Opus Bonum

The documentary’s brief synopsis sounds like an unconventional fairy tale – an old hermit and a young girl who can communicate with birds hear the singing of an unknown bird one day and set off into the forest and an abandoned mine to find it. Although the story involves modern recording equipment and microphones, this doesn’t detract from its fairy-tale poeticism. With birdsong at its centre, the film encourages concentrated listening, while at the same time leading us to reflect on the fact that even a sound as ordinary as birdsong has something mysterious about it. “Deep in the forests, the natural world offer itself up in equal proportions to the curiosity of scientists and the passions of poets.” ---Source: https://www.cinemadureel.org/en/films/7h15-merle-noir-2/    

Tainan County is located on the southwest coast of Taiwan. The locals have a modest lifestyle and make their living by rice farming and fishing. The filmmaker lived there for twelve years, capturing the beautiful coastal landscape and the lives of its inhabitants. This time-lapse documentary shows the transformation of nature and urban settlement by human activity as the permanence of tradition and human belonging. Static shots of sea waves and vast rice field give the impression of photographs come to life, creating a contemplative documentary film about the sense of timelessness in a Southeast Asian rural community.“In 2021, while I was busy with the final stage of the post-production, my father suddenly passed away. I thought the best gift I could give him is this work full of sea salt and heavy wind, which very much resembled our lives and destiny.”---Source: Director Statement, Taiwan Docs. https://docs.tfai.org.tw/en/film/6738

Three groups of adolescent girl friends from Quebec are going through tough changes. The process of inventing their own bodies and identity are being recorded on the move by their smartphones and shared with their peers from other parts of the networked world. Due to their strong need of external confirmation, they alter their lives into a series of retouched pictures and videos. The film camera, however, captures their feelings of void, loneliness and deep inner insecurities that are not so attractive for Periscope, TikTok or Instagram. An intimate portrait of adolescence is made with full comprehension of experiencing and self-presentation in a generation growing up on the brink of the real and virtual worlds.“It's easier to talk to your phone than it is to talk to people.”

A filmmaker and a young, left-wing activist named Pierre meet outside amidst the pandemonium of civil unrest. Every Saturday, they take to the streets of Paris in support of the yellow vests movement. Originally, when the yellow vest protests started in November 2018, it was about calling for affordable housing and cheaper fuel prices. Later the protests expanded to include demands for economic justice and the French president's resignation. The film consists of footage shot from the heart of the crowd and authentic interviews with opponents and supporters of the movement. The author's introspective voiceover thematizes the passion and romantic feelings brewing inside her despite the brutality and urgency of the demonstrations.“It’s the thread of loving passion and unreasonable bewitchment that the filmmaker has chosen to pull upon, as a mirror to the fiery, revolutionary hopes of a social movement gathering together individuals from very different horizons every week on the streets of Paris.” (Fabien Lemerciera)---Source: https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/423280/

In the midst of a vast desert in the American West lie the abandoned ruins of a ghost town. A young person, Eileen, decided to leave the hectic hustle and bustle of modern life to live there and dedicate their life to hard work. During the day, they repair the crumbling houses in the town, at night they sleep in their trailer. They meet many locals and travelers with whom they share both their joys and doubts. The longitudinal documentary works as a double portrait: a portrait of a person defying society’s ideas and a portrait of a place living in the past, full of idiosyncratic figures and fascinating life stories.

“I had many friends before the war; many of them are dead now”, one of the narrators comments, looking at a photo of her classmates. “We had a perfect life, but we were never satisfied,” she adds laconically. The secondary school in Mostar united them, the War of Independence divided them. This mosaic of memories of the early 1990s is composed of contemporary postcards and silent shots of places where wars were once fought. Their calmness today contrasts with the emotional excerpts from the letters of the Croatian students. They describe their flight across the border, their experiences in refugee camps, and their lingering hatred of the enemies who robbed them of their home and youth.“They took everything from me, everything I had. They drove me from my home, robbed me, imprisoned my father, destroyed my city and everything I loved about it.”  

Josete Massa Residence in Madrid is the world’s first retirement home for senior LGTBIQ+ citizens. Javier Codesal filmed here between 2019 and 2020, while the building was undergoing renovations. He places the residents of the home among the rubble almost like living sculptures in a gallery. Their bodies, like their souls, defy heteronormative notions of beauty. They recite fragments of biblical texts and quote Pasolini and Jarman like modern-day apostles. The religious texts flowing from their lips are not so much about faith as they are about cultural tradition. They have laid the foundations for centuries of canonical narratives that reduce the representatives of sexual minorities to a set of stereotypes.“A woman being made from Adam´s rib attributes a mythical importance to trans people. This fable leads us to believe that the physical reality of trans expresses the original traits of our changeable corporeality.”

Taiwan and Austria, two countries on two different continents, two cultures. Two dance ensembles separated by many differences and yet their members speak the same language. The director spent two years with his camera, attending dance rehearsals of the Vienna State Ballet and the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre from Taiwan. He has captured how small gestures, steps and figures create a performance that we will not see in the end and his film shows more than just the final work. We can see a living matter that is being squeezed and shaped into an ideal form under the guidance of a choreographer. Art is like life and life is like art.„Rehearsals are always a breathtaking work. No interviews, no commentary and no subtitles – the body language says enough.“

On the Greek island of Arki there are a thousand goats, but only thirty people. Among them is a single child, a boy named Kristos, who is just finishing his first year of primary school. In order to complete his primary education, he would have to go to another island to study, which his parents cannot afford. However, Kristos' teacher Maria is determined to do everything in her power. In this poetic observational documentary, a ten-year-old boy faces the dilemma of whether to stay on his native island and become a shepherd like his father and brothers, or venture into the unknown.“This film has its roots in my childhood. My father was a passionate sailor and every year we sailed around the Aegean Sea. Out of all the Dodecanese, Arki became the island dearest to my heart. When my father died, I felt I had to go back and I was sad to learn that there was only one child left on the island, the only student at its small elementary school. Soon I realized that Kristos was the same age I was when I landed on the island for the first time. What does it mean to be totally alone and to grow up without a friend? I felt the desire to make a documentary about how life turned out for this child.” — Giulia Amati---Source: https://www.giornatedegliautori.com/en/program/kristos-the-last-child-eng/

Switzerland is one of the few European countries that still has mandatory military service. This film provides a glimpse behind the walls of the barracks, where soldiers participate in the required drills and exercises, but also find ways in which to alleviate boredom. We watch young recruits during daily activities: eating, cleaning, and video conversations with the surrounding world. However, the montage also includes the vlogs of men who have already completed their military training and share their experiences, anecdotes, and frustrations over the internet. In this way, the problematic aspects of a militarized society appear in between entertaining excerpts from military life.“The people who shared the room with me would wail / yo, I don’t want to always hear hip hop first thing in the morning / I said, I don’t care, I have to destroy these bad feelings from the military.”---Source: Rap by a soldier from the film Over Our Hills (28:40-28:56)  

What does the world look like from a non-human perspective? This surprisingly poetic film, which can be boldly described as an example of pure cinema, takes us on a journey through the seasons using security camera footage from various parts of the world. Individual, seemingly neutral snippets of life look like moving canvases with paintings or postcards that allow us to see places we could never otherwise visit. The cameras, like surveillance tools, reveal the unexpected beauty of industrial spaces, private buildings, and natural landscapes.“Self-Portrait takes charge of its own interpretations, imaginings, and fictions for each moment, but aims still to leave room for the subjectivity of viewers, allowing them to find their own meaning or to slip into their own fictions.”

Sisco, Cecilia, Gibbo and Armelle work as hired crop pickers. Along with other seasonal workers, they sleep on the farmers’ land before moving on to the next farm. Their irregular worktime depends on the cyclic changes of the weather. For a while, they pick strawberries in Denmark, and then move on to vine in France or oranges in Spain. Even if they find themselves on the society’s edge, with their nomadic way of life condemned by some and adored by others, they remain relatively free and independent. And it counts both in work and money. Precarity, a daily object of struggle of others, is their very own life style. They do not know what tomorrow will bring for them, yet they are still left with a lot of time for dreams and plays.“We believe that a shift in certain paradigms is necessary in our society, especially regarding the way of being with others. We believe that pain, agitation, insecurity, weakness are not feelings to be avoided. The crisis must be be embraced, lived.” (Angrisani Giulia, Mattia Petullà)---Source: https://cvb.be/sites/default/files/catalogue/dp_tiv_fr.pdf

In December 2020, the pandemic caused the cancellation of all performances the filmmaker had arranged for a small experimental theatre in Queens, New York City. She and her partner, a composer, decided to move into the theatre for two weeks and perform every night for an absent audience. The film consists of a mixture of genres and forms, from stand-up performances, to monologues about art and life, to musical installations. Combined with documentary footage of everyday actions, the film reveals the tragicomic fate of an artist in quarantine, whose work is meaningless without a live audience. “The joke doesn’t exist without an audience.”

Even after more than 25 years since the dreadful war crimes had been taking place in former Yugoslavia, this tragic history is far from over – be it for the victims’ families, conflicting nations or for a Czech investigator who comes back to the region to carry on in his work after so many years. The documentary return voyage follows not only the paths of fleeing war criminals, but is driven by an effort to capture a part of the ethic mission of the then newly formed International Criminal Court in The Hague along, in its double nature: based on an independent investigation of war crimes, to strive for reconciliation in cases of multifarious ethnic, national and other conflicts.“The International Criminal Court has successfully condemned only a small part of war criminals in former Yugoslavia – one hundred of the conflict’s major perpetrators carrying either military or political responsibility. Naturally, these solved cases definitely retain a symbolic meaning.”---Source: https://www.denik.cz/ze_sveta/jugoslavie-valka-chorvatsko-20210815.html  

Even after more than 25 years since the dreadful war crimes had been taking place in former Yugoslavia, this tragic history is far from over – be it for the victims’ families, conflicting nations or for a Czech investigator who comes back to the region to carry on in his work after so many years. The documentary return voyage follows not only the paths of fleeing war criminals, but is driven by an effort to capture a part of the ethic mission of the then newly formed International Criminal Court in The Hague along, in its double nature: based on an independent investigation of war crimes, to strive for reconciliation in cases of multifarious ethnic, national and other conflicts.“The International Criminal Court has successfully condemned only a small part of war criminals in former Yugoslavia – one hundred of the conflict’s major perpetrators carrying either military or political responsibility. Naturally, these solved cases definitely retain a symbolic meaning.”---Source: https://www.denik.cz/ze_sveta/jugoslavie-valka-chorvatsko-20210815.html

A babysitter, a bunch of laborers, and a long-haul truck driver. All were born in Slovakia, but after the country joined the EU, they took the opportunity to work elsewhere in the Schengen zone. During week-long work shifts in Austria, Germany, or on European motorways, they try to get used to their foreign environments while struggling to maintain contact with their children and partners. For their future, they left for better-paying jobs. Now they are losing them by their absence. They don't know what awaits them when they return home. A trio of saddening stories compose a laconic portrait of a globalised labour market that allows people to fulfil their dreams, but often at great sacrifice.

Yoyogi is a park located in the center of Tokyo and the setting as well as the main character of this documentary. However, it is not the director’s intention to present the history of the park – apart from the opening title, the audience will not learn any facts about it. The documentary without voiceover captures the park and its visitors only with a static camera and soft editing. Children playing on a monument, a couple on a bench hugging under an umbrella, young men competing in a rap battle, a homeless man passed by somebody, a girl making a TikTok video, a group of black men singing a song in a foreign language. A meditative observation.“This film combines two strange and seemingly overlapping peculiarities. On the one hand, there is a distant, almost scientific in its dryness, observation of ordinary scenes of people’s life in the park, on the other hand, a feeling of some kind of magic and the impossibility of what is happening.”---Source: https://allfilm.ee/work/yoyogi-haiku/