First Lights

It started with an autobiographical art project. Miriam Bajtala used the floor plans of the 18 apartments she had lived in until now. They served as canvases on which she used words and colors to transfer her memories of the given space as well as the disadvantageous socio-economic factors that shaped her as a woman and a foreigner. In the confrontation she had begun with her own family history, the author is now continuing the film, which is fiction, documentary and performance. Different spaces and dimensions of existence – national, class, gender – are constantly layered on top of each other and rearranged in it. The result of the act of visualization and updating becomes a spatial curriculum vitae. “My experiment of creating a conceptual coming-of-age film.” — Miriam BajtalaSource: sixpackfilm

During the first wave of Covid-19, four young Ukrainian filmmakers retreat to the countryside to work on their artistic projects. Where they were looking for peace and escape from pandemic restrictions, they end up finding much more. The film diary, in which the director's voice speaks to the overman within, becomes not only a record of creative development and search, but also a description of the painful journey to the knowledge of one's inner self. The separation does not only refer to the spatial and relational distance between individuals, but can also be understood in the coordinates of the separation of individual layers of the personality in the process of self-observation.“Separation is a natural process of destruction, which exposes a person, leaving them alone with themselves.”Source: IMDb

Simone, Francesca and Olivia are three young people from Bologna who are members of the Communist Renewal Party. Full of life, they take part in demonstrations and party meetings and believe that they can change the current world, dominated by ruthless capitalism and pressure for performance, for the better. At least until the moment when it turns out that it is almost impossible to change the minds of the older party members and the unsuccessful attempts to win new supporters intersect with the difficulties in their personal lives. Comrades is an empathetic time-lapse portrait that shows how the current young generation is losing its illusions due to social pressure and turbulent internal changes, and how difficult it is to keep faith in what we believe makes sense.“By telling the stories of Olivia, Francesca and Simone, I try to show topics shared by many 20-30-year-olds: overstimulation, confusion, and awareness of social inequalities, accompanied by a difficulty in translating their good intentions into actions that bring about real change.” — Joanna JanikowskaQuote source: CineLink Industry Days

Some doctors refer to the situation of babies born long before term as a grey zone. At 24 weeks, the fetus is not yet legally perceived as a full human being and the pregnancy can be terminated prematurely. This introspective documentary puts us in the position of a mother inextricably linked to her child who, directly from birth, is given only slim chances of survival by the doctors. The film's tribute to mothers and families of premature babies stands out for the harrowing yet disarming honesty with which the director speaks of her own feelings of fear, humiliation, hopelessness, and hope as her son makes further progress. “Through the intimate confession of a mother, the documentary portrays the often traumatic reality of premature birth, the special care for a premature newborn or later a child with special needs or disabilities.” Source quote: Film profile at AVF

Me + You follows twin sisters Sanaa and Zohra. What begins as Zohra’s exploration of their Moroccan heritage gradually reveals the shifting dynamics of their relationship, as Sanaa’s deepening love for Islam becomes more apparent. The film unfolds as a journey of mutual understanding — a cinematic dialogue fueled by their desire to connect. An intimate portrait of sisterly love and independence. “Me + You endeavours to celebrate the nuances, complexities, and idiosyncrasies of being a young Belgian-Moroccan woman, with the hope of resonating with those who are still searching for their place in this world, as well as with those who value the meaningfulness of such an evolvement.” - Zohra BenhammouQuote source: Business Doc Europe

Fifty-five-year-old Hajar, who has spent her entire life in the nomadic Iranian tribe of Bakhtiari, is betrayed and disappointed by her closest family, who want to force her to settle down and peacefully live out her life in the city. Although the circumstances, including the patriarchal social system, increasing urbanization and climate change, are not in her favour, Hajar is not going to give up her flock of sheep or her nomadic freedom. In her extremely empathetic, partly personal documentary debut, director Marjan Khosravi creates a portrait of a strong woman who, even in the face of turbulent modernity, does not want to let herself be deprived of the most valuable things she has – memories, traditions, contact with nature and the joy of free movement.“I immediately figured out that Hajar and her personal story is the concept of my new film and I decided to make a film about her and all the other women like her: traditional women and their struggles with modern life. Their families always decide for them, yet they are never happy with these decisions. These women are not heard by anyone.” — Marjan KhosraviSource: Variety

Diego Revollo first had to go deaf to learn to listen. According to conventional medicine, the director's deafness was incurable until he met Ortiz Ramos, a Bolivian healer from the Kallawaya shamanic nation. According to their teachings, which are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, urbanisation has severed man's connection with place, resulting in a rift between body and soul. Civilisation is sick and can only be cured by reconnecting with nature. The intoxicating details of the structures, the contemplatively ethnographic cinematography and the atmospheric soundtrack therapeutically return to matter, shapes, touch and the senses and restore the connection to our animal origins.“Perhaps for humans, healing is more akin to the ability to understand than to regenerate. To understand is to discover the deep meaning of something, to embrace it from all sides.”

Folk poetry collector Ōtani Masae visits the residents of the mountain village of Ubuyama in southern Japan and collects songs that are over a thousand years old. However, continuity is only an illusion and ancient cultural heritage is subject to fragmentary memory, rewriting and new contexts. Ballads, confessions and prayers are thus not a chronicle of old times, but a liberating manifesto against the patriarchal tradition that for centuries confined women to the solitude of their homes. Lyrically layered on 16mm filmstrip, with the intimacy of a family video and the poetics of a visual essay, the images explore the fragile power of ephemeral detail and the cathartic effect of communication and sharing.“By making this film, I have been able to discover and be amazed by the transformative power of the Japanese ‘uta’ (‘uta’ meaning song and poem at the same time). Gently, they help loosen iron bonds. They float over Ubuyama-mura’s heavy hetero-patriarchal heritage and its strict, unwritten laws of behaviour.”Source: Jorge Suárez Quiñones RivasFunded by INJUVE Grant for Contemporary Creation and Grant for contemporary creation and national and international mobility, Madrid City Council.

A lyrical tapestry of life and landscape, The Unfixing reveals one mother’s path from illness to healing and from climate despair to environmental awakening. American filmmaker Nicole Betancourt fell ill in 2014. For a long time, she did not know the cause of the disease affecting her body and mind. But she could not devote herself properly to her work or raising two children. The stress, uncertainty and isolation made her stop and reflect. She began to perceive the health problems of herself and her loved ones in the context of the destruction of the entire planet. Her journey to the roots of personal and global grief takes the form of a layered collage in which themes and visual styles alternate cyclically. Through an intimate diary, animation, archival family films or interviews with doctors, indigenous teachers, and systems thinkers she looks for parallels between her own life and the landscape and finds hope at the intersection of both.“I hope that this film offers another way to face the sickness in our bodies and the earth, a path of allowing, listening, receiving – all things I thought were passive. Now I know they are active, courageous, and acts of rebellion.” — Nicole BetancourtSource: The Unfixing

This playful poetic documentary finds its whole world in the library. In libraries, that is, because they are all connected in an imaginary universe made up of aisles, book spines, letters, words and stories. Night after night, two female travellers venture into it; sometimes their steps cross and they remain in brief conversation, sometimes they wander along their own routes of their thoughts and imaginations. Because in books you can find literally everything beyond the walls of the library. And all it takes is a slight change of letters, a red becomes read, an isle becomes aisle, and the whole cosmos is spun on its axis by the single powerful force of creativity and imagination. “I’m interested in the feeling and movement of everyday life and ordinary places. I start my films intuitively around that—the structure often comes from circumstances around making the film.” Source quote: Innersense

Marie Tomanová travelled from Mikulov to the USA as an au pair, and today she shoots campaigns for fashion brands such as Nike, Instagram, or for the fashion magazines such as Vogue CS. However, her name is better known abroad than in her native country, which provided few opportunities for the young painter. Paradoxically, it was only in New York, far from home, that she was able to grow up and find herself - a transition greatly supported by Marie’s partner in professional and personal life, art historian Thomas Beachdel. Tomanová touches the world in a different way, with a rush of positive emotions, an immediate connection, acting as a medium through which the energy of the portrait-sitter passes. Director Marie Dvořáková, who also relocated to the US, connects to the photographer in the same way. The portrait of the two Maries tells the story of the American dream and the search for roots, identity and home. “What I'm looking for is a moment of connection. It's more than the photos.”