Silvan Skrivanic was the last inhabitant of a remote island in the Adriatic Sea, but even the traces of his existence are gradually disappearing – whether in the memories of others or in a landscape ravaged by a harsh climate. With the fading shadows of the human soul, it is as if life itself is disappearing from the island, leaving behind only the wind, the skeletons of animals and the inscriptions on the walls that have lost their meaning for others.“The traces of the last soul and the prints of its existence, the messages of a place where everything has disappeared.”

A tiny light source in motion is captured by an extremely slow exposure, which leaves a trace of its trajectory in the emulsion. The artist prepared an extensive 13-part score for his film number 3, which includes exposure length, colour, camera position, light trail width and speed of movement. At the same time, however, he attached the light to a double pendulum, which behaves completely unpredictably under certain circumstances.“I have long been fascinated by the fact that it is possible to construct a static image using movement and that it is possible to recreate movement by showing several of these static images in succession. In this way, both the images as well as the transformations of those images are caused by interference between the movement of one single light-germ and the movement of the film camera. I regard this as a kind of zero point of photographically recorded film.” - Joost RekveldSource: joostrekveld.net

On 27 September 2020, a second war over Nagorno-Karabakh broke out between the internationally unrecognised Republic of Artsakh and Azerbaijan. During this forty-four-day conflict, the director's younger brother, Soghomon, who had just completed his military service, disappeared in the middle of the war zone. In an attempt to cope with the fear and uncertainty that paralyzed her family for the next two years as they tried hard to find Soghomon, Shoghakat Vardanyan began to record everyday reality on her phone's camera. A remarkably mature, harrowing and hopeful documentary debut from a director who had no previous experience with film, it proves that even the most painful loss can only be reconciled in the moment of closure.“I made this film for the people who are still held in captivity, and for all the families who lost somebody. It is emotionally a very difficult film, but maybe watching it can be therapeutic for them.” — Shoghakat Vardanyan Quote source: IDFA

We all perceive poetry differently. For some, a poem is a rhyming text, for others a metaphysical experience. For director Kateřina Dudová, it is an experiment with three people who are close to her, whom she places in one room for three days, leaving them to their fate with the task of writing a poem. Sometimes the recording of real events is more poetic than the poem itself. “I was given the task of making a 'film poem', but I hate poems, so I'm looking for something… the feeling I want to get from poetry, how I feel. What is a poem?” – Kateřina Dudová

During the three weeks before spring, the filmmaker captured the same panoramic view from the window. Each day, he inserted three identical rolls of film into the camera in a repeating sequence, but each day he put a differently perforated mask on the lens and opened the aperture at different sections of the 90-metre film strip. According to a predetermined scheme, this created a time-lapse collage in which moments of the same place from different times appear side by side.

The quadratic number 36 and its subsets, including the prime numbers into which it can be broken down, function as the basic organizing principle of a two-minute video divided into three fields in which the transformations of vertical and horizontal structures take place and are linked together by Stefan Németh's minimalist electronic soundtrack. The work recalls early digital aesthetics, absolute film and minimalist compositions.

This experimental film takes a closer look through the entomologist's lens at the cyclical behavioural patterns linking humans to the insect world. Just as the fig wasp inevitably finds death in the pollination of the fig tree flower, we too are thrown into the dance of passion and death. Drawn by the seductive scent of allurement and the inevitability of the final end. “I believe that documentaries, and especially art in general, can process reality in an alchemical way so that it has the right representation.”Source quote: Dok.revue

Word gets out that someone has awakened God, so Tsai heads to the temple with a digital camera to film it. But along the way, all he sees are bloody rituals, celebrations of the body and shamanic ceremonies until he discovers a gateway to the underworld. Subways, passageways, sewers, blowing wind, the harsh light of fluorescent lamps and emptiness. Perhaps there he'll find the voice of God, which is reminiscent of the silence of dead fish.

For Christine Angot, since the beginning of her writing career, her books have been a space where she has been able to express what no one wanted to see or hear. Like incest. She was abused by her father since the age of 13. In her directorial debut, she goes back to the places where it happened and confronts those who were silent at the time. First her father's wife. Then her mother or her ex-partner. Long, uncomfortable but also cathartic dialogues are interspersed with excerpts from family films and photographs from the author's traumatic adolescence. From these fragments of the past, she composes a portrait of the man who stole her childhood. She is now using the written and spoken word to take it back.“For the other scenes, the camera pushed us to communicate in ways we never had before, partly because of the whole filmmaking apparatus — the crew that had travelled by train, the camera operators standing around, the soundman, etc. There’s a formality to a film shoot that obliges you to have more than just a casual conversation.”Quote source: The Hollywood Reporter

In the summer of 1982, during the intervention in Lebanon, the Israeli army left behind three thousand dead and seized the archives of the Palestinian Research Institute in Beirut. The Ministry of Defence misused the vast collection of Palestinian books, photographs and films for propaganda purposes. Palestinian Aljafari reclaims the appropriated images and, through cinematic sabotage, removes them from their forced ideological context. He crosses out in red the commentaries and figures of the winners; he poetically colours, associatively connects and adamantly condemns. His collage, which has the Arabic word fidai in its title, meaning to sacrifice for the good of the whole, is an act of political defiance and artistic liberation.“Aljafari has described his approach as the ‘camera of the dispossessed’ by recovering lost images and memories of life in Palestine. The documentary has decontextualized pre-existing material as a form of artistic and political liberation.”Quote source: POV Magazine

High in the mountains, life is a little different. Close to the glaciers, away from civilization, you can see the stars in the night sky more clearly, you can meditate in complete silence or feel humility face to face with the elements. But you can also observe, as if from the front row, the retreat of the ice masses and the destruction associated with it. This poetic documentary touching the Alpine peaks is dedicated to people who move at heights yet never act as if they’re above anyone. Instead, they stay in place, surrounded by nature, just like this film, trying to capture the genius loci of an environment where time is usually measured in eons and ages.  “Flower of Mine continuously changes points of view in ‘describing the [mountain] life that flows at various levels’.” Quote source: Variety

An intimate soliloquy about memory, dreams and anxiety, which takes on the form of a therapeutic dialogue, is the prelude to the footage of an original dance performance in which the movements of the dancer and her double are gently desynchronised. The artist's voice, in a distinctly stereophonic recording, interprets a text based on her diary.