family

Quarantine with a politician – this is how one could describe the situation captured in the film A Grandfather. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the director continuously filmed his cohabitation with his own grandfather, the prominent conservative politician and former Lithuanian Prime Minister Vytautas Landsbergis. This observational film captures everyday life in their shared household, but mainly focuses on conversations between the two men, one of whom is recapping his career and the other is making a film, but is also a classical flute player. The result is a chronicle that blends everyday life, artistic expression, and statesmanlike declamation. In the quarantined isolation of both family members, the Lithuanian past is echoed in the recollections of Vytautas Sr. as he rummages through his old collection of notes, as is the COVID-19 present, which is announced on the television screen. The grandfather finally agrees to participate in a joint theatre performance combining music and political performance. “By trying to explain it you ruined it. Just like in music. There was some nonsense: ‘explain how to understand music.‘ You can explain it. And you’d be ruining it. The essence.“

A postcolonial voodoo ritual, cyclical in the hypnotic rhythm of time and pulsating fists, saturated with fire and water, interwoven with the East and West, is intended to win the favour of the Haitian goddess, Erzulie. It is also a prayer for the deceased ancestors who, along with other Haitian workers, were murdered in 1920 in the Cuban province of Holguín, in a sugar mill owned by a subsidiary of the American corporation, United Fruit Company.“You fought hard for your children. Now we are alone in this country.”

Young men in Georgia in the 1990s died en masse of heart attacks as a result of the war. They left behind a generation without fathers, including Elene. This autobiographical portrait looks into a darkroom where the author develops photographs and films left behind by her father, lending them her own narrative, and thereby finding herself. “Between the earth and the land of the dead, a darkroom becomes the only dimension where the paths of a father and a daughter can cross.”

One in ten children in the United States lives below the poverty line. Among them is twelve-year-old Mikel, who lives with his parents Jason and Tonya in a one-room apartment in a cheap motel. His story is exceptional in that he was born into extreme poverty and alcohol addiction and knows no other life, even though he longs for one. This empathetic family portrait, free of prejudice and with an unusual understanding of the characters' situation, tells a story of love and pain, hopelessness and hope, and points to a flaw in the system that excludes low-income households from the regular real estate market and creates socially conditioned generational trauma.“It’s a comment on the U.S. as an institution and as a society, where people are ‘collected’ only because they need to exist next to each other, not necessarily with each other.” — Monica StrømdahlSource: International Documentary Association.

Sang has struggled his entire life with the stigmatizing label of being a “child of dust.” This is how the unwanted offspring of Vietnamese women and American soldiers are referred to. Tens of thousands of them were born during the Vietnam War. Most of them never knew their fathers. Fifty years after the end of the conflict, Sang continues to search for his. He hopes that with the help of a DNA test, he will finally be able to find out where he belongs. But in order to find his new family, he must leave his current one. Just like his father once did. Nevertheless, he manages this emotionally demanding journey of self-discovery and acceptance with stoic calm. The same composure is evident in Mikael Lypinski's unobtrusive camera work and the gently melancholic soundtrack by Argentine composer Joaquín García. “Fatherhood in Vietnam is your social status. When something wrong happens to you, your father is your insurance for life… not having a father means that you don’t have social relevance.” — Weronika Mliczewska

There was no other choice for her. She had to go and fight the evil that had taken over her country. An evil she had experienced first-hand in 2014, when she spent four days in Russian captivity in Donbas. She was so determined that she was able to leave her young son behind for an extended period of time. Now she composes letters to him in her head as helicopters fly overhead and mortar shells explode nearby. This evocative documentary portrait of life in close proximity to the front lines builds on the contrast between an incredible will to live and the duty to risk one's life for a higher cause. Not for the nation, not for the homeland, but for the free future of one's own children. “My camera has been with me since the first day of the full-scale war.” — Alisa Kovalenko

Director Diana Fabiánová's documentary offers an exceptionally intimate look at the topic of open relationships. The film does not reflect much on the social debate surrounding this issue, but instead replaces it with a personal story that shows what unexpected factors can come into play in such a marital agreement. The filmmaker turned the camera directly on herself and her family and documented how she and her partner are managing to live in a partnership with shifted “boundaries of fidelity.” She and her husband film many situations with a handheld camera, which allows us to get to the heart of their several years of experimentation with other sexual partners. The film, which is accompanied by the director's monologue and primarily follows her perspective, ultimately deals with the question of honesty in marriage, but also with identity, inherited patterns of behaviour, and the meaning of the nuclear family as such. In connection with the film and its title, Fabiánová also talks about the topic of setting and breaking boundaries between romantic partners. “The definition of infidelity depends on what the couple agrees constitutes infidelity for them.” — Diana Fabiánová Source: Forbes

Against the backdrop of his hometown and momentous historical events, the director seeks the answer to a seemingly simple question: What is my very first memory? As the film progresses, the audiovisual topography of memory transforms into a labyrinth where trauma and disappointment may lurk around every corner, and yet we continue to navigate through it. “The director, who wants to return to the most interesting period of his childhood, wanders the streets of the city where he was born and raised, to find traces of those years. This trip brings him to the place of his first memory.”

Giuseppe Polerà chose an excerpt from a poem by Italian lyricist Sandro Penna as the title for his short film. However, he transposed the verse from its lyrical context into the harsh material reality of the Cuban countryside, where Leonardo and Mercedes coexist with farm animals. The middle-aged couple lives in extreme poverty, but not in sadness. Their private world, in contrast to their unchanging work routine, is imbued with warmth and joyful sensuality. Although they have almost nothing, they never cease to desire. This intimate portrait does not shy away from even the most physical expressions of love, which are also the most authentic expressions of the self in otherwise bleak social conditions. “It's the time when sleepy children are kissed on warm knees. But I, on long roads, with my eyes uselessly. Me, a worthless monster.” — Sandro Penna

Director Zhu Yudi filmed this devastating chronicle of the gradual decline of a family falling into debt, primarily in the company of his father. In recent years, his renovation company has been sinking deeper and deeper into debt due to investments in various projects in Chinese cities. Zhu accompanies his father on one of his regular business trips, during which he attempts to collect unpaid debts from clients. However, he also captures the escalating family disputes and his father's descent into ever-greater despair. Through one personal tragedy, the film shows the existential distress caused by the recent crisis in the Chinese real estate sector. The young filmmaker uses a professional camera to capture confrontational situations and composes them in a way that makes him not only an observer but also a direct participant, commenting on events from behind the camera while talking to his protagonists. His film is an immediate, authentic drama that remains in the intimate sphere but at the same time speaks to the state of Chinese society. “Dad rarely discusses his debts to me at home, not to mention the details of collecting debt. I had never been to Heibei, so I never thought it would be so difficult.”

The turbulent pre-election atmosphere in Indonesia becomes absurd background noise to everyday scenes of a stagnant village life in the film Sunshower. Director Micko Boanerges visits his grandparents in the countryside and observes how little the struggle over the country's fate disrupts the peaceful flow of life there. The minimalist film lets the black-and-white camera rest on everyday scenes in which so little happens that the rush to bring in the laundry at the onset of a rain shower becomes one of the most dramatic scenes. The director's grandparents barely exchange a few words and spend most of their time just relaxing, paying little attention to the disputes between election candidates blaring from the television. Sunshower can thus be viewed as a contribution to the meditative cinematography of empty scenes, but also as an ironic film that draws on the aesthetics of boredom, showing the contrast between the turbulent situation in the public sphere and people who rarely come into contact with it. “You said that the leaders who have never been poor couldn’t lead their people. I think that this statement is mistaken and has to be straightened out. What if the leaders who have always been wealthy turned out to be capable of leading.”

Documentary filmmaker Karel Malkoun comes from Lebanon, but has been living in Canada for the past few years. In 2022, when the economic crisis in her native country was at its peak, she decided to visit her family there. She turned her short trip into a collage-like diary in which she reflects on her relationship with her homeland, which is in a state of protracted decay. The film is composed of spontaneous snapshots capturing the author's stay, interspersed with inserted captions serving as personal, often poetically formulated comments and observations. As a result, the film does not hide its strongly subjective perspective, but at the same time builds on it to make an important statement that shows the transformation of Lebanese society in everyday details such as the appearance of the city itself or in the intimate sphere of the author's family life. Malkoun has created an immediate, raw, and deliberately unsorted impression capturing the absurdity and suddenness of situations that took her by surprise as a native returning from abroad. “They got married in the war, they had us in the war. We grew up in the war. Went to school in the war. Got married and had our kids, in the war. And also we will die, in the war. Regardless of whether it is an economical war or an actual war.”

The camera pans several times across the empty apartment. It seems spacious, unused, neglected. In this autobiographical film, the director returns to the places where her family lived before they were forced to flee the country. With its transformation into an authoritarian theocracy after 1979, Iran became a regime that oppressed many groups of the population—primarily women, but also advocates of liberal values and secularization. It was as if, almost overnight, the Middle Eastern country had become a different society. In the film, we cross this invisible boundary between the old and new worlds several times and, together with its author, try to catch the vanishing point on the horizon of both the past and the future. “My work is one concerned with the labour of memory, an attempt to make a placeholder for more to come forward, and an invitation to reflect together and participate in the archive.” — Bani Khoshnoudi

Inspired by Jonas Mekas' diary films and his father's home videos, Michal Böhm composes a candid self-portrait of his own desire for fatherhood from numerous visual fragments. Six years of life, dozens of gestures, smiles, and silent faces captured by the nimble eye of an 8mm camera. A breakup with a partner, a new relationship, his mother's serious illness, meetings with friends. Demonstrations, pandemics, war, and weddings. Things both fleeting and fundamental. Life as a fabric of fleeting impressions and the camera as a tool that captures, shapes, and preserves them for future generations. And above all, reflections on the future and the legacy we will leave behind, and doubts about whether this is the right world and the right time to have a child.“But there had to be a soundtrack, and an 8mm camera doesn't record sound on its own. So in the end, I used fragments of conversations and excerpts from my own and other people's speech.” — Michal BöhmSource: Dok.revue

Director Victoria Hely-Hutchinson offers us a glimpse into a hermetically sealed, highly privileged, yet deeply toxic microcosm in her family portrait Vacances. This time-lapse film, shot over a period of ten years, follows members of several generations of a wealthy aristocratic family with Austro-Hungarian roots. The entire film is set in a Provençal villa, whose social heart is the swimming pool, around which the women gather to exchange various observations and, surreptitiously, gossip. The centre of the family is the aging matriarch, who likes to talk about her extravagant, promiscuous life, but at the same time commands all the attention and authority of those around her. However, her influence gradually weakens with each passing generation. The director herself is a member of the family being filmed and captures the dynamics of their relationships with a directness that some of her relatives describe on camera as cruel. “You would like to get all the sort of the crunchy wickedness out of people. And then you’re like a little elf going, ‘Hahahaa! Look what I have. I’ve got the money to splurge.’ And I think to myself, ‘Yeah, but you’re pretty wicked.’”

Marion Guillard is an ornithologist and filmmaker who has been capturing wild nature since her youth. Images of nature also dominate her autobiographical essays. However, the author's voiceover tells a story that is different from the journey across the United States she once embarked on with her family—it tells of her complex relationship with her own body and sexuality. Parallels gradually emerge between seemingly unrelated topics. The bulimia Guillard suffered from as a teenager was not limited to fast food. Similarly, she did not limit herself in collecting footage of the landscape, which helped her divert her attention from her own physicality. With the passage of time, she realizes how much she was determined by culture and society in both cases – in her view of herself and the outside world. “A succession of sequences illustrating various forms of representation of nature, such as wildlife films, natural parks and zoos, are set in motion around my personal experience as a wildlife filmmaker, visual artist, ornithologist, woman and body.” — Marion Guillard