Transit

This politico-aesthetic essay is based on found footage from the filmmaker’s family archive. The horrifying parallel between horse breeding and the Nazi racial ideology takes on sharp contours thanks to the dry commentary and the montages of seemingly meaningless, coldly real images, which do not allow the film to drop down to the level of a mental or emotional exploitation of the topic.

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.

This film presents the pragmatic downside of live sex websites through following the performing partners during their breaks between sex acts. The voyeuristic eye of the webcam captures trivial arguments between partners, political discussions, and the boredom and tired resignation of people trapped in a virtual aquarium.DETAIL:“Don't slap me, it hurts. I am a small girl and it hurts me as well.” “You are quite something. You are hypocrite. Do you think when you slap me it doesn't hurt? Do you know how much those fucking scratches hurt me?”

There’s a helpline just for gay farmers. Through authentic recordings and reconstructed situations, the film offers a glimpse into the issue of British gay men from rural areas. For farmers it’s difficult enough to admit their orientation to themselves, let alone to their not-so-gay-friendly surroundings. 

A humorous conceptual game based on a simple idea – filming amateur swimmers as they get ready to jump from a 10-meter platform. The short scenes are a mixture of slapstick, miniature psychological portraits, and aesthetic studies of physical and verbal expressions and courage.

Extinction of monarch butterflies in the US became a topic of a film based on manipulation of found footage. The director adjusts archival recordings of butterflies or planes spreading fertilizers through double exposure, scratching, colouring and so don, coming up with a purely visual micro-essay asking who is really the pest and who is the infested in this ecosystem.

Two elderly gays spice up their relationship with a series of sex games that include a quirky game of father and son. The protagonists not only talk about their sexual habits, but also even demonstrate them for the dispassionate camera. Depictions of intimacy in film are once again pushed to their limits.

In a single take lasting several minutes, the film shows the village of Hladivode (whose names means “Cooling Waters”) near Sarajevo. After a slow tracking shot across an orchard, the camera zooms out to show a group of men engaged in conversation. They are filling in the bullet holes on a ruined building – a reminder of the recent events in the Balkan peninsula’s turbulent history.

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.

Four migrants from Mozambique provide eyewitness testimony about the racially motivated attacks that took place in Hoyerswerda, Saxony, in 1991. Their report is read to accompany archive shots, obtained directly in the streets of German city, which are shown in one half of the frame. The other half contains drone surveillance footage obtained by Frontex, the agency responsible for protecting the European Union’s borders.DETAIL:“They shouted ‘Blacks out of this country’. They threw stones at the windows. On this day there were three of us seriously injured. Two came from the fair, one was beaten up at the intersection.”

Translator Riccardo Bertani almost never leaves his house, but still travels in his imagination through his linguistic book transformations. For him, language is a true gateway to other worlds. And although the translator speaks the entire time about other worlds and the frontiers of knowledge, we observe his home in detail from an intimate distance.DETAIL:“I've always been interested in Russian writers but my first translation have been from Ukrainian. Within 6-7 weeks I was already writing Ukrainian. And then the Russians followed and then many others until the Yakutsk.”

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.