activism

“Are you proud of yourself?” This was a question asked in 2020 by a father of one of female voluntary workers who had just come back from a rescue mission searching for drowning refugees in the Mediterranean Sea. Instead of a reply, an open letter came to life, followed by a film illustration of the feelings of ugliness and hopelessness, composed of sea waves mingling with various film footage.“In July 2020, a young volunteer returning on the humanitarian aid ship Sea Watch 3 writes to her father. The text of this letter is put into perspective through different registers of travel images (animation, Super 8, archives…).”---Source: https://www.shortfilmwire.com/en/film/200110598/En-col_re

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 winter of 2021/2022, a crisis broke at the Polish-Belarussian border, with Syrian migrants trying to cross the frontier. In the no-man’s land in between the two countries, they were suffering from hunger and diseases. A group of Polish female volunteer workers were making all possible efforts to bring humanitarian relief to them, but often with no avail. This led to frustration, anxiety and fatigue, all captured in this film observing the work of volunteers on the spot.“The migration crisis won’t disappear in Poland, but when you think about the scale about the whole world? Maybe sometimes you think you’re useless, you can help just few people among all.” (a female volunteer worker)

A few years ago, Argentine novelist Félix Bruzzone bought a house near the sprawling Campo de Mayo military base near Buenos Aires. It was not a random choice: his mother was kidnapped and held there during the military junta’s rule in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The aim of the writer’s self-therapeutic mission is also to uncover the other dark secrets of the location. The idyllic countryside provides a stark contrast to the atrocities committed by the Argentine government, as recounted by local witnesses. From their accounts, Bruzzone composes a picture of a place that contributed significantly to the disruption of his family and the nation.„The film is like a poem in the sense that it is not a movie that dwells on meticulous detail. It unfolds gradually, using symbolism to find ways, if one can, to overcome the grief. It is not direct like a history book.“ — Jonathan Perel---Source: https://www.latinolife.co.uk/articles/camuflaje-camouflage-2022-jonathan-perel

Miko is a truck driver, his father is Romani, and above all he is a man who wanted to help those in need. When the Czech government was looking for reasons not to take in a few dozen children from Greek refugee camps after the chemical attacks on Syrian civilians in 2018, Miko took justice into his own hands and, together with the Czechs Helping initiative, prepared facilities for child refugees. However, government officials gave priority to political interests. Will parliamentary elections and a change of ministries save the situation? An unflattering but accurately portrayal of the Czech Republic as a country that will only offer a helping hand when it is worthwhile. “The country today doesn’t actually allow you to act according to your conscience.”

The life story of an unassuming, modest, yet extremely principled woman is also a dramatic portrait of a time when criticism of the regime and defense of the unjustly prosecuted was punished by imprisonment and constant surveillance from the secret state security. The story also reflects the turning point after the Velvet Revolution, when Dana Němcová briefly entered politics as an active member of the Federal Assembly, or when, in response to the war in the former Yugoslavia, she founded a counselling center for refugees and refugee women in the Czech Republic. In the film, she also meets some of those she helped again after many years.

Even before the pandemic, there were almost 24,000 homeless people in the Czech Republic. In the following months, many more Czechs faced housing crisis due to the increase in the unemployment rate. Filip, a social work student from Prague experiences their reality first hand. The protagonist of a video journal was shooting in the streets of Ústí nad Labem. In the hot summer days, his existence shrank to finding a mere place to sleep and a meal to eat. Growing tiredness and apathy are temporarily brightened by joyful moments of human solidarity and warm meals. In such circumstances, things like that are not at all common; they represent a means of survival.“An autobiographical video journal of a social worker who decided to spend a week in the street of an unknown city. Is home a place inside or outside?”---Source: by author

This multi-layered portrait of Jean-Luc Godard shows the world of one of the pioneers of the French New Wave as a laboratory of ideas. In the maze of his parallel lives, we meet him as a star who burst into the world of film, as a left-wing radical and advocate of Maoism, and as an experimenter with new technologies through which he reinvents the medium of film. Despite the hectic activity of the director, who made over 140 films, Godard’s portrait has a subtly nostalgic tone. Part of his world is solitude, which, according to documentary filmmaker Cyril Leuthy, is necessary to create a work of art. “In all my films, there is something about loneliness. It is something that interests me because perhaps I feel it too. Perhaps it is a good way to reach and touch the audience… to be an artist, you need loneliness.” ---Source: https://businessdoceurope.com/venice-ff-godard-seul-le-cinema-by-cyril-leuthy/ 

The primary motif of the documentary is the journey. A metaphorical journey, a spiritual journey, a tangible journey, a forest path, a road, a sidewalk, a drug trip, or a journey abroad. The director pastes together a collage of micro-stories of people and places that comment on the journey. Her documentary oscillates between playful absurdism, existentialism and existential questions, environmentalism, and social commentary. The dynamism and rhythm of the narrative are then determined by the jumps between different forms of video, such as analogue film, digital film, and mobile phone filming.“I think there's this idea of adventure, that you go somewhere straight, and you don’t know where you're going. It doesn’t matter where you go, as long as you get somewhere.” — Roman Prahl, art historian

On the one hand, the multi-layered film functions as an autobiographical portrait of a non-binary person, but at the same time it presents the wide range of difficulties and joys that trans and non-binary people in the Czech Republic go through. The personal is political in this film, which is why the kaleidoscope of situations includes intimate conversations with their mother over fried schnitzels, shots from Ride of the Kings, costumed festivities in the Slovácko region, talking about their coming out around the fire, and serious topics of discriminatory Czech legislation regarding trans people. The informal character of the film is enhanced by authentic interviews and handheld camera footage accompanying the lives of the protagonists.

This documentary film by Jennifer Baichwal tells the story behind the Johnson v. Monsanto Co. lawsuit filed by Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, who sued the agrochemical corporation Monsanto for exposing him to the Roundup herbicide product that gave him cancer. Johnson's case was the first of thousands of lawsuits filed against the company and its herbicide glyphosate, which at one point was among the best-selling herbicides in the world. The film not only covers Johnson's story, but also exposes the greed of a large corporation that puts profit over people's health and manipulates scientific studies to its advantage. The film also serves as an environmental and humanistic call to action and avoids focusing solely on one specific court case. “In telling Johnson’s story, Into the Weeds asks whether this kind of David versus Goliath fight can effect substantial and lasting change.”---Source: https://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/into-the-weeds

Ondřej, a student and teacher; Denisa, a lawyer; and Petr, a policeman, are all Romani who have enjoyed a world of opportunity in Britain, something that’s hard for them to come by in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This multi-layered, yet rather intimate documentary, which contains a number of scenes shot by the protagonists themselves on their mobile phones, depicts the everyday worries and small victories of the three main characters who represent an educated and ambitious, yet still vulnerable community of Europeans, and who help embrace the opportunities offered to others. In addition to exploring themes of displacement and the search for one's own identity in a post-Brexit world, the film – which features humanism interspersed throughout – also asks how the characters’ fates were shaped by the COVID-19 epidemic.“The film has developed over the past 4 years. The pandemic forced us to adopt a new filming concept of using iPhones to record our protagonists' lives with intimate access, which presented an opportunity to reveal the community from the inside. The choice of the equipment was designed to ensure they could easily get used to the camera, and this material has quickly become the core of the film, with crew-generated material available for flashbacks to the pre-Covid era.”---Source: https://www.cinelinkindustrydays.com/2021-docu-talents-from-the-east/one-more-question

In Belarusian, “mara” means “dream,” but in the sense of “hope.” In Slavic mythology, the word denotes a female spirit that manifests in people's minds while they sleep and brings either dreams or nightmares. An artistic personification of the mythical being Mara roams through the streets of Minsk in 2020–2021 in the film of the same name. During the anti-dictatorship protests that took place, it served as a symbol of the hopes and subsequent horrors experienced by the Belarusian citizens demanding to have their basic rights and freedoms. For the director, Mara is her alter ego incarnate, which in poetic shorthand allows her to talk about her most personal fears and desires in the face of an unpleasant reality that’s hostile towards dreams.“I didn’t want to make a typical ‚reportage‘ film. For me the most important thing was to show what trauma does to the human psyche.”---Source: https://eefb.org/country/belarus/sasha-kulak-on-mara/

A modern-day aborigine, alone on a deserted planet, surrounded by cold nature, builds a new world from the remnants of an extinct civilization. This surreal audiovisual work reflects on the question of human existence when the world is on the verge of destruction, evoking the mourning of an activist artist over an ecological catastrophe.“The motto of the Native character, who wanders the landscape with unbounded imagination, is to translate sentiment into creative new approaches. This is probably the only way to cope with the current state of affairs.”---Source: Comment on the video

Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, this recent work by Michal Mitro presents a new semblance of our future world in which energy, as a universal and indestructible force, determines the order of global activities and relationships. The film is a reflection on what a post-capitalist society can look like when energy justice prevails and when both human and extra-human factors are involved.“The visual language of this work juxtaposes the workings of society where energy justice has been established through speculative archaeological research conducted in a contemporary communal garden from the viewpoint of future's utopia.”---Source: https://dspace.vutbr.cz/xmlui/handle/11012/195152?locale-attribute=pl

Štefan Pongo and his family left the Czech Republic for Britain to escape racial stereotypes and discrimination. To have a normal life. And they did—that is, until he decided to respond on the internet to the racist rhetoric of Czech President Miloš Zeman. The truck driver’s fate then took a major turn. The sensitively conceived personal and family portrait is a film-argument that juxtaposes simplistic, chauvinistic assessments with a full-blooded picture in which race issues are more of a problem to be solved than a lived reality. It tells the story of a journey there and back, across countries, beliefs, and our conscience.“I was wondering how the Roma who had emigrated to the UK were doing, so I went there and tracked down a trucker named Štefan Pongo and his big, wonderful family.”---Source: http://www.romea.cz/cz/kultura/premiera-dokumentarniho-filmu-pongo-calling-probehne-v-patek-na-mezinarodnim-filmovem-festivalu-docfest-v-sheffield  

Martin Imrich lives and studies in Prague. But he comes from South Moravia, where he makes a pilgrimage on foot to overcome the contradiction between “tím, kým jsem, a tím, kým jsu” (“who I am” in Czech and the Moravian dialect), as he says. His video diary, accompanied by a frank off-screen commentary, captures in fragmentary form the journey to the roots and the search for the meaning of such an artistic project.“Vlašim and Benešov are the most disgusting places in the world, and I pity all the people who have to live there.”