Constellations

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

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

Olga Chernykh originally wanted to make a portrait of her mother. However, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine again and everything fell apart. The director's three-generation kaleidoscope of memories is an attempt to find a foothold in the face of an uncertain future. Her video interviews with her mother and grandmother are interspersed with photographs and films from the family archive and reportage images of contemporary everyday Ukrainian life. Above all, a sense of longing and loss permeates the collage of past and present stories of three women and one country. At the same time, it speaks of the courage and defiance of a nation that has repeatedly faced external pressure.“We worked a lot on the balance of the portrait of the country and the history of this city and immersing it inside a family story because we did not want to have a historical film.”Quote source: Variety

Andrés Roca Rey (1996) is one of the biggest toreador stars of the present and is popular with the traditional Hispanic corrida (bull-fighting) audience. This detailed, aesthetically captivating probe into his mastery depicts the preparatory rituals, flashy costumes, the building of attention before a performance, and reflective conversations with fellow toreadors. The heart of the film, however, is Rey directly in the ring with the bull in an almost symbolically dualistic situation of trained, rational man meeting animal ferocity. The explicit depiction of the violence perpetrated in this controversial tradition raises the question of whether the animal or the man himself is the source of the corrida’s brutality.“The beast presumably doesn’t know it’s about to die, but seems angrily resigned to its fate anyway — or more likely we feel angry on its behalf, and project that back onto this regal image.”Quote source: Variety

When French soldiers sacked the kingdom of Dahomey, located in what is now Benin, at the end of the 19th century, they appropriated thousands of artistic artifacts. In 2021, it was decided that 26 of them would be returned to their country of origin. Director Mati Diop follows their odyssey from Paris to Cotonou. The legacy of the stolen treasures comes to life first in a fanciful commentary by the King of Benin, represented by one of the statues, then during an excited debate between university students. The film, in which the ghosts of the past meet the postcolonial present of the African continent, won the main prize at the Berlin Film Festival.“France has exploited this place for centuries. You need to do more. You need to go further. You need to breathe new life into this question, and that is what I was trying to do in this film.”Source: The Hollywood ReporterThe screening is organized in cooperation with the European Parliament Office. The film Dahomey is nominated for the LUX Audience Award of the European Parliament. You can vote for the film HERE.

War tourism is an extreme form of leisure activity that serves to satisfy curiosity and achieve an experience of adventure and relaxation. However, its backdrop is not made up of well-preserved cultural monuments, nor can you expect a throbbing social life and a sense of general security. Quite the opposite. The perverse business of adrenaline and the misfortune of others is the subject of a documentary following both the organisers and participants of tours to risky areas – individuals who at the same time refuse to give up the luxury of comfort and various types of protection, even as children die and people's homes and lives crumble nearby them.“I know that this is very controversial. People prefer in general to watch movies about people who are fighting for freedom or who are more positive. We often like to feel some bond with characters.” Quote source: Business Doc Europe

The thirty years since the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu have been a period of dynamic cultural, economic and political change for Romania. The transition from state socialism to consumer capitalism has affected society's attitudes towards food, nature, history, death and sex. In eight ironically titled chapters and one epilogue, we see how contemporary television advertisements attempt to sell the new lifestyle and neoliberal ideology. An uncommented strip of clips promoting beer, washing machines or shoe polish is at the same time a showcase of bizarre (male) fantasies and hitherto unfulfilled dreams of a world of unlimited possibilities.“The point was to have these eight different ways of organising the materials. We tried in each of these chapters to tell a different story.” — Ferencz-FlatzQuote source: Business Doc Europe

A new business is being born right before our eyes, which can bring comfort to some and keep others awake at night. Either way, someone's bound to make a profit. At present, people can already chat with AI-powered chatbots that simulate the personality of a deceased loved one. This investigative documentary looks at this new technological achievement from utilitarian, moral and social perspectives. Chatbot programmers, users, television producers and academics share their views and opinions. And above it all, a question looms: Who are we really talking to when we talk to artificial intelligence?“People generally think that a robot only becomes dangerous when it develops a consciousness. But that is a misleading idea, and therefore many people make the following argument: as long as they don’t build a conscious machine, we don’t have to worry about it.”Quote source: Cinerratica

The moments immediately following a person's death are among the most intimate, accompanied by a sense of loneliness and emotional turmoil. The already soulless body is transported to the morgue in the hospital. The chapel is ready for the final farewell. The pallbearers arrive. Family members survey the preparations. The parish priest prepares his eulogy. Behind the imaginary curtain of secrecy, the film director lets us peek through an imitation voyeur's peephole placed in front of the camera lens. What is for one the finale of a life’s journey may be for another a sequence of repeated actions with no discernible end in sight.“I like to explore things that feel ambivalent, subjects that challenge my own moral codes and references, and trigger an almost physical reaction.”Source: https://nordiskfilmogtvfond.com/news/stories/2023-nordic-talents-to-watch

When Russian missiles started flying over their heads, the film director packed a few essentials and left the immediate danger area to visit her aging parents, who live farther inland. But the war soon caught up with her there as well. This documentary diary of the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine brings to life the immediate reactions of ordinary people to the horrors unfolding in their neighbourhood. As the conflict escalates, so does the tension in the home, which is gradually stripped of basic certainties such as electricity and heat. But leaving home is not easy. And who would take care of all those cats and dogs if people leave?“Stories about families jammed into one house always turn out badly, but these three are even more isolated. There is no one around, people are leaving, and everyday conversations turn into bitter fights all too quickly.”Quote source: Cineuropa

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukrainian security forces have intercepted and published thousands of phone calls from Russian soldiers on the frontline. The men's calls to their mothers, wives and siblings testify to the power of propaganda and misinformation, as well as disillusionment, war crimes and trauma. Oksana Karpovych puts the world that is heard in constant tension with the world that is seen. Sound and image are at war with each other but united by the theme of death. The somnambulistic landscape is reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic computer game. Observational shots of dead houses, streets and towns in which the shadows of life move are accompanied by the voices of people who, although standing on the other side of the front, are now probably dead too.“While many of these intercepted comments were so absurd, they helped me see the reality, with wild justifications for the invasion. The calls were constantly keeping me in this state of cognitive dissonance, and that’s exactly what I tried to recreate in the film.”Quote source: POV Magazine The screening is organized in cooperation with the European Parliament Office. The film Intercepted is nominated for the LUX Audience Award of the European Parliament. You can vote for the film HERE.

Paula Albuquerque's conceptual film is based on a propaganda documentary from the 1950s, which she came across during her research in the archives of Amsterdam's Eye Film Museum. It deals with the “educational” colonisation activities of the Netherlands in Suriname. The archival footage showing the interaction between a Dutch nurse and the indigenous tribes was used by the director to create a double cinematic work that, through a digital glitch that replaces the silhouettes of the indigenous population, allows her to highlight the ideological nature of the original film and restore the lost sovereignty of the “spirits”, who for centuries have been perceived as the inferior ones.“You notice there is a huge difference in how the body of the white male is represented when exhausted… and when we look at BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour]. Then, the body is always poor, dirty, sick. It’s always in relation to slavery or colonialism, or in positions of servitude.” — Paula AlburqerqueQuote source: Screen Daily

The novel Makamisa (1890) by the Filipino poet and revolutionary José Rizal was never completed. In it, the author denounced religious hypocrisy and the abuse of power by Christian colonisers. When a fragment of the novel was discovered nearly a century later, it became the inspiration for this iconoclastic film poem. A series of scenes captured on hand-coloured and variously distorted 35mm film stock takes us back to the early days of cinema, when the Philippines was simultaneously fighting for its independence. The radical anti-colonialist pamphlet is accompanied by a soundtrack by David Toop and the director's band, The Kontra-Kino Orchestra. “Everything you see on the screen has no post-production, we turned the bathroom into a darkroom where we manipulated the film.”Quote source: Il manifesto

This biographical film presents the life and career of one of Austria's most important painters, Maria Lassnig (1919–2014). Through her expressive and gestural paintings, distinguished by their bold colour, she explored her own corporeality and is considered a forerunner of feminist art. A troubled childhood and an absent maternal love marked her lifelong approach to interpersonal relationships, which the painter drew upon as a recluse devoted to her art. A sensitive and vividly dreamlike film imbued with real images, Lassnig thematises the obstacles an artist must deal with in a male-dominated world.“Throughout her painting career, Lassnig disrupted the duality of body/soul, which dominated Western philosophy and society for millennia and which establishes the duality of man/woman; she demonstrated that knowledge can be as much an act of the mind as of the body.”Quote source: Artalk

The audiovisual poem uses associative images to present the thoughts and aspirations of a Ukrainian filmmaker during her study stay in a foreign country. She gets acquainted with the Portuguese language and through its specifics, sound and similarities to her native language, she penetrates the local culture in the role of a potential migrant. However, memories of her war-torn homeland keep returning to her reflections, creating unexpected connections between her current home and painful memories of Ukraine. The melancholic film thus presents language as a guide through a foreign landscape and dreamlike images of the everyday as a diary entry.“It’s difficult to say which place to call home. When you move frequently, you don’t get so attached to the place.”

Patrice Lumumba became the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Congo in 1960. The following year, he was executed in a coup engineered by Western powers. Lumumba's fate is intertwined with the stories of legendary jazzmen such as Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong. Their music served as a smokescreen for the activities of governments seeking to suppress the Pan-African movement and maintain Western hegemony. With a relaxed jazz beat and a sense of historical irony, director Johan Grimonprez assembles a carefully edited collage of interviews, archival footage and sound recordings. Filling in the white spaces on the map of the Cold War, he is particularly attentive to the links between colonialism and the media.“It is called Soundtrack for a reason. Because when I listened to the material, then it really directs where you head with the story. A lot of the political agency is also set forth by music.”Quote source: Modern Times Review

This existential wartime meditation on the American Civil War returns to 1862 and realistically delves into the plight of Union soldiers exploring the uncharted territories of the West. The longer they remain in the wilderness, the deeper they sink into feelings of confusion, disorientation and disconnection from reality, as if they are a foreign body in a time and age to which they do not belong, losing themselves in time itself. Minervini made his first feature film, which was awarded for Best Director in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, just like a documentary. The authenticity of the non-actors silently watching the winter landscape of present-day Montana and the snowflakes that drift down purifyingly on the weary, lost, and desolate souls of demoralized soldiers fighting an invisible enemy far from the front lines, make for an immersive, Terrence Malick-style dive into the USA’s past.“It seemed natural to go back to the roots of a country that’s never ceased to be divided and never ceased to be at war with others, or with itself in a way.”Quote source: Variety

The Yanomami and Watoriki are indigenous tribes inhabiting the Amazon rainforest. Until the early 1970s, they lived in relative isolation. However, during Brazil's military dictatorship, a highway was built across their territory, devastating the landscape and opening it up to resource extraction companies. With them came pollution, violence and disease. The frustrating clash with a system that has no regard for anything living is portrayed in the film as perceived by the indigenous men and women. The leisurely pace and the (otherworldly) visual dynamics are suited to them. We are thus invited to look, hear and feel for a while, just like the people whose world is quickly disappearing.“Our desire was for the camera to feel the vitality, the friendship and of course the strength of the Yanomami people. So we didn’t arrive with a firmly structured way of going about it. We got there with a very, very small crew. The camera looked at the vibrancy, the heat that these people emanate. And we worked with that.”Quote source: Variety

In the middle of the Utah desert, near the Skull Valley Indian Reservation, is a heavily guarded military base where the U.S. military has been developing and testing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons since World War II. It was here that the pilots who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima were trained. Anyone working at the military facility is bound by confidentiality. Nevertheless, the filmmakers piece together a complex picture of the high price the United States pays for wars that take place thousands of miles away, yet are painfully etched into the American landscape and mentality.“There is no one reality, especially not in documentary film. Our film is more a reflection on the costs of war and human existence.” — Michael David BeamishQuote source: der Freitag

The Bosnian town of Velika Kladuša is located near the Croatian border. Its inhabitants often come into contact with refugees from the Middle East and other even more distant places. Day and night, the camera observes the local forests and streets, capturing unbiasedly the clearing of civil war-era explosives, school lessons and collective efforts to face the consequences of the current conflicts. The layered soundtrack and the deliberate rhythm of the narrative, subordinate to the changing seasons, contribute to a slowly absorbing atmosphere of a place where past and present traumas collide alongside different cultures.“With my stubborn approach as a filmmaker, I wanted to grapple with this spot on earth, this spot of World Soul. Perhaps I‘d call it an attempt to ‘capture a floating truth’.” — Nicole Vögele Quote source: European Film Academy

Forest observation in negative colours captures the night life of wildlife out of the sight of man, but within his earshot. An anthropocentric element creeps into the natural still life in the form of noise from a nearby battle line. The night vision camera transforms the forest animals into fantasy creatures with glowing eyes and their home into a mythical space of love and war. Both, according to Jean-Luc Godard, exist side by side, like the quietly falling snow and bomb explosions, or the lovers' phone call and Putin's voice from hell. A poetic post-apocalyptic purgatory and homage to dead creators, it represents the eerie adjacency of life and death.“Jean-Luc Godard is dead. The only two subjects he ever dealt with were love and war, which were intertwined more firmly than he wished for them to be.”

More than half a century after the Algerian War of Independence, the film opens up the topic of the role of women who were part of the uprising and played a significant role in the war. Some of them were sentenced to a decade in prison, others to the death penalty. After their release in 1962, a film was made with them, in which they shared their stories. Today, only a visual record of it exists; the audio has been irretrievably lost. The director embarks on an almost detective-like task, searching for the women in the footage and trying to recover their voice – symbolically and literally. In their memories, the past and the heroism of women who were not afraid to remain silent come to life.“All this material I was trying to compose into a film: a film that awakens emotion rather than imposes it, a film that makes you think rather than asserting knowledge. A film that gives back a body, a name and words to these women.”Quote source: European Film Academy

In August 1965, The Beatles arrive in New York to play their now legendary concert at a sold-out Shea Stadium to fifty-five thousand passionate fans. Outside their hotel, crowds of teenage female fans gather, eager to catch even a glimpse of the four idols. Archival footage from the press conference and television broadcasts soon spins into a narrative based on the autofiction of American poet Geoffrey O'Brien and the biographical accounts of writer Judith Kristen. On the border between reality and fiction, a poetic narrative unfolds, complemented by drawings by French illustrator Yann Kebbi. The context of the film is gradually expanded to include other significant moments captured on television at the time, evoking the spirit of the era and the associated ethos of youth. We are unsure whether the characters are real or fictional as they pass through a rich audiovisual kaleidoscope, guiding us through a lost but ever-present past in our consciousness.“Someday when we're dreamingDeep in love, not a lot to sayThen we will rememberThe things we said today.” Source: The Beatles - Things We Said Today

This poetic film from the streets of Athens mixes colourful imagery with a strong political message. The clash of two worlds – the human world full of dynamism and the world of ancient statues representing tradition and staticism – is depicted with a playful exaggeration in which statues come to life and people turn into statues. We follow a group of young artists and activists organising demonstrations to destroy historical monuments, especially the Parthenon temple, which functions as a metaphor for the old order preventing radical social change. This reveals the relationship between the current political situation in Greece and the doctrine of cultural heritage.“If statues could talk, what would they say?”