Hanawon

Dawson City in Canada’s Yukon Territory abounds in goldmines and lack of sunshine. This portrait of the town is an audiovisual collage on the search for the sun and gold, history, and the everyday realities of its inhabitants. The atmosphere of cold, snowy Canada infuses the film with a dark mood reminiscent of Twin Peaks.

A woman sells her five-year-old son to a French tourist for 100 dollars, but the dream of a better life turns into years of physical and sexual abuse. This animated film looks at young Fekri’s journey during the most vulnerable years of his life. Can he recover enough to leave his family?

Saudi Arabian cinema only recently emerged from thirty-five years of being an underground phenomenon. Before it was legalized, Bentley Brown used his childhood home movie camera to record filmmakers working in the town of Jeddah. The film’s melancholy mood is underscored by the voiceover of the women who form most of the film crew.

The ferry's name was Sewol (which means the passing of time), and it happened in April (which is Sawol in Korean). The tragic death of a larger number of people affected the film’s director to such a degree that she decided to make this contemplative miniature, which brings together reflections about the absurd accident and interpersonal distances with 3D animation of personal living space.DETAIL:“It was not my life. It was someone else’s. It was not my tragedy. It happened to others. There was no particular reason why I survived. Nor was there any reason why they died.”

The film is a skit on the parallels between a caretaker and a security guard embodied by the character of a young man who keeps watching over everything all the time. Repetitive and automated everyday tasks are accentuated by monotonous aesthetics of the camera and a slow-moving pace, introducing the audience into the world of Korean pragmatic mentality and sense of responsibility. 

In a Moscow apartment, Andrei Tarkovsky’s sister and brother-in-law remember the famous filmmaker. A film-collage consisting of family photos, visual impressions, narrative scraps, and vague and confusing memories reveals neglected fragments from the life of the Russian artist against a background of ambient music.

At the funeral of her grandmother, Yanlin, a young Chinese girl, learns that the deceased was a medium – and was possessed by a spirit named Gong. The film is Yanlin’s personal confessional – she never believed in the existence of miracles, but is now becoming interested in the world of spiritualism and finding out who Gong was in order to understand her grandmother better.

Intercut footage of the camera panning along two sides of Havana Bay. Every few seconds, our act of viewing is disturbed for several seconds as the camera shifts from one side to the other. The rhythm of this panoramic view is determined by the editing. The 12-minute film invites the viewer on an experimentally filmed journey by boat from Old Havana to Casa Blanca.DETAIL:The sound of waves. The camera’s gaze shifts from the dark-blue surface of the water to the shoreline. An abandoned industrial building and lazily floating boats along the shore represent tools for transforming the abandoned bay.

This film is the video diary of a Ukrainian mother from Mariupol, a city close to the turbulent Donetsk Region. A series of several-minute long records of commonplace views from a window, following tracks in the snow, and strolls in the surroundings form a loving visual message for her daughter in Kyiv.

An observational look at the interaction between two elderly women: 100-year-old Ema and her six years younger sister Zosie. The camera sensitively documents how these two once famous hostesses try to bake a cake at their advanced age. In so doing, it offers a perceptive portrait of their personalities and their relationships.  

A three-hundred-kilometer unmaintained dirt road is the only way to reach the nearest hospital from a remote African village. Through naturalistic observational camerawork, the film captures the journey of an ambulance driver in southern Ethiopia struggling to overcome all possible obstacles in order to safely deliver a laboring woman to the doctors.

The documentary captures a data cable from Chinese company Huawei being laid out onto the seabed floor. Two robot-like voiceovers – English and Mandarin – reflect on the nature of technology and how they overlap with business, war, politics and society. They are not given any explicit identity and it can be interpreted as a conversation of artificial intelligence or as a symbolic dialogue between the US and China in the midst of a Cold War for technology.