24th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
My God Never Dies
director: Daichi Amano
original title: Watashi no kami ha shinanai
country: Japan
year: 2019
running time: 17 min.
synopsis
Nearly twenty years ago, a Muslim refugee whose face we don’t get to see crossed the border of Myanmar, a country plagued by ethnic-religious conflict. He has since been unsuccessfully applying for asylum in Japan. Deprived of the opportunity to work and live outside a refugee facility, the now-40-year-old man turns to Allah as his last hope for human dignity.biography
Japanese documentary filmmaker Daichi Amano is a graduate of the California Institute of Art s(CalArts) and now works in Tokyo. He has focused on refugees and portrayed people's stories since then. His work includes the documentary Days (2010) and the feature film Flowing (2012).
more about film
director: | Daichi Amano |
producer: | Daichi Amano |
editing: | Daichi Amano |
music: | R N S T |
sound: | Yukiko Shimizu |
other films in the section

Contrary to popular belief, rape most often occurs among those who know each other and those who are close, all in a seemingly safe home environment. This documentary draws attention to the problem and reconstructs the memories of victims of sexual violence whose testimony manages to free a standard furnished apartment of its aura of innocence.
The Lamp in the Ceiling
Anette Svane
Norway / 2019 / 7 min.
section: Short Joy
World Premiere

"She was defending her son like a tigress," is how the protagonist of the experimental film describes his traumatizing encounter with death. The circumstances of the incident are somewhat unclear but what is essential is the way its eyewitnesses reacted and the feelings it provoked in the narrator which are portrayed by the film through a powerful montage of black-and-white shots.
La Tigresse
Fabrizio Paterniti Martello
Italy / 2019 / 14 min.
section: Short Joy
World Premiere

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.
On Guard
Jeamin Cha
South Korea / 2018 / 18 min.
section: Short Joy
European Premiere

A shop by the side of the road. One after another, people enter and exit the small building. The randomness and illogical nature of the action feels unreal. The sense of timelessness and of being in an unnamed place further heightens the dreamlike nature of the scene. The nearly motionless black-and-white camera records a fragment of life in a place torn from the context of the world.
Dream
Laila Pakalnina
Latvia / 2016 / 7 min.
section: Short Joy
World Premiere

This conceptual work reconstructs the memories of a hotel room in the so-called red-light district in the city of Makati in the Philippines. The objects which dominate the author's perspective are pillows and blankets. However, extreme close-ups reveal other objects in the room and what is behind them.
Pillow and Blanket
Jan Philippe Carpio
Philippines / 2019 / 11 min.
section: Short Joy
World Premiere

This minimalist six-minute film looks at the creation of animal life through time-lapse footage of an embryo’s development – a process universal to all animals, including people. The film follows, in microscopic detail, the development of an alpine newt in its translucent egg all the way from first cell division to moment of hatching.
Becoming
Jan van IJken
Netherlands / 2018 / 6 min.
section: Short Joy
World Premiere

A personal documentary about writing two diaries and finding a lost childhood friend who once moved with her parents back to her native China. Static shots of the streets of a Chinese metropolis and its surrounding natural beauty alternate with retrospective scenes from the Argentine homeland, suggestively drawing the viewer into the girl's loneliness in an unfamiliar environment.
Shendy Wu: a Diary
Ingrid Pokropek
Argentina / 2019 / 17 min.
section: Short Joy
European Premiere

The film assembles images from the daily work of livestock breeders in the unhospitable Hungarian steppe, where the universal laws of time have ceased to apply. The interplay between the panoramic shots of the landscape combined with details of daily farm life create a gloomy vision of a place that dooms all who live there, human and animal alike, to decay.
Beast
Alyx Ayn Arumpac
Hungary, Philippines / 2016 / 15 min.
section: Short Joy
World Premiere

The film’s creator, in the role of an earthling walking the streets of Paris, asks the eternal question: Are we alone in the universe? While attempting to find the truth and therefore quiet the constant musings, the filmmaker holds interviews with astrophysicist Nicolas Prantzos, science historian Florence Raulin Cerceau, and sociologist Pierre Lagrange.
The Hypothesis
Bruno Saboia
France / 2018 / 20 min.
section: Short Joy
World Premiere

Using simple animation with outline figures and objects against a dark background that evokes nightmares, an anonymous 16-year-old youth, a repeat offender at a correctional facility for juveniles, recounts his criminal past caused by traumatic experiences with domestic abuse within his family.
The Holiday Inn-Side
Charby Ibrahim
Australia / 2018 / 20 min.
section: Short Joy
European Premiere

Lucyna and Krzysztof are a long-time married couple who operate a salvage yard in a socially excluded area of Łódź, Poland. Patrycja Polkowska’s observational documentary captures how the couple transforms the salvage yard every day into an eccentric microcosm where all those who are offended or humiliated can find help.
24 Praska St
Patrycja Polkowska
Poland / 2016 / 16 min.
section: Short Joy
International Premiere

The goal the protagonist of the film has set for himself seems impossible to him: to contact his former partner in order to see his own son. On a deeper level, this video essay on what is and isn't possible unifies the footage it uses - videos freely accessible on YouTube and a monochromatic yellow filter through which they are presented.
Impossibility
Leonardo Barbuy
Peru / 2019 / 9 min.
section: Short Joy
European Premiere