There's a winning combination of warmth and honesty to the way that she and her family share their lives that opens the door to viewers and asks them to shift their perspective.
After uncovering a treasure trove of home videos documenting the moments of love, laughter, and musical expression that punctuated an otherwise tumultuous upbringing, filmmaker Nira Burstein returns to her childhood home – now crumbling from the inside out – to explore whether she and her two sisters can reconnect with her parents.
Double Layered Town/Making a Song to Replace Our Positions
Set in Rikuzentakata, Iwate, Japan, in the year 2031, Double Layered Town is a story written by Seo Natsumi, which plants the seeds for new folktales to be born in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.
(Country: Japan; Year: 2021; Director: Komori Haruka, Seo Natsumi)
Equatorial Constellations
Through archive, landscape, and the contemporary testimonies of the child refugees and humanitarian workers involved, Equatorial Constellations traces the physical and immaterial debris that remains in São Tomé following the conflict that ensued when, in 1967, Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu unilaterally declared the independence of the state of Biafra from Nigeria.
In Croatia in 2005, a machine tools factory was occupied by its workers. Since then, they have operated collectively, becoming the only successful example of a worker occupation in post-socialist Europe. This film tells the inside story.
In March 2020, 25 young musicians from the Bolivian Experimental Orchestra for Indigenous Instruments (OEIN) came to Germany to play concerts in Berlin and Dresden. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the concerts were cancelled. Then, as Bolivia closed its borders, the musicians found themselves stuck in the Music Academy in Rheinsberg/Brandenburg for almost three months. Together with their German colleagues in the ensembles PHØNIX16 and noiserkroiser, they face the crisis by developing several musical projects.
(Country: Germany, Bolivia; Year: 2021; Director: Philipp Hartmann)
My Dear Spies
In contemporary Paris, filmmaker Vladimir Léon delivers his brother Pierre an old suitcase that he had taken from their mother’s house after she died. In it, they find documents connecting their Russian grandparents, Lily and Constantin, with the Soviet secret services working in Paris before the Second World War. The two brothers then begin an investigation.
(Country: France; Year: 2020; Director: Vladimir Léon; Writer: Vladimir Léon; Stars: Anne Benhaïem, Serge Bozon, Julie Desprairies, Karina Karaeva, Renaud Legrand, Pierre Léon, Svetlana Léon, Vladimir Markovchin, Louise Narboni, Natalia Smolianskaya, Anne Benhaïem, Serge Bozon, Julie Desprairies, Karina Karaeva, Renaud Legrand)
Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: This Land Is Our Land!
A personal film that shifts across multiple forms, combining mourning practices, rituals, and chanting, with interviews and observational material to create a study of white violence that reminds us of the urgency of seeing beyond the western gaze.
The verite approach means that the film has a fragmented feel that would have benefited from a tighter edit but it has plenty of interesting things to say
Prison portrait of a maximum-security jail in Argentina.
(Country: Argentina; Year: 2021; Director: Pedro Speroni; Writer: Pedro Speroni; Stars: Oscar Artaza, Iván Bilbao, Pablo Moyano, Laio Pereyra, Oscar Artaza, Iván Bilbao, Pablo Moyano, Laio Pereyra)
Set in Nizhny Tagil, Russia, Summer journeys nostalgically through the warm middle-Ural summer with eight-year-old Vadim and his half-sister Christina.
Detailing the preparation of the multi-city Aurat March (Women’s March) in Pakistan, This Stained Dawn tells the story of a feminist movement asserting itself in the country’s urban spaces through the eyes of the march’s organisers.
(Country: Pakistan; Year: 2021; Director: Anam Abbas)
White On White
(Biela na bielej)
Viera Cákanyová's video diary that she kept while staying at the Polish Antarctic station, where in 2017 she shot the film 'FREM' (2019), whose main character was an artificial neural network. During her stay, the author chats with various artificial intelligences, leading conversations that touch on the nature of film, art, and the meaning of life while also revealing a way of thinking that's free from humanity and from an emotionality that forces deep introspection.
(Country: Slovakia, Czech Republic; Year: 2020; Director: Viera Cákanyová; Writer: Viera Cákanyová)
