Constellations

Director Giovanni Bucchieri was inspired by video diaries from the days when he was a young dancer at the Royal Swedish Ballet and fell madly in love for the first time in his life. With the help of over 25-year-old footage and live action sequences, he composes an emotional, partly true love story of two artistic soulmates. However, unhealthy ambitions and a desire for recognition interfere with their relationship. The protagonist's bipolar disorder then becomes the third character in the multi-layered story. During manic episodes, his experiences become more intense, the contrasts sharper, and the relationship also starts to get out of control. Love, however, prevails. “It grew on me that I wanted to do a goodbye film, to have a proper goodbye I never had with everyone I ever loved, a goodbye not only from Louise, but also a cathartic goodbye from the world.” – Giovanni Bucchieri Source: Cineuropa

One of the most prominent institutions of higher learning in Nigeria is the University of Ibadan, founded during the era of British colonial rule. It now has over 30,000 students. A handful of them meet every Thursday in one of the lecture halls to watch selected works by African filmmakers as part of a film club. The films, which deal with the ever-present problems of post-colonial countries, provoke heated discussions. Thanks to the nimble handheld camera, we become participants ourselves. During the protests against police brutality, the students' passion for political and social issues, sparked by the films they have seen, spills beyond the walls of the university building. “I would say that it’s an attempt to render visible the reality of Nigerian students. I wanted to depict the ordinary beauty and intelligence they display despite the challenges they face.” — Alain Kassanda Source: New Directors/New Films

Olfa, a Tunisian cleaning lady, is a mother of four daughters and above all a strong woman with unshakable principles. One day, however, her two older daughters disappear without a trace. To cope with their loss and understand what led to their disappearance, she embarks on a challenging and often painful filmed reconstruction of her and her daughters' life stories with director Kaouther Ben Hania and professional actresses. The work, which straddles the line between fiction and documentary, reflects on issues of human conscience, guilt and violence passed down through generations, as well as sisterly love, female independence and hope. “[The mother-daughter relationship] is full of love, hate, violence, darkness and light. […] What interested me, as you said, is that it’s a women’s story and also a story of adolescent women. They were teenagers when everything happened. So what does it mean to be a teenager in a context like this? What does it mean to start thinking about sexuality with a mother that does not want to hear about your sexuality or your desire? In a world where desire is punished.” Source: Variety Magazine

The view from the front seat to the back of the car makes up the majority of the shots in this minimalist documentary. The car oscillates back and forth between areas threatened by fighting in Ukraine and the Polish border. Its driver, the film's director, transports male and female war refugees to perceived safety. He drives through bombed-out towns, past destroyed military equipment and through checkpoint after checkpoint. The faces of his passengers sometimes show relaxation, sometimes exhaustion, but almost always a fear of things to come. Apart from the few necessities crammed into their suitcases, they carry with them traumas and fears for those they had to leave at home. “We never put people in a situation where they felt they needed to do something to get evacuated.” Source: Point of View Magazine

Billions of years before the origin of life, our planet was an active, evolving entity. Rocks, crystals and minerals could tell stories, and in Deborah Stratman's meditative essay, they get the chance. Before and after does not exist for them. Also, in their story of Earth's evolution, the lines between past and future blur. Images of sublime rock formations are accompanied by commentary by renowned geologist Marcia Bjornerud as well as excerpts from philosophical texts and speculative fiction. To see the world from the perspective of minerals may be to admit one's own transience. And perhaps, in doing so, to understand our place in the universe. “I fell in love with the idea that storytelling and rhythm are a sort of genetic memory of our species. The land as tape recorder. Every rock as a text.” — Deborah Stratman Source: MUBI

The three-star Michelin restaurant La Maison Troisgros was founded in the same year that Frederick Wiseman was born. The ninety-three-year-old filmmaker decided to make his 44th film about it, aptly titled “small pleasures”, and thus fulfil one of his longstanding dreams. He spent several weeks in the renowned establishment in the French town of Roanne in the spring of 2022, when the long-time owners were handing over the business to their son. The four-hour documentary slowly reveals the inner workings of the restaurant, which has been run by the Troisgros family for four generations. Alongside the management and staff, Wiseman patiently observes the chefs preparing delicious culinary creations. “During the summer of 2020, I stayed at a friend’s house in Burgundy for a month. To thank my friends, I looked in the Guide Michelin for a good restaurant nearby. I found Troisgros and we had a great lunch. After the meal, the Chef, César Troisgros stopped by our table. We thanked him for the delicious meal. Without planning, I suddenly asked him whether he would consider having a documentary film made about his restaurant. He said he would think about it and came back a half an hour later and said, “why not?” We then exchanged some letters, and he granted me formal permission. I waited to shoot the film until spring of 2022, when the Covid epidemic waned.” — Frederick Wiseman Source: La Biennale di Venezia 2023

The hardest part is capturing the pain, says documentary filmmaker Claire Simon, who filmed a nearly three-hour fresco about coping with womanhood in the gynaecology ward of the Tenon clinic in Paris. In the surgical theatre and in the consulting room, she searches for the right words and images to capture the intimacy of people's bodies and souls during childbirth, a diagnosis of a malignant disease or a sex change. With disarming empathy, she portrays the ritual cyclical nature of life's turning points and captures one of the most beautiful scenes of anesthesia, one that touches her more than she expected before the filming began.“The whole film is about language and the body. The way you name the body is half of the pain.”Quote source: Film Comment.

Tehran, July 2007. Nineteen-year-old architecture student Reyhaneh Jabbari has a business meeting with an older man. During the meeting, he tries to rape her. Reyhaneh stabs him in self-defence. She is arrested the same day and, despite international protests, sentenced to death. Using secretly made video footage, witness statements and letters from prison, the film vividly reconstructs the woman's years of hardship and the desperate cries for justice from her family and lawyers. Reyhaneh refuses to drop the sexual assault charges, and her story becomes a symbol of the struggle for rights, freedom and safe spaces for Iranian women. “It was clear to me that the footage shot by the family had to be the heart of the film. The rest was footage […] that I shot with a small team. In addition, there was footage from the prison that had been secretly shot by relatives who had managed to take a cell phone inside during the visit.” – Steffi Niederzoll Source: Iran Journal

Q&A with Anna HintsAn essential part of life in southern Estonia is the smoke sauna, which is strongly linked to local folklore and traditions. It also serves as a confessional, where people can bare their thoughts as well as their bodies. As the heat radiates from the pot-bellied stove and the smoke mixes with the smell of wood, a group of women begin to share their views on menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, cancer, unsolicited penis photos and the patriarchy without fear or shame. The sense of safety and intimacy is emphasized by the close-ups that make the seated figures merge into one collective body that is not only concerned with its own physical and mental cleansing, but also with societal change. “A sisterhood was formed during the process. Sisterhood doesn't even need to be between women; it doesn't depend on gender. It's about community. It is the connection between humans who support each other and with whom any story can be shared.” — Anna Hints Source:  Cineuropa

A taxi driver and his passenger drive through Cuban villages and talk about travel, heartbreak and human destiny. One speaks English, the other Spanish, yet they find mutual trust and understanding. The passenger, a Filipino filmmaker, tells the taxi driver the shocking reason why he is in Cuba and asks for cooperation in his search. A seemingly documentary prologue opens a journey into the last days of a former general of the Philippine dictator hiding on a banana plantation. The history of colonialism and political dictatorship emerges in the blazing Cuban sun in a film standing on the borderline between reality and fiction. “It is a thrillingly anticlimactic story of an overwhelming calm and a horror so absolute that it is confused with everyday life; it is immanent to it and is therefore definitive, omnipresent, absolute as the air.” — Antonio Enrique Gonzáles Rojas, Rialta Magazine Source: Rialta Magazine

The Eternal Memory chronicles the enduring love between Chilean journalist Augusto Góngora and activist-actress Paulina Urrutia. As Alzheimer's tests their bond, their story becomes a poignant exploration of human dignity in adversity and the intricacies of memory, both individual and collective, posing questions about what we remember, why we forget, and its impact on individuals and nations.“I think this film shows what remains when everything is forgotten. The identity of someone who is never lost, who until the end has a tone that characterizes him, who never forgets certain painful historical events and who loves even when it seems he does not remember.” – Maite AlberdiQuote source: film’s press kit.

One day, Armel Hostiou finds out that there is a fake profile of him on Facebook. The director's alter ego seems to be living in Kinshasa, also making films for a living and casting for a new film. It is to be filmed in the Congo, where Hostiou is also heading. Through Kafkaesque meetings with local artists, lawyers and IT specialists, he tries to navigate the foreign country and track down his digital twin. Just when he seems to be on the right track, another unexpected twist comes and the narrative changes direction. This gripping documentary whodunit gradually reveals issues in post-colonial states and the digital world that are darker and more serious than identity theft. “In Dostoyevsky's The Double, the hero Goliadkin discovers that he not only has a double, but he does the same thing and does it better. Without giving too much away, this idea leads to what happens at the end of my film.” — Armel Hostiou Source: Météore Films

The oldest Polish DJ, Virginia Szmyt, who is known to dance-party-goers as Vika, will be eighty-five years old this year. She manages to make crowds dance and actively speaks out in public against the stereotypes associated with old age. Behind the door of her apartment, however, she is a lonely widow with tragic memories of World War II and severed ties with her family. This multi-layered, emotional portrait of an indomitable life force looks with tender melancholy into Vika's quest to live fully in the here and now despite the layers of societal norms. The experience of the present moment is all the more powerful in regard to the jagged map of her personal history and her intense awareness of her own finitude. “What a person needs most in life is tenderness, which, once a loved one dies, he’ll never receive.”

Under the direction of director Mehran Tamadon, an empty warehouse on the outskirts of Paris is transformed into a prison cell. He reconstructs the claustrophobic space according to the descriptions of three people who were imprisoned by the Iranian regime for their political views. Taghi Rahmani is a proscribed journalist who was harshly interrogated countless times. Mazyar Ebrahimi ran a film equipment rental business and was accused of espionage after a competitor slandered him. Homa Kahlori experienced torture at the hands of Iranian jailors in the 1980s. While each of them describes and re-enacts in detail the effect of the horrific experiences on the body and mind, we wonder along with the director whether there is a staging method that could ever capture similar hardships to their full extent. “In Where God Is Not, I tried to be delicate with my characters, because the trauma is huge, and I had to take care of them. I always tried to make sure that they could go on; I kept asking them how they felt. I was really with them, and I understood that re-creating these scenes could even help them a bit. But it wasn't my sole goal to help them; it was to make the film. I don't think that a filmmaker is an angel or that he has only good intentions.” — Mehran Tamadon Source: Cineuropa

The grass is always greener on the other side, and for now he’d like to watch it grow. The paradox of the transience of life is most clearly reflected in the moments when it fades away. Julie and Freddy, the director's parents, are slowly leaving this world, and their son decides to capture this painful moment on camera. The result is a documentary created using the associative method, composing stimuli in a single line as they unfold in the director's perception. In a cascade similar to the rivers flowing from Swiss mountain peaks and rolling down to the ocean, Julie and Freddy also headed from Europe to Canada many decades ago in search of a new life, which is now coming to an end. “From the beginning of my own filmmaking, I have never seen cinema as just an illustrative tool, but also as a medium that allows us to go inside the head – directly into a state of perception that can be engaged or changed in a myriad of ways.” — Peter Mettler Source: porto/post/doc

The town of Zhili, about 150 km west of Shanghai, is one of the centres of the textile industry, where twentysomethings from all the rural areas around the Yangtze River flock for work. Although they toil away tirelessly in workshops all year round, live in the squalid conditions of cramped dormitories, face the prejudice of their families and have to fight for better pay conditions, even in this environment they find room for first loves and conflicts, building friendships and establishing new family bonds. Wang Bing thus pieces together an absorbing mosaic of intimate moments in the everyday reality of one Chinese generation through observational footage. “In the mid-20th century, during the revolutionary fervor, especially in art, there was an enormous overuse of the word and the idea of youth, to represent a revolutionary spirit. I wanted to reclaim it from that use and that meaning. The fact is that this sector relies very heavily on this production force—the physical labor of young people.” — Wang Bing Source: Film Comment