummaging through a rubbish tip in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, we move to the studio of a local painter who runs out of paint just a few days before his exhibition. His attempts to raise money and subsequently launch a career as a Christian street preacher frame a docu-fiction portrait of a city where nothing is of much value – including art. This observational film offers us fascinating glimpses of everyday life in Kinshasa, while, through the story of its protagonist, it seeks to convey the hardships of existence in a city of markets, rubbish and slums, where artistic creation is certainly not regarded as a social priority.

Director Kristina Savutsina wanted to make a film about an incident in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, where, in the 1980s, a capsule containing a highly radioactive element was accidentally embedded in the wall of a prefabricated flat. However, within a set built to exactly match the original flat, a refractive documentary ultimately emerged, which turns the focus towards the filming process itself and the personality of its creator. The film does not record her relationship with a man who is also a member of the film crew, nor other personal elements, in the form of a diary, but rather through a sequence of scenes full of autofictional self-stylisation that blur the boundaries between the realities of Kramatorsk and the behind-the-scenes world of filming.

Götz Kubitschek is a German journalist, activist and representative of the far-right Neue Rechte movement. He is also a former schoolmate of director Gregor Centner, who describes himself as a liberal leftist. At the outset of this personal documentary, Centner contacted Kubitschek with a proposal to make a film about him. Over the next six years, they met to share memories of their childhood and school days, but above all to discuss Kubitschek’s ideological turn towards the extreme right. The resulting film draws its power from candid recordings of their conversations and the recordings the two men exchanged.“I don’t know if you are aware what it means to make a film about me. This means about us and about the movement I represent. Especially with public funding. Even talking to us, to me, is the crossing of a line.” 

The lives of ordinary people in the Chapéu Mangueira neighbourhood of Rio are affected by the long-standing havoc raised by drug gangs. This observational documentary takes us into one of the local households struggling to survive in a neighbourhood where gunshots are a frequent occurrence and where the police, with their brutal tactics, only serve to escalate the situation. In the film, the title of which is a phrase of condolence in Portuguese meaning “He will remain in our hearts forever”, the director interacts directly with her subjects and films them with a handheld camera in everyday situations. In doing so, she highlights the extent to which the constant sense of threat has become an inescapable part of their existence. “It was in 2015, quite by chance, during my first trip to Brazil, that I discovered Chapéu Mangueira. I got lost in the narrow streets and met Sueli, who was hosting a barbecue, and I immediately felt a connection with him. Intrigued and moved, and despite the obvious violence, I decided to move to Chapéu Mangueira.” — Emma Boccanfuso, Business Doc Europe Source

In the director’s native village in Sicily, it has been a tradition for centuries to hold a summer procession dedicated to the martyr Saint Lucy. A local girl is always chosen to portray the saint, who was repeatedly tortured by various male authorities during the Roman persecution of Christians. The filmmaker filmed a series of interviews here with women who have portrayed Saint Lucy over the years, complementing them with amateur period footage of the processions. In doing so, she not only shows how perceptions of the saint’s persona have evolved from the perspectives of women of different generations, but also generally presents the history of Sicilian women, to whom the documentary is dedicated.

A triple jump on ice skates lasts just a few seconds, but requires years of physical training and mental isolation. This time-lapse portrait of Barbora Vránková, three-time Czech figure skating champion, captures a pivotal period in her life between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. Her days are filled with online lessons, physiotherapy sessions and, above all, a strict training regimen. The camera, which is synced with the protagonist’s movements, takes us straight onto the ice, where the scraping of blades and the rumble of pop-music hits blend with the shouts of the coaches. Without any artificial pathos, the film follows how, fall after fall, the young athlete works her way towards precision on the ice and her own autonomy off it. “For me, sound has never been merely an accompaniment to the image. Gradually, it has also become a path to the themes the film explores: performance, expectations, and the search for one’s own place in a world that constantly judges people by their results.” — Eliška Cílková Andršová, dok.revue

This experimental documentary conveys the traumatic experience of “enforced disappearances” in war-torn Colombia. We hear testimonies from the mothers of some of the dozens of missing young men. Their voices are accompanied by images of the empty places where the missing were last seen, alongside footage of fire and other elemental forces, abstract sequences of coloured blotches, or simply a black screen. Together, these elements create a devastating impression of absence, of inhospitable, abandoned spaces haunted by spectral memories of people whose fate remains a painful mystery. “Well, let me tell you something. God is the only one who can change this. How many times have they signed peace treaties? And yet, the massacres continue.”

Doubts about her own past and the collapse of her former certainties lead Ukrainian director Kateryna Ruzhyna to revisit old amateur videos. As she looks back on her childhood in Zaporizhzhia, she discovers traces of Russian cultural influence and subjects her own memory to a process of decolonisation. This retrospective element is complemented by uncensored interviews from her time in exile in Prague. Together with friends from Ukraine and Russia, she asks whether it is possible to maintain friendships when one’s home countries are at war. This self-reflective essay on the search for a balance between the personal and the political makes room for vulnerability, anger and formal experimentation. “Life is about understanding what we can change, what we cannot change, and knowing how to tell the difference.”