NIHRFF 2013

Synopsis

What makes a hero? What type of individual maintains the integrity to fight for what is just under any circumstances? What compels someone to jump into a river, risking his own life to save a stranger? Why, during World War II, did some Germans put themselves at risk in order to save Jews? 10% attempts to penetrate and understand the very makeup of the human soul. “In the film 10 % director Yoav Shamir, asks ‘What makes a hero?’ and attempts to give an answer by taking us on a world wide tour from New York to the Congo, Slovenia, South Africa, Israel and Palestine. He tries to find a typical pattern in what makes a hero. In the film we meet many people along the way who have committed acts of heroism in various forms, from a guy in New York who threw himself under a subway train to save a life of someone who had fallen on the tracks, to a Belgian woman who hid Jews in her apartment during the second world war, to a white woman in South Africa who grew up protesting against apartheid and went against the grain of her peer group. This subject makes for a fascinating documentary. The characters, the heros that he speaks to are widely different; there is no common thread as to why each hero has gone the extra mile to help a fellow human being. The ‘hero’ that Shamir seems to be most affected by is one of his ‘own’, Yonatan Shapira, an ex-Israeli pilot who, like Shamir, trained with the Israeli army, but who then went on to denounce the Israeli government, to openly criticise them and accuse them of genocide, resulting in him being labelled a traitor in his own country but a hero elsewhere. This makes Shamir reassess his own position. He attempts to join Yonatan in a protest. There is a telling moment when Yonatan says to camera ‘you only need to taste tear gas in your mouth that was aimed at the Palestinians, to take that last bit of Zionism you ever had out of you’. Shamir looks openly shaken. The film has a hint of self mockery and irony throughout but in this scene, the seriousness of what it really takes to be a hero is brought home to the director.” (Catherine Nelson-Pollard)

Synopsis

Homosexuality remains strictly taboo in Russia. In 2012 Moscow courts banned gay pride parades in the capital for the next 100 years. Any pride marches planned in previous years also faced bans and were forcibly broken up by the police if they went ahead. This documentary portrays a young man who loves being a policeman and happens to love men too. Torn between his sense of duty and his personal desires, he talks about his anxieties, his yearnings, and what it means to be homosexual in a deeply patriarchal environment. (goEast Film Festival 2013)

Synopsis

A road movie set in the Middle East. Two Palestinian brothers take a trip to Ramallah that they do not want to last longer than 45 minutes because they are smuggling the body of their late father. However, a whole series of misfortune lands them in trouble with the Russian mafia and Palestinian terrorists and the short journey becomes a nightmare. Rafik, who lives in Germany, comes home for his brother Jamal’s wedding. During the celebrations, ancient conflicts surface and the father has a fatal heart attack. The two brothers have to smuggle him from Jerusalem to Ramallah for his burial. However, they run into one predicament after the next and get landed into trouble with the Russian mafia and Palestinian terrorists. In the end, the Israeli security forces are the least of their problems. German-Iranian director Ali Samadi Ahadi sets his story about a family against the backdrop of the Middle East conflict, telling it with charm and a good dosage of irony. The screenplay for this turbulent comedy was written by the German- Israeli Gabriel Bornstein. It treats its deadly serious subject matter with means of entertainment. “I think that comedies about uncomfortable themes have the strongest and most lasting effect on the viewer. The result is not only a few hours of entertainment – audiences can take something away from the cinema visit, something that challenges them and hopefully leads to discussions or even to action. (…) It’s important to me personally to deal with this issue and to reach as many people as possible with the story – laughing and crying at the same time.” (Ali Samadi Ahadi)

Synopsis

In The 727 Days Without Karamo couples, whose love is put to a special test, give us insight into their lives. One partner of each couple is not originally from Europe and the lovers find themselves confronted with immigration law and its impact. Director Anja Salomonowitz depicts a story, which many couples experience, in which the snapshot moments of scene after scene form a continuous narrative, similar to a relay race. A sudden deportation could break them apart at any time. Those whose relationship can withstand enormous psychic and (also) financial burden hope for a lasting life together or for a reunion. As with Susanne, who has waited 727 days for Karamo, her husband and the father to her children, to be allowed to return. The personal insights are marked by hope, government intervention into private life, the dream of great love, and sobering reality. These couples go beyond lingual, territorial and social boundaries – with hope that their relationship can overcome the battle with immigration law regulations. Anja Salomonowitz combines very different facets into an exciting, very moving and strongly expressive documentary mosaic. A compelling, filmic plea for love without borders. “Documentary story-telling is always a dual process: on the one hand her story-telling style aims to address relevant socio-political conditions and raise awareness of intolerable situations and, on the other hand, to expand and vary and create anew the view on a theme with unusual narrative strategies. In The 727 Days Without Karamo the filmmaker has further refined her It Happend Just Before basic concept for telling a documentary story differently. The material drawn from reality, and its emotional potential, are thereby placed in constant tension with each other. Anja Salomonowitz denies both sides a cinema of pity. Above all, The 727 Days Without Karamo wants to tell the story of people fighting for another person and defending their right to choose their partner freely. Therefore the filmmaker (as in her previous films) has chosen a dominant colour in her shots: yellow. For courage and the fighting spirit and contempt.“ (Karin Schiefer)

Synopsis

After the Silence deals with how the effects of dictatorship are still extremely vivid, even after the fall of dictatorship. It is a film about the abuses of the state, about fear, how silence is passed on from one generation to the next. A film about the space which, despite all that is known, is left to ghosts that make it impossible to live fully in the present. Three generations walled in silence. The legacy of denial, as nothing has been put back in its place and nothing has been said. Killing the dictator is not enough to kill the dictatorship.

Director’s Statement
I met Ioana in 1991, in Bucharest, a year after the coup d’état that the media called the “Revolution”. When we met, we talked about everything except the dictatorship from which her country had recently emerged, as if silence could expunge everything that was still too raw. After my studies in Bucharest, I returned regularly to visit Ioana and her family, with whom I’d created strong family ties – I became the godmother of Ioana’s daughter, Téona, and Rodica, Ioana’s mother, had become like a substitute mother to me. I understand their country’s problems “from the inside”. Now I personally feel them. It helped me work on the subjects of abuse, silence and fear, on the cocoon that Ioana made for herself – an illusory cocoon that preserves her from the surrounding reality and protects her from the abuse, both present and past, for the old, intrusive reflexes die hard in Romania, and Ioana, powerless and depressed, has withdrawn into her family unit. She refuses the reality of the outside world in which she lives – she involuntarily maintains a connection with the historical injustice – her cocoon has become a cell. (…) Through the story of Ioana, a young, 40 year old Romanian woman, my film shows how living under a dictatorship becomes a way of life. And this is not the “privilege” of ex-communist countries.

Synopsis

“I feel like a chess player”, says Chinese avant-garde artist and political activist Ai Weiwei, “my opponent makes a move, and then I make the next one.” No sooner did he realise that the 2008 Olympics were to be used for party propaganda than Ai Weiwei boycotted the event and, when the authorities tried to cover up the earthquake in Sichuan Province, he began researching the names of more than 5,000 children who lost their lives in the rubble of poorly built schools. Ai Weiwei has always made public his opposition to silence and oppression. His appearances on the internet and the unsparing truths he airs in his blogs have often led to police harassment. But even then he never gives up, and instead films his official pursuers and minders with his video camera and publishes his footage on the web. And alongside all of these activities he still manages to casually prepare his exhibitions and maintain his close relationship with his family . Alison Klayman spent two years following this internationally celebrated activist and has distilled this first feature-length portrait from one hundred hours of material. Her documentary provides an informed insight into conditions on the ground in China today with oppression on one side and resistance on the other. (Berlinale Special 2012)

Synopsis

Adapted from Gurdial Singh’s novel of the same title, Gurvinder Singh’s debut feature opens on the harsh reality of a small village situated in Punjab. The extreme poverty in which the villagers live colors each scene with a heaviness that, added to the rest of the injustices suffered by the villagers, makes the distressing effect all the more intense. Singh’s camera cleverly ventures outside the immediate space of the story, taking note of traces of misery imprinted on the villagers’ faces and in their eyes, and loudly pronounced by their deep silence. Most of the actors in the film are non-professionals, and Singh displays great skill in extracting wonderful dramatic moments from them. The story unfolds as a large company destroys one of the houses on the outskirts of the village. Despite their anger, the villagers simply stand still supervised by police while the demolition takes place. Later, the people convene in an attempt to mobilize and perhaps give voice to their frustration, but deep down they know all too well that things are beyond their control. They are, after all, a caste downtrodden by an historical injustice that fundamentally and completely denies them the right to protest or to try to change their reality. Haunting and beautiful cinematography augments Singh’s film, which is a siren that points to the latent violence that resides in those who see no possibility of a better life – a violence that might explode at any moment. (Raman Chawla)

Synopsis

In 1998 Wojciech Staroń made the documentary film „The Siberian Lesson“. The film told the story of a young teacher who emigrated to the vicinity of Lake Baikal in order to teach Polish deportees’ descendants their native language. Many years later, as a married couple with two children, the director and his wife are leaving for Argentina. For their little son, this trip will not only be an encounter with an unknown language. Influenced by their Argentinian friend, Janek enters the fascinating world of imagination, and is introduced to the bitterness of childhood prematurely contaminated by the problems of grown-ups. Wojciech Staroń has already had one of his works screened at NIHRFF: He was responsible for the haunting cinematography of NIHRFF’s 2011 award winner The Prize (directed by Paula Markovitch), which won him a Silver Bear for Best Cinematography at Berlin Film Festival 2011. The beautiful score for both films was composed by Sergio Gurrola who was a guest of NIHRFF 2011. Argentinian Lesson won the Silver Dove at prestigeous DOK Leipzig film festival in 2011. The jury stated: “This cinematic journey follows the filmmaker’s 8-year-old son from Poland to Argentina as he becomes acclimated to his new home and develops a friendship with a young girl that is both joyous and sorrowful. The film skillfully pushes the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Its filmmaker demonstrates a high degree of craft regarding the composition of his images and the rhythms of narrative editing. His finely-etched characters stay with us long after the movie’s final, surprisingly humorous image.”

Synopsis

The joy, pride and sense of community experienced during the revolution in Egypt was replaced by the everyday fight for survival. How did the transformation impact the lives of citizens? Employing the documentary essay form, director Petr Lom considers the character and depth of the revolutionary changes. He interviews not only opponents and supporters of the revolution, but also the bystanders. A guide at the pyramids, a minibus driver who refused to transport the arrested to prison, the wife of a wrongly accused man, a young girl stigmatised in her village for taking part in the uprising, the brother of an imprisoned blogger – all gradually paint a complex and unhappy portrait of post-revolutionary Egypt. The revolution has not managed to overthrow a system of repression rooted in both state organs and interpersonal relationships. On the contrary, it has led to increased despotism on the part of police. However, this film clearly shows that people have decided to take advantage of the increased leeway the revolution has brought.

Director’s Statement

We filmed in Egypt for ten months since the beginning of the Revolution in January. A year later, protests continue, but the euphoria of Tahrir Square and its Egyptian Velvet Revolution have given way to a more sober realization that Egypt has a long struggle ahead to free itself of old power structures, entrenched elites, endemic corruption, and above all, widespread abuse of basic human rights. More than 12 000 protesters have been detained and tried in military tribunals that hand down sentences of one to four years in trials often lasting merely one hour. There have been no systematic attempts to reform the police, which is responsible for the majority of the 900 killed during the revolution. Many Egyptians still live in a world of fear. But the difference is, in the new Egypt, they are not willing to remain silent in the face of injustice. Our film is about courage to resist injustice in post-revolutionary Egypt.

Synopsis

Before Elvis, before Elton John, Madonna and Lady Gaga, there was Liberace: virtuoso pianist, outrageous entertainer and flamboyant star of stage and television. A name synonymous with showmanship, extravagance and candelabras, he was a world‑renowned performer with a flair that endeared him to his audiences and created a loyal fan base spanning his 40‑year career. Liberace lived lavishly and embraced a lifestyle of excess both on and off stage. In summer 1977, handsome young stranger Scott Thorson walked into his dressing room and, despite their age difference and seemingly different worlds, the two embarked on a secretive five‑year love affair. Behind the Candelabra takes a behind‑the‑scenes look at their tempestuous relationship – from their first meeting backstage at the Las Vegas Hilton to their bitter and public break‑up. HBO’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra has generated so much enthusiasm thanks to its subject matter – the tormented relationship between the pianist and his much younger lover, Scott Thorson – and its well-known leading men – Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. But it is also happens to be the last film directed by Steven Soderbergh before he goes into self-imposed exile from moviemaking.

Director’s Statement

Even though Soderbergh was unable to find Hollywood money for this film – reportedly because the story was perceived as “too gay” by studio execs – and eventually produced the film with HBO, he does not aim for the political dimension of the two men in love: “I really was trying to strip away any of that sort of …” Soderbergh begins. Both he and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese “were very conscious of trying to not look at it through any sort of political lens … And halfway through the movie I really feel like you’re just watching a relationship. When the relationship starts to fall apart it’s wrenching because Michael and Matt have done such a god job of showing that Liberace and Scott were connected, if only by the fact that they were both kind of broken, I think.” (from “I needed to see Jason Bourne on top of Gordon Gekko,” The Telegraph)

Synopsis

After working menial jobs in Germany for several years, Alina (Cristina Flutur) returns to her homeland determined to rescue her childhood friend Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) from the monastery she was sent to after both girls were ejected from an orphanage at the age of eighteen. Alina’s single-minded resolve excludes any consideration that the docile Voichita might have actually found fulfillment in this austere retreat — and a means of forgetting the lesbian relationship she and Alina once shared, a forbidden love that Alina is eager to rekindle. Standing between the women is the unyielding „Papa“ (Valeriu Andriuta), the head of the monastic order, who responds to Alina’s aggression with an ever more zealous dogmatism. He soon comes to believe that Alina has fallen prey to demonic possession, and it is his duty to chastise her soul — even if it means destroying her body. Brilliantly exploring the nuances and complexities of a scenario that could easily have been rendered as a simplistic contest between freethinking and backwards tradition, Mungiu firmly establishes himself as one of the most accomplished artists in contemporary world cinema. With Beyond the Hills Cristian Mungiu has created a powerful story about women living under an authoritarian regime — in this case, a remote Orthodox monastery in the Moldavian wilderness, where archaic beliefs still regulate communal life. (Toronto Film Festival)

Director’s Statement

Beyond the Hills is for me primarily a film about love and free will: mostly about how love can turn the concepts of good and evil into very relative ones. Most of the greatest mistakes of this world have been made in the name of faith, and with the absolute conviction they were done for a good cause.

Synopsis

Daniel Abma’s documentary accompanies three young offenders – Imo (22), Jano (17) and Marcel (25) – on the day they are released from Wriezen prison in Brandenburg, eastern Germany, and over the three years that follow. At first sight, the three young protagonists are very different. Jano is a small-time drug dealer from a nearby village. Imo’s face reveals his aggression and every other emotion he experiences. Then there’s Marcel, who was convicted of murdering 16-year-old Marinus from Potzlow. The young men’s new life begins at Wriezen station, where they all set out hoping for the same things: a job, somewhere to live, a girlfriend. Three simple concepts, embodying the yearning for security, emotional safety, respect and love. But the very first day turns out differently for each of the protagonists. Marcel’s girlfriend has planned the day down to the last minute and organized all the necessary bureaucracy, while Imo invests his discharge grant in drugs and beer. Finding a job proves difficult – one rejection after another, now and again an unpaid work placement. After a while all three young men find a girlfriend. Life settles down a bit, and starting a family seems the obvious thing to do next. Each of the three has a daughter. They are caring fathers, selling drugs and renovating their homes in their attempts to look after their children and satisfy the welfare office’s requirements. Now, though, problems can no longer be solved simply by socking your opponent in the face. How do you fight a court that says you’re incapable of looking after your own child? What happens when you end up back in jail – this time as a dad? What does life in our society ask of each of us? What do we need in order to live an autonomous, successful life? Is release day a chance to start afresh, or do you stay a jailbird forever, unable to cope with the challenges of everyday life?

Synopsis

„In April 2009, Swedish filmmakers Fredrik Gertten and Margarete Jangård learned that the world premiere of Bananas!— their documentary about a lawsuit against the Dole Food Company — would take place at a major film festival in Los Angeles. Within weeks, they were embroiled in a legal and public-relations battle to save their premiere, their film, their reputations, and their freedom of speech. While censorship is, sadly, nothing new, its insidious power gains startling immediacy by playing out in front of Gertten’s camera. The filmmakers find themselves painted as villains due to Dole’s shrewd PR moves — even before their film has been screened. Gertten takes the offensive, filing a countersuit and media campaign of his own to confront Dole’s overgrown-schoolyard- bully tactics. As demonstrated over the past several months in actions held around the globe, corporations are being taken to task for their disproportionate political and financial influence. Big Boys Gone Bananas! is a telling case study of the power of individuals to fight back.“ (B.T., Sundance Film Festival).

Synopsis

A literal and metaphorical journey towards enlightenment, Black Out shows how children reconcile their daily lives in Guinea, one of the world’s poorest countries, with their desire to learn. Every day during exam season, as the sun sets over Conakry, Guinea, hundreds of school children begin a nightly pilgrimage to the airport, petrol stations and wealthy parts of the city, searching for light. This evocative documentary tells the story of these children’s inspiring struggle for education in the face of the country’s own fight for change.

Director’s Statement

„In philosophical terms, life is hope. Without hope it’s suicide.“ (Socrates, teacher in Conakry). For me, Socrates’ words sum up the mood and feeling I wanted to create in this film. Hopeful and dark at the same time, Black Out does not give any easy answers; it leaves us wondering what the future really holds for these children. When I first had the idea for this film, it was very clear to me that I did not want to make another inspirational film about children in Africa. I did not want to make a film that ultimately is designed to leave us, a Western audience, feeling good about the children and about ourselves; a film that shows that if you work hard, you can make it and achieve your dreams. For me, the situation in Guinea is way more ambiguous. Whilst the children in this film are inspirational, and you can’t help but feel moved by their determination and desire to improve their lives, it is also clear that most of them will not achieve their dreams or even get a job after studying so hard. These children are very much aware of this, they know that currently regardless of how hard they study, this might not make any difference. Black Out is a film about the resilience of the human spirit, the fact that we keep on trying to achieve our dreams against all odds, even when our lives seem shaped and dictated by forces outside of our control.

Synopsis

The history of the Iranian revolution as the history of cinema: In 1978, on the verge of the Islamic revolution, more than 130 cinemas burned down across Iran, including 28 in Tehran. Great strikes, signs of the onset of the revolution, affected cinema at large. The debates also addressed the films as such: which films should be shown, which should be made? Which cinema could or should be abandoned, what did people want and what were they allowed to see? After the cinemas were closed or burned down, the state of things is inverted in Falgoosh. The characters abandon the screen, the people take to the streets and try to direct themselves. And cinema becomes the spectator. (Forum Expanded)

Inhalt

At 15, Adèle doesn’t question it: girls go out with boys. Her life is changed forever when she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair, who will allow her to discover desire, to assert herself as a woman and as an adult. In front of others, Adèle grows, seeks herself, loses herself, finds herself … Abdellatif Kechiche’s adaption of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Color won the Palme d‘Or at the 2013 Cannes Film festival.

Director’s Statement

I was interested in developing a female character who was passionate about her professional life and wanted to pass on her enthusiasm … Each of us remembers that turning point in our school life when a passionate teacher … instilled the seeds of a vocation in us. But in the end my screenplay never reached fruition. So when I came across Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, the story of absolute love between two women and, at the same time, of a young woman becoming a schoolteacher, I saw how I could link these two projects.“

Inhalt

Award winning director Sridhar Rangayan offers a sneak preview of the 70 min feature length documentary Breaking Free and a selection of South Asian LGBT shorts. Crisscrossing across India, Breaking Free, a pathbreaking feature- length documentary, attempts to unravel the human rights violations faced by Indian LGBTH (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, hijra) persons at the hands of the law, family, and society because of their sexuality and sexual orientation. It also traces the history of the Indian queer rights movement – from ‘Invisibility to Empowerment’. „I’ve a right to love and live with dignity“, cry out the Indian LGBTH community who have been made invisible and pushed underground by a draconian law Sec 377 that criminalized homosexuality till recently. The film Breaking Free strings together anguished voices of those who were tortured, blackmailed and indicted by this law; along with voices of advocates, activists and opinion builders who have fought a decade-long battle to have this law read down in 2009. But it is now being challenged by religious fanatics and moral policemen who scream it will open the floodgates of immorality and destroy India’s cultural fabric. Even as hate crimes rise and LGBTH voices become strident demanding social acceptance, the Indian queer rights movement has gained a spotlight in the media and among the mainstream. The film captures a community in indignation, a society in transition and a country on the verge of historic changes. Breaking Free is the biggest LGBTQ project from India, with more than 100 interviews across 15 cities and towns in India, giving a candid and emotional voice to the still largely closeted and invisiblised by the society.

Synopsis

In Uganda, a new bill threatens to make homosexuality punishable by death. David Kato – Uganda’s first openly gay man – and his fellow activists work against the clock to defeat the legislation while combatting vicious persecution in their daily lives. But no one is prepared for the brutal murder that shakes their movement to its core and sends shock waves around the world. In an unmarked office at the end of a dirt track, veteran activist David Kato labors to repeal Uganda’s homophobic laws and liberate his fellow lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender men and women, or “kuchus.” But David’s formidable task just became much more difficult. A new “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” proposes death for HIV-positive gay men, and prison for anyone who fails to turn in a known homosexual. Inspired by American evangelicals who have christened Uganda ground zero in their war on the “homosexual agenda,” the bill awaits debate in Uganda’s Parliament. Meanwhile, local newspapers have begun outing kuchus with vicious fervor under headlines such as: “HOMO TERROR! We Name and Shame Top Gays in the City.” David, Uganda’s first openly gay man, is one of the few who dare to publicly protest state-sanctioned homophobia. Working with an idiosyncratic clan of fellow activists, David fights Uganda’s government and tabloids in the courts, on television, and at the United Nations. Because, he insists, “if we keep on hiding, they will say we’re not here.” But one year into filming Call Me Kuchu and just three weeks after a landmark legal victory, on January 26, 2011, the unthinkable happens: David is brutally murdered in his home. His death sends shock waves around the world, and leaves Kampala’s kuchus traumatized and seeking answers for a way forward. With unprecedented access, Call Me Kuchu depicts the last year in the life of a courageous, quick-witted and steadfast man whose wisdom and achievements were not fully recognized until after his death. While heartbreaking, the documentary traces a narrative that takes the viewer beyond the chronicle of victimization depicted in international news media: it tells the nuanced story of David and Kampala’s kuchus as they work to change their fate, and that of other kuchus across Africa.

Synopsis

German musician Heinz Ratz felt asylum seekers in Germany weren’t being treated fairly. So he found some of the best musicians among them and went on tour to raise awareness. Now the ensemble is part of a documentary. Two year ago, 45-year-old Heinz Ratz went on a bike tour through Germany with his band Strom & Wasser. But it wasn’t just a leisurely summer outing – their aim was to campaign for justice for refugees in German politics and collect donations for their cause. Along the way, they visited 80 different refugee camps where they came into contact with musicians who had been well known in their home countries, but weren’t allowed to work – let alone travel – within Germany. „Back then I had the idea to invite [the musicians] to Hamburg to record a CD with them and then go on tour,“ said Ratz. And that’s how the band’s next album, Strom & Wasser featuring The Refugees, came about. The Refugees were 30 musicians from 15 countries that had nothing to do with Lauryn Hill’s former band with the same name. The resulting CD, whose cover features a green rowboat stranded in a desert, is a mix of world music, rap, folk, and pop and texts about life in refugee homes. Can’t Be Silent isn’t a portrait of Ratz as a person, though, but rather of the refugees he’s put in the limelight. Ratz only appears three or four times in the film to explain the project and the tour schedule. The film’s focus lies fully on the music, fears and hopes of the artists on stage. For the film, director Julia Oelkers had to rely on video material that the asylum seekers made themselves, because she wasn’t granted permission to film inside the residences. Nevertheless, she managed to weave together a documentary that tells the stories of people caught between the euphoria of applause and the hope of a better life.

Synopsis

“Two brothers and their little sister are thrown out of their flat because they haven’t paid the rent. The orphans pack up their few possessions and go out to the country, where the family owns a small plot of land. The children set up camp, knowing they have to fend for themselves. But this solution is insecure, too: they are told, in no uncertain terms, that all plots will shortly pass to the state unless at least the foundations of a house have been laid. The threesome get down to work, making night-time visits to neighbouring sites to ‘borrow’ tools and materials, then building by day. But no sooner are the foundation walls complete than an unsympathetic policeman advises them that the law has changed. Foundations are not enough – the shell of a new building must be standing, or the land will be confiscated. The setbacks keep coming, but the plucky trio refuse to accept defeat. Delivered with sublime calm and infinitely laconic humour, Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s parable on homelessness and lawlessness also tells of the determination to overcome obstacles and fight for one’s rightful place in the world.” (goEast – Festival des mittel- und osteuropäischen Films)

Synopsis

Asylum matters have crept out of politics and the public eye since the number of applications decreased in Germany as a result of a balancing out of laws at EU level. Tacitly, we rely on an administrative system and perhaps a legal procedure to clarify the status of asylum seekers. The responsibility for either accepting or rejecting an application lies with decision makers at the German Federal Office for Migrants and Refugees. The most the large majority of refugees who leave their home for reasons of hunger, poverty or lack of prospects can expect is refugee status according to the Geneva Convention or protection from deportation. In the worst case, the application will be rejected with deportation as a consequence. Gerda Wittstatt lived in a caring home in Nuremberg until her death. Until she was forced out for reasons of age, she worked for the Office for Migration and Refugees. For this film she spoke for the first time about her experiences with refugees – people who are regularly confronted with abuse and torture – and about the difficulties of making decisions of conscience.

Synopsis

In the constant stream of hoping, failing and making new plans, Denok and Gareng stay united in their passionate struggle to make it up the hill one day. In the modest house of Gareng’s mum, the young Muslim couple starts a small pig business, looking for the lucky streak to come over the family. But new challenges constantly arise, putting their cheerfulness and patience on trial. In an entirely observational approach Denok and Gareng explores a strong loving relationship inside a strikingly vivid family that sticks together, fights back and laughs, about what others would call a Sisyphus fate.

Director’s Statement

“Personally, I have learned a lot from Denok and Gareng’s life, from the spirit to love, how they accept and face problems that continue to come their way, as well as their courage in laughing about themselves and their lives. Not many people have that courage. Daring to laugh at yourself means to look at one’s own life from greater distance. That’s why I admire Denok and Gareng. I believe their daily life struggle should be seen. Their courage should be shared through a film that portrays them carefully and sincerely. I want to place Denok and Gareng into the centre of our perception, because their existence is hardly looked at, when we pass by.”

Synopsis

Two men representing two different cultures clash in the dust of the former Belgian colony, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lao Yang and Eddy both work for a company called CREC (Chinese Railway Engineering Company). They have just set up camp near the remote mining town of Kolwezi in the Katanga province of the RDC. The goal of the company is to redo the road – covering 300km – that connects Kolwezi with the capital of the province Lubumbashi. Lao Yang is head of logistics of the group. He is responsible for the equipment, building materials and food (mainly chickens) to arrive in the isolated Chinese prefab camp. The Congolese government was supposed to deliver these things but so far the team hasn’t received anything. With Eddy (a Congolese man who speaks Mandarin fluently) as an intermediate, Lao Yang is forced to leave the camp and deal with local Congolese entrepreneurs, because without the construction materials the road works will cease. What follows is an endless, harsh, but absurdly funny rollercoaster of negotiations and misunderstandings, as Lao Yan learns about the Congolese way of making deals.

Synopsis

Nazif barely makes ends meet as an iron picker to support his family. He searches daily for scrap metal while his partner Senada tends to their home and their two young daughters. A third baby is on the way. After a long day’s work, Nazif finds Senada laid up in pain. The following day, he borrows a car to drive her to the nearest clinic. The diagnosis is that Senada has miscarried and is still carrying her dead five-month old fetus. The condition is critical and Senada needs immediate treatment at a faraway city hospital. Because she does not have a state-provided health insurance card, the hospital requests that Senada pays 980 Bosnian marks (500 euros), a fortune for a modest iron picker. Despite Nazif’s begging, Senada is denied the crucial surgery and forced to return home to their Roma community in central Bosnia and Herzegovina. For the next 10 days, Nazif will do everything he can to try and save Senada’s life – desperately searching for more scrap metal, seeking help from state institutions… For the next 10 days, Nazif and Senada will be fully exposed to the callousness of contemporary society. “Danis Tanović weaves these dramatic events, his protagonists’ economic hardship and fear of death into a wintery tale. The fact that the non-professional cast are re-enacting an episode from their own lives contributes greatly to the film’s sense of authenticity and social realism. At the same time, the film demonstrates one Roma family’s extraordinary courage and unerring will to survive” (Berlinale 2013)

Synopsis

Have you ever wondered what happens to your electronics at the end of their life? Almost 50 million tonnes of e-waste (electronic waste) are generated worldwide every year. A large volume of second-hand and condemned electronic goods arrive in developing countries from the “developed” world, with a significant quantity arriving as e-waste, exported illegally as “second hand goods”. Without dialogue or narration, E-WASTELAND presents a visual portrait of unregulated e-waste recycling in Ghana, West Africa, where electronics are not seen for what they once were, but rather for what they have become.

Synopsis

Beth B takes us into the 21st century underground and reveals a secret world where cutting-edge performers are taking hold of a taboo art form, Burlesque, and driving it to extremes that most people have never seen. It’s satire. It’s parody. It’s a populist blend of art and entertainment that gives new meaning to the word “transgression.” Above all, it’s a lot of fun, and it will blow your mind. Operating on the far edge of Burlesque, these performers combine politics and physical comedy to question the very concept of “normal.” Through them, we get to examine our own inhibitions. Beth B has followed the lead characters with a “fly-on-the-wall” camera over several years, capturing rehearsals, backstage preparations, private struggles and triumphs, and the extraordinary performances. The film’s unique perspective allows us, the audience, into the clubs and other hidden spaces where these artists perform. This shocking and comedic art form thrives in the after-dark hours and cult venues of major metropolitan areas – renowned spots such as The Box, Coney Island Sideshow, Casa Mezcal, and The Slipper Room, founded by James Habacker, who also appears in the film. This performance art is powerful and enlightening because it challenges traditional notions of body, gender, and sexuality. The body types of the performers range from statuesque to transgender to disabled. Their personalities are scintillating, yet very real. They may be part of a unique subculture, but they come from surprisingly diverse economic and social backgrounds. As they peel away their clothes – describing their journeys and commenting on their performances – they peel away our own preconceptions and inhibitions. Ancient moral, religious and sexual shibboleths are seen from new perspectives, and a new generation of the cultural avant-garde comes to light.

Synopsis

The first Iranian fiction film that was shot in (in parts) Nuremberg! “Iranian female director Negar Azarbayjani’s first feature is also the first Iranian narrative film with a transgender protagonist. Adineh, or “Eddie” as she calls herself, is waiting impatiently for her passport to be processed so that she can get female-to-male sex-reassignment surgery in Germany. The reason she won’t get an operation in Iran (where sex reassignment is surprisingly accessible despite the fundamentalist government’s policies against homosexuality) is that her wealthy and humiliated father is just as impatient to marry her off to a male cousin. Having slipped from his clutches and needing to lay low while waiting for her passport, Eddie is on the verge of being assaulted by goons when Eddie flags down a passing car. It’s actually a clandestine taxi driven by Rana, a conservative young wife whose husband is in prison and can’t provide for the family. Although a woman driving a cab is taboo in her social class, she can’t resist when Eddie offers her triple fare to get her to her hideout. But when Eddie tries to explain that she’s “trans,” Rana panics and drives into the path of a bus. This remarkable film is anchored by a magnetic, heartbreaking performance by Shayesteh Irani as Eddie, who also played the butchest of the forbidden female soccer fans in the banned director Jafar Panahi’s Offside. What at first seems like an implausible friendship between Rana and Eddie achieves rare sympathy and solidarity through their mutual oppression, cutting through their class and ethical differences.” (Frameline FF 2012)

Synopsis

“A lovely, elegant and stirring look at one man’s sometimes sturdy, sometimes wavering memories of being a fighter for Algeria’s liberation from French colonialism, Damien Ounouri’s Fidaï marks a striking advance in Arabic documentary filmmaking. With his great-uncle, Mohamed El Hadi Benadouda, keeping his exploits secret from his family for the 50 years since Algerian independence, Ounouri’s artfully made movie — with Jia Zhang-ke’s XStream Pictures as co-producer and showing some of Jia’s filmic influence — is an act of personal liberation as well.” (Robert Koehler, Variety)

Director’s Statement

What History remembers from wars are numbers, highlights and legends. What has been actually experienced by its participants, their day-to-day, personal stories and feelings are not passed on to us. Taking a more sensitive and human approach – that begins from the individual and heads towards major events – I wanted to give voice to the ordinary people. When I was a child, I often questioned my father about my great uncle, El Hadi – one of many humble soldiers who fought for Algerian independence. Since the elders never spoke openly about this period, his story was only ever revealed to me through footnotes and so my mind used to fill in the gaps with all kinds of imagined adventures. By recreating a path through France and Algeria of El Hadi during those dark years, hearing his words and those of the people he meets along the way and remembers with, we discover something new: a living history that enters into a dialogue with the official textbook versions we have become accustomed to or have been taught. Through Fidaï, I wish to bring a fresh perspective on the Algerian Revolution, a subjective and necessary look. In view of the situation of the increasing loss of its participants, it is urgent to build a memory that binds the intimate to the collective, my generation with that of the elders and that encourages the transmission of these memories.

Synopsis

Fire Under the Ashes tells, through handycam footage kept unreleased for four years and brought out of Iran under difficult circumstances, how the ordinary life of a couple is seriously affected by the political conditions during and after the Presidential Elections in 2009.

Inhalt

Transnistrien: Ein geographisches Gebiet, das an die Ukraine und an Moldawien angrenzt. Kein Staat und doch von Grenzen umgeben, keine Demokratie und doch steht mal wieder der Wahlkampf vor der Tür. Lukáš Kokeš und Klára Tasovská richten in ihrem kunstvollen Dokumentarfilm Fortress ihre Kamera wie ein Mikroskop auf einen Landstrich, dessen Bevölkerung mehrere Pässe benötigt, um reisen zu dürfen. Transnistrien ist zugleich multinationaler Staat und sowjetische Utopie: von keinem Staat anerkannt außer von Russland. Kurz vor den Präsidentschaftswahlen 2011 kommen die Filmemacher Lukáš Kokeš und Klára Tasovská in ein Land, in dem die Zeit stehen geblieben zu sein scheint: Sie finden ein Regime vor, das mit einer grotesken Staatspropaganda und einem riesigen Sicherheitsapparat die ständige Überwachung der Menschen und Diskriminierung regierungskritischer Bürger propagiert: Auf jeden einzelnen Bürger kommt ein Polizist – „deswegen ist Transnistrien ein paradiesischer Ort und deswegen kann hier jeder so gut schlafen“, sagt ein Staatsdiener. „Our Country, our Pride“ steht in roten Lettern auf einer Steinplatte, die direkt an einer spärlich befahrenen Straße prangt. Viele Menschen hier fühlen sich gut aufgehoben und sicher vor der großen weiten Welt da draußen. Sie bezeichnen das bestehende politische System als „modified democracy”, ein wirkliches Bewusstsein der staatlichen Kontrolle, der sie ausgesetzt sind, haben sie allerdings nicht. Meinungs- und Versammlungsfreiheit scheinen Fremdwörter zu sein. Mit großem Gespür für die feinen Zwischentöne blicken Kokeš und Tasovská, die größtenteils illegal drehen mussten, wie mit einem Brennglas auf eine unbekannte Region und geben einen faszinierenden und zugleich irritierenden Einblick in die Zustände Transnistriens, an dessen Existenz man kaum glauben mag.

Synopsis

The subject remains a taboo. Almost 65 years had to pass before Austria finally overturned the Nazi judgements in 2009 and deserters from the Wehrmacht were vindicated. The film takes us back to 1946/1947, the Winter of Starvation in Salzburg. Scarred by traumatic wartime experiences and confronted by social exclusion, four young deserters – a cook, a farmer, an altar boy and a pig keeper – reveal to us the reasons behind their desertion. Successfully walking a tightrope between fiction and documentary, Gabriele Neudecker reveals touching insights into the forgotten victims of National Socialism and their ostracism after the war. “Taking a look behind the stereotype of the blond-haired, blueeyed Nazi soldier, Glorious Deserter studies a collection of brave young Austrians, men who chose to champion their own beliefs rather taking orders from the Third Reich’s war machine. Linked once by their acts of desertion and now by circumstance, the men try to forge normal lives in post-war Austria but find their paths strewn with disillusionment, guilt, estrangement and painful recollection. Some of them have their wives, others have religion to support and help them move on – but for many, it seems, things can never be quite the same again. In an unconventional twist, Glorious Deserter is written almost entirely in direct address to the audience, and shot like a contemporary documentary; each of the characters have their part of the film, and although their narrative is fluid you can’t help but feel as if there’s someone just behind the camera, asking questions. If there were, that ‘someone’ would be Gabriele Neudecker: producer, writer, director and editor of Glorious Deserter, a veteran of three short films taking her first step into the world of features – and finding she can stand.” (Orestes Kouzof)

Synopsis

God Loves Uganda explores the role of the American evangelical movement in Uganda, where American missionaries have been credited with both creating schools and hospitals and promoting dangerous religious bigotry. The film follows evangelical leaders in America and Uganda along with politicians and missionaries as they attempt the radical task of eliminating “sexual sin” and converting Ugandans to fundamentalist Christianity. As an American influenced bill to make homosexuality punishable by death wins widespread support, tension in Uganda mounts and an atmosphere of murderous hatred takes hold. The film reveals the conflicting motives of faith and greed, ecstasy and egotism, among Ugandan ministers, American evangelical leaders and the foot soldiers of a theology that sees Uganda as a test case, ground zero in a battle not for millions, but billions of souls. Through vérité, interviews, and hidden camera footage – and with unprecedented access – God Loves Uganda takes viewers inside the evangelical movement in both the US and Uganda. It features Lou Engle, the creator of The Call which brings tens of thousands of believers together to pray against sexual sin. It provides a rare view of the most powerful evangelical minister in Uganda, who lives in a mansion where he’s served by a white-coated chef. It goes into a Ugandan church where a preacher whips a congregation into mass hysteria with anti-gay rhetoric. It records the culture clash between enthusiastic Midwestern missionaries and world weary Ugandans. It features a heartbreaking interview with gay activist David Kato shortly before he was murdered. It tells the moving story of Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, a minister excommunicated, ostracized and literally spat on for being tolerant and his remarkable campaign for peace and healing in Uganda. Shocking, horrifying, touching and enlightening, God Loves Uganda will make you question what you thought you knew about religion.

Synopsis

Golden Slumbers is an elegantly assembled and deeply moving remembrance of Cambodian cinema, which shone brightly from 1960 to 1975 with more than 400 productions before the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime destroyed almost every film and executed most of the country’s creative community. Framed around the illuminating and frequently heartbreaking testimony of surviving industry figures, the docu reps an auspicious feature-length debut for young French-Cambodian helmer Davy Chou. A long fest life is indicated, and niche broadcasters should snap it up. The grandson of Vann Chan, one of Cambodia’s most prolific producers of the era, Chou goes against the grain of conventional documaking by showing only tiny snippets of moving footage. Given that only 30 old Cambodian movies have survived on poor quality VHS and VCD formats, Chou instead invites participants to describe films last seen theatrically 40 and 50 years ago. These recollections of supernatural thrillers, costume spectacles and heartrending melodramas prove so enthralling that clips — especially inferior-quality ones — hardly seem necessary. Using stills, lobby cards and old radio promo spots, the docu opens with a vivid picture of how the Cambodian film industry sprang up virtually overnight during the administration of prime minister Father-King Norodom Sihanouk, an enthusiastic patron of the arts and feature filmmaker. Cambodia’s first screen goddess and still an active performer and teacher, Dy Saveth (Love and War, The Snake King’s Wife) gives a marvelous account of starring in approximately 100 films, and will touch many auds’ hearts with her comments about the immortality of Cambodian cinema. (Richard Kuipers)

Synopsis

In a small apartment in Buenos Aires, an old woman eagerly awaits the birth of her grandchild and all the joys of becoming a grandmother. However, horrific circumstances mean she is forced to wait over 30 years. Abuelas explores the traumatic ramifications of General Videla’s military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976-83, whereby an estimated 30,000 men, women and children, ‚disappeared‘. Using real-life testimonials from members of the ‚Grandmothers of May Square‘, this animated-documentary raises issues of memory and loss. The film is testament to the extraordinary tenacity of these women, who continue fighting for the truth about their missing relatives.

Synopsis

A documentary of small changes evolves into an historical record of New York. The resulting film is an essayistic requiem for a neighborhood and an entire way of life; it also provides a case study of the rapid gentrification of our cities. In 1989, together with a group of female friends, Su Friedrich rented and renovated an old loft in Williamsburg, an unassuming working-class district of Brooklyn. In 2005 this former industrial zone was designated a residential area and the factories, manufacturers and artists‘ lofts were priced out by property speculators lured by tax breaks. Friedrich spent five years documenting with her camera the changes in the area between East River and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. She shows the demolition of industrial buildings and the construction of trendy new apartments for wealthy clients, watching old tenants leave and new inhabitants arrive. As she keeps meticulous record of developments, the extent and speed of the upheaval becomes clear. Her own tenancy agreement expires too and so her documentary images and trenchant commentary become the tools of her growing anger. The Atlantic’s Sarah Goodyear writes: “Friedrich may be filled with righteous anger and deep sorrow, but she never loses her sense of humor. …She seems like she might be dangerous. Maybe she is. Artists are supposed to be that way, after all.” In Pop Matters, Cynthia Fuchs looks at a different angle: “On one hand, the movie mourns the loss of a community. On the other, however, it asks how this or any community is defined, who makes and misses it, and how it might be remembered.”

Director’s Statement

In making Gut Renovation I was concerned with documenting two central aspects of my experience as the neighborhood collapsed around me. These were the physical changes—the heart-rending loss of so many beautiful old industrial buildings, as well as the men and women who worked in them—and the changes in our lives—the loss of our living and working space and of the friendships we had forged with our roommates and neighbors.

Synopsis

Based on real-life events, Home is the story of an old man who stays behind in war-torn Grozny during the Chechen War. He is alone and cannot go anywhere. His house is all that he has. During the day, he repairs his house with tools that he finds in the ruins and rubble around him. At night, he hides from the army’s attacks and plundering in his cellar. The next day, he once again climbs the stairs to observe the destruction and begin his reparations. The camera accompanies his search for wood, water and gas and gives the viewer an insight into his environment and loneliness. The images are as poetic as they are mundane, telling of survival at times of war but also of hope for a better future.

Synopsis

The Paraguayan Chaco is one of the world’s last virgin frontiers, where modern-day cowboys battle with indigenous populations over agricultural and drilling rights. This not-so-Hollywood Western begins when Daniele Incalcaterra rolls into town and ruffles some feathers by announcing his plan to establish a national park in the middle of it all. Daniele and his brother inherited 12,355-acres of land that has remained untouched since their father purchased it from the Stroessner regime in the 1970s. The land is now worth millions and in an act of immense altruism, Daniele hopes to return the land to its rightful owners, the Nandeva people. But the neighbouring cattle baron has no intention of living beside pesky Indians, so he sends one of his cronies, Mr. Centurion, to drive Daniele away. Our chainsmoking protagonist retaliates by assembling a motley posse of his own. Jato is a hippy ornithologist who can identify every creature in the Chaco. Victor runs a pugilistic NGO that battles deforestation on a global scale. Enrique is all business and he strategizes against the long arm of bureaucracy. With Daniele as their fearless leader, the group sets out to fight the good fight and preserve a piece of magnificently rugged forest forever. (TW, DOXA Documentary Film Festival)

Synopsis

„Tbilisi, Georgia, 1992: The Soviet era is over and Georgia must fend for itself. Civil war is raging in the province of Abkhazia. For Natia and Eka, the barely fourteen-year-old protagonists of In Bloom, childhood is coming to an end. Eka is growing up without her father, rebelling against her concerned mother and her older sister. And Natia’s father, a choleric alcoholic, terrorises the entire family. The two friends cannot find peace outside of the family either – not in school, not on the street, and not in the bread lines. Chaos, insecurity, and fear of what the future might bring hold sway in everyday life. An admirer gives Natia a pistol with one single bullet. A little later, she’s abducted by another admirer. This first feature film by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß takes up the buried traditions of Georgian cinema, weaving together loud and soft, melancholy and missing love, eruptions of violence and a sense of the idyllic, precocious cold-bloodedness and childlike naïveté into a wonderfully rhythmic, exciting cinematic composition. A new generation of filmmakers has emerged in Georgia and is starting out by remembering its own history.” (Christoph Terhechte, Berlinale, Forum 2013)

Directors’ Statement

“Our characters are in search of their identity as women and of the meaning of violence, revenge, and love. They seek an answer to the question of whether love can justify killing a human being. The answer seems clear: no, of course not! But what if this question is thrust upon one when one has only fourteen years of life experience and lives in a country ruled by chaos, anarchy, and vigilantism? What role models does one have? Which set of values offers the best chances for survival? Perhaps all of us can see a bit of ourselves in these two girls.”

Synopsis

Adam is a Catholic priest who discovered his calling as a servant of God at the relatively late age of 21. He now lives in a village in rural Poland where he works with teenagers with behavioural problems who fight and yell abuse. He declines the advances of a young blonde named Ewa, saying he is already spoken for. However, celibacy is not the only reason for his rejection. Adam knows that he desires men and that his embrace of the priesthood has been a flight from his own sexuality. When he meets Łukasz, the strange and taciturn son of a simple rural family, Adam’s self-imposed abstinence becomes a heavy burden. Małgośka Szumowska’s visually powerful film, charged with striking imagery from Christ’s Passion, dares to broach the still taboo topic of homosexuality in the priesthood. Confronted with his ‘forbidden’ desires, her protagonist experiences both moments of bliss and utter despair. A film about confused emotions, repression and loneliness – and the possibility of perhaps finding oneself after all. The film’s topic quickly evokes associations such as pedophilia and sexual abuse. Yet Małgośka Szumowska points at a far different problem.

Directors’s statement

It’s strange, but I wanted to make a film about this kind of yearning for love, affection, closeness. It sounds trivial, but this feeling of somehow being torn from the inside,a feeling of being unfulfilled in contacts with other people, this great longing for something strong and powerful, was the startingpoint for me. I found a short note in a newspaper, about a boy, a young man really, who killed a priest in a very brutal way. Even though this story was completely different, I suddenly got an idea, to tell a story about a priest who dares to love.

Synopsis

In Portugal, as in the whole of the European Union, the number of people subjected to immediate or almost immediate expulsion in airports is striking. Every year, the number goes unnoticed because the thousands of stories behind each of the figures remain untold. The way things stand today, what does it matter how many are expelled at airports? The images of African corpses in the seas around fortress Europe have become so commonplace that the daily interrogations and expulsions appear to be a minor matter. Nevertheless, thanks to our indifference, everyday thousands of individuals are interrogated straight off the aeroplane, in Europe. Hundreds are sent back to their country of origin. They are not criminals, they are not traffickers; most have their papers in order and valid entrance visas. These are people who have paid their airfare, a sum that often represents several months salary, yet are sometimes treated with hostility. Journey to Portugal throws light on a tiny tip of the iceberg: the fact that these everyday police practices are consigned to the silence of statistics. There is a total lack of transparency regarding police procedures in very many situations. In Portugal, civil society has no way of knowing what really happens in the majority of cases the police handle. Lawyers, Immigrant Protection Associations and journalists are forbidden access to police controlled areas in Portuguese airports (with few exceptions). In other EU countries, like France, this police impunity no longer exists. The regular presence of associations at interrogations is authorised and abuses do not go unreported.

Synopsis

Justice for Sale follows Claudine, a young and courageous human rights lawyer in Congo in her struggle against injustice and widespread impunity in Congo. She investigates the case of a soldier who was convicted of rape and discovers that his trial was unfair and corrupted. He was convicted without any concrete evidence. In her journey to obtain justice, she uncovers a system where the basic principles of law are virtually ignored. Questions are raised about the role of the international community and non-governmental organisations within the Congolese judicial system. Does their financial support cause justice to be for sale? And who pays the price? Justice for Sale is the third documentary in Ilse and Femke van Velzen’s trilogy about the Congo. Earlier they made Fighting the Silence (NIHRFF 2009) and Weapon of War.

Directors’ Statement

Justice for Sale is a very important film that needs to be told. Congo is officially in a post-conflict situation that in order to move forward needs a well functioning justice system, a judicial system that convicts perpetrators for their crimes. As long as this is not the case, more innocent people become victims and crimes against humanity will continue. Over the last few years there has been much more attention given to sexual violence by local and international NGOs. As a result, rape is becoming a ‘business’ – a business because people are abusing the law on sexual violence to settle conflicts, to earn money, and to show the international community that more perpetrators are indeed convicted. Justice for sale also raises questions about the financial support that the international community and NGOs offer to the Congolese judicial system. Is it creating a justice that is for sale? And if so, who pays the price? This film is extremely important because this is an emerging problem that is not yet public. It’s time to start a debate about this.

Synopsis

17 year old Jasper lives in a very grey, small town. In his family, he cannot be himself. Jaspers dad is a singer, named Lukkie Luk. All the attention in the family goes to his career. Jasper searches a way to handle this and is faced with the typical questions in the live of an adolescent. Questions that will not be answered when he stays in his own routine.

Synopsis

The story begins with an experiment. A filmmaker in the country of Georgia posts an ad inviting youth to audition for her film. Facing the camera, the hopefuls confess their struggles and dreams. These raw interviews unfold seamlessly into cinematic slivers of Georgian life. A teenager awaits news of his father’s surgery. A girl anticipates her wedding. The governor of a tiny village faces a monumental decision. A soldier attempts to link his imprisoned brother to the world outside, and a young woman confronts the mother who abandoned her. These threads form a fluid Altman-esque collage of characters—and a nation—teetering on the brink of change. It’s a world where tradition and modernity subtly intermingle: singing traditional ballads is as common a self-expression as listening to hip-hop or playing online poker. Mixing metanarrative with heightened visual aesthetics, The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear intuitively penetrates individual lives to conjure a richly layered, indelible portrait of a society, brilliantly becoming more than the sum of its parts. (C. L., Sundance Film Festival)

Synopsis

“The means by which an authoritarian regime succeeds in silencing independent voices is the subject of Manuscripts Don’t Burn, the slow-burning, clandestinely made fifth fiction feature by Iranian helmer-writer Mohammad Rasoulof. A brave, challenging picture that makes the viewer complicit in the action, it is also perhaps the first film since the declaration of the Islamic Republic to confront so directly the brutality of the feared security apparatus. The film opens like a thriller, with working-class man Khosrow running from a pursuer and jumping, in the nick of time, into a car driven by his colleague Morteza. It’s only after we follow Khosrow home and feel sympathy for his sick child and financial problems that we discover that he and Morteza are the torture and assassination arms of the state. Along with their silken-voiced boss, Khosrow and Morteza are searching for copies of a banned manuscript that describes a 1995 incident in which 21 poets on a bus bound for a conference in Armenia were slated for elimination. The bus driver, whom we later learn was Khosrow, was ordered to jump out of the bus just before sending the vehicle into a gorge. Luckily, fate forestalled the fatalities, but the writers were warned never to speak of the incident. The violence is, for the most part, understated, depicted as an everyday part of Khosrow and Morteza’s jobs. Yet even as these men go about their diabolical deeds, Rasoulof provides a sliver of hope by showing that there is always a witness, both within the film itself and by extension, via the audience. No warm tones intrude on the well-executed lensing, much of which is done in tightly framed closeups. The claustrophobic visuals, as well as the sophisticated and increasingly ominous sound design, reinforce a ‘no exit’ feel. Those in the know say all exteriors were shot in Iran, while the interior scenes were filmed in Germany.” (Variety)

Synopsis

Richard, an unemployed 55-year-old, arrives 3 minutes late for his appointment at a job centre. An advisor, stifled by the limits of the system she works in, has no choice but to penalise him for his tardiness. To avoid plunging further into destitution, Richard takes desperate measures. Inspired by the events surrounding the London Riots in 2011 and the subsequent infamous speech made by Prime Minister David Cameron, Mass of Men gives a harsh insight into the dangers of repression, disillusionment and apathy. Sehsüchte Internationales Studentenfilmfestival calls it: “An exploration of the absurdity of life, whose interchangeable protagonists, whose societal excess lead to a violent conclusion. With its razor-sharp irony, the film manages to create a nightmarish feeling of the zeitgeist.”

Synopsis

Matthijs (English: Matthew) is autistic, his childhood friend Marc is a filmmaker. Out of their filmed encounters, spanning a couple of months, comes a strikingly beautiful and heartbreakingly complex documentary. “‘My apartment is my universe’, writes Matthew in his diary. Matthew is autistic. Highly intelligent and fragile, he spends his days taping telephone calls, hoping that they would help him understand what people ‘really’ mean – ‘not what they say, but what they mean: they are usually opposite’. Spending most of his time in his cluttered apartment, Matthew has established a complex system meant to help him put some order in the chaos around him and walk easier though the hallway of data that he is constantly struggling to organise. Marc Schmidt creates an affectionate film portrait of his autistic childhood friend – an intensely personal documentary that goes beyond autism, into the inability to translate between one’s understanding of order and another’s sense of chaos, the sense of vulnerability experienced when under the scrutiny of the camera, and the love and human connection needed by each and one of us. A moving story about a man’s attempt to live as close as possible to the border of social acceptability, Matthew’s Laws is also a reminder that housing is a fundamental human right: everyone deserves a place to call ‘home’.” (One World Romania) Matthew’s Laws won the Grand Prix Swiss Post for best feature at the prestigious Vision du Réel film festival on Nyon in 2012. In their statement, the jury wrote: “With love and courage the filmmaker places us face to face with his childhood friend. This film crosses a border into the unknown and mysterious world of autism. Matthew’s Laws gives us the opportunity to experience friendship and self-determination in the face of society’s demands from a unique point of view.”

Synopsis

“For many years, I have been looking for the missing picture: a photograph taken between 1975 and 1979 by the Khmer Rouge when they ruled over Cambodia … On its own, of course, an image cannot prove mass murder, but it gives us cause for thought, prompts us to meditate, to record History. I searched for it vainly in the archives, in old papers, in the country villages of Cambodia. Today I know: this image must be missing. I was not really looking for it; would it not be obscene and insignificant? So I created it. What I give you today is neither the picture nor the search for a unique image, but the picture of a quest: the quest that cinema allows.” (Rithy Panh) “A recreation of the era and Panh’s personal anecdotes is accomplished through the creation of countless clay figures—carved and painted, we see, by hand, out of “earth and water”—staged in static scenes through which the camera moves and the director cuts. They fill in a gap, the missing image of the title: a missing photographic record of the human experience of the horror and oppression behind the government’s official ideology. (An image not missing: the official image, the propaganda image, that of Cambodian films of the time.) Panh’s narration with moving straightforwardness segues between historical recount, deeply personal recollections, and broader criticism, illustrated by the savagely naïve and thereby at once terrifying and sweet figures of his clay populace, each working, living, starving, dying in unalterable repose. Some are laid over documentary film footage, creating historical scenes — like the mass exodus out of Phnom Phen — that apparently have little, if any, visual record. Others‘ colorful sculptural presence of existences eked out, carven-frozen in a solidarity of misery, are contrasted against official moving images of Pol Pot’s official visits and speeches. Pahn begins the film saying that upon reaching his middle age he has returned to his childhood, and so he does not just in recollections of his boyhood but in the toy-like imagining of those recollections. Their primitive form suggests, as does the ellipses in Panh’s storytelling, where it feels like eons pass in what must only be a few seasons or years, a work in progress to discover records of an era held mostly in memory.” (Daniel Kasman)

Synopsis

What happens when your child comes out to you? My Child is a warm, inspiring and sometimes funny documentary about a very courageous and inspiring group of mothers and fathers in Turkey, who are parents of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender individuals. They have not only gone through the difficult path of accepting their children for who they are, but also have taken the next step to share their experiences with other LGBT families and the public. In five homes in Istanbul, Turkey, seven parents of LGBT individuals talk about their experiences of becoming parents; about their children growing up and opening up to them; about the difficult path they had to go through in dealing with this; about themselves opening up to their families, and re-learning how to be a parent. They talk about themes such as denial, trauma, helplessness, fear, shame, acceptance, and re-birth. Nothing has prepared them for this experience. None of the parenting guides, nothing passed on from their elders or schooling mentioned how one could be a parent of a LGBT child. They had to learn it from scratch. When they talk about how they experienced the coming out of their children, they refer to it as the death of a child and birth of a new one. They say this extremely traumatic experience has also led to their own rebirth, as they have been questioning what it means to be an individual, to be true to oneself, and to be a parent. In a conservative society, where family ties are important, they had to deal with their fears about what “others” would say, whether they would be ostracized if they were to come out to their own parents, families, and friends.

Synopsis

Oscar, a teenage graffiti artist, only cares about one thing – getting his name seen. When he is arrested for vandalism, he is sentenced to community service at an old folks’ home. He is forced to clean up, spend time with the elderly, and accompany some of the residents on walks outside. One night after his shift is over, Oscar decides to ‘bomb’ a utility truck parked nearby the home. Lost in his own world, he is unaware of Isabel, a lonely and isolated resident, watching him spray his name. The next day, Isabel forces him to take her on walks so she can continue watching him write his name. Fascinated, she insists Oscar teach her how to ’tag’ her name. They create her alias – ‘NANI’ – and as the graffiti consumes her, the two form an unlikely bond over their visceral vandalism. While Isabel seems to grow younger through her newfound love of graffiti, her battle with Alzheimer’s is on a steady decline. When Isabel’s memory fades as quickly as the art they’ve created, will their friendship be able to survive?

Synopsis

At the latest in summer 2008 the Sri Lankan Government decided to finish the Thirty Years civil war against Tamil rebels at any costs – which meant: irrespective of the sufferings of the civilian population. In the spring of 2009, the army trapped the last 10.000 rebels and 300.000 civilians on a small coast strip at the Northeast of the island and put them permanently under fire, from the sea, from the air and from the countryside. They did so although they had declared the area as a “No Fire Zone”. According to UN estimates, between 40.000 and 70.000 people were killed. No Fire Zone represents the culmination of three years of journalistic investigation and contains deeply disturbing new evidence, powerful eye-witness testimony and compelling personal stories of this century’s worst crime against humanity and of the failure of the international community to prevent this catastrophe. Carefully evidenced, the film uses mobile phone- and small camera footage from both the victims and the perpetrators of violence. Supplemented by expert opinion, No Fire Zone pieces together the day-to-day horror of this war, in a way almost never done before: Viscerally powerful actuality from the battlefield, from inside the crudely dug civilian bunkers and from over-crowded makeshift hospitals, of summary execution, torture and sexual violence.

Synopsis

It begins as Crime & Punishment, with a pawnbroker (and her daughter) killed by a young student who believes he is a philosophical rebel, a unique individual contre dominant society. But the narrative’s triad structure which follows doesn’t pair the criminal against the investigator, but rather the criminal against two other victims. The three stories of cause-and-effect — a spiritual, interior kind of cause-and-effect, actions influencing self-consideration and different engagements with daily existence — alternate back and forth as time passes. Its one movement is that of the dissatisfied, destabilized youth, who the film introduces in its long, single-take discussion among prospective law students who range from fully committed to their careers of entering society and enforcing its status quo, to Fabian, the radical young man whose nihilism, his desire to do away with all relationships, all “history,” will lead him to kill. The other movements are that of Joaquin, an innocent man wrongly convicted of the murders, and Eliza, the wife he leaves behind. The impoverished housewife, in debt to the pawnbroker because a broken leg prevented her husband and her from starting a business — the coincidence that gets him accused of the crime — is stuck taking care of their kids and her sister, and they slump down further into poverty, stalwartly eking out an existence while her husband serves a life sentence in prison. It is, above all, an “everyday” story of observation and adherence, in that the filmmaker has a compassionate sensitivity towards his characters (even the amoral student) and what they do in the world. It is an approach profoundly complicated as North, the End of History turns down a path towards violence, and, later, gestures towards absorbing something mythical into the simple story. The vividly human scale of Diaz’s film, its telling of a classic story specifically within a topical context, its remarkably simultaneous magnitude and minuteness, it is a work so powerful that its tendrils of suggestion seem capable to connect all of the films of Cannes together. (Daniel Kasman, mubi.com)

Synopsis

“A soldier father guides his family with a firm but understanding hand. He gives his two 13-year-old sons a notebook in which they are to write down their everyday experiences. It’s the Second World War, the family is broken up, and the boys are taken to their grandmother’s village to take shelter in her house. But the old woman would rather nurse a bottle of booze than care for her own flesh and blood. Thus instead of finding a safe refuge, the brothers fully experience the cruelty of war and the utter absence of love. Nothing good can come of the situation, and the bitter reality is reflected in their matter-of-fact, emotion-deprived entries in the notebook. The picture graphically portrays the war through the eyes of children – but differently than we’re used to in such cases. Wholly unidyllic, the film takes a brutal look at the loss of illusions and the forced transformation of the protagonists into adults (or whatever the war makes of them). Moreover, the cruelty the brothers learned out of necessity extends beyond the end of the conflict, and thus we may perceive the film as a broader social critique. This elegiac motion picture benefits from Christian Berger’s dazzling camerawork.” (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival) Based on the worldwide bestseller by the Hungarian born Swiss author Àgota Kristóf, The Notebook is a postmodern antiwar drama, an oppressive parable about what war does to children and intensely describes the misery of entire populations in Eastern countries.

Director’s Statement

The Notebook is a war film with no war, a story about innocent but cruel children who resist all morals. It is the story of early adolescent, murderous twin boys. Two bodies, one spirit; two bodies, one will. They speak the same way and they finish each other’s sentences, always on the same wavelength. One boy thinks of something and the other carries it through. When they kill, it is an act of justice. Two bodies and one soul.

Synopsis

The story of a deportation that ended with the tragic death of an asylum seeker in March 2010. In the film, the camera itself is this asylum seeker, and what it captures is a subjective view of reality.

Synopsis

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, the new installment of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s HBO Documentary Films series about the notorious 1993 “West Memphis Three” child murders, chronicles the 18-year fight to prove the innocence of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. On May 5, 1993, the bodies of three eight-year-old boys were found next to a muddy creek in the wooded Robin Hood Hills area of West Memphis, Arkansas. A month later, three teenagers, Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Misskelley, were arrested. Following trials fraught with innuendoes of satanic worship, emotionally charged statements and allegations of coerced confessions, the defendants were convicted, despite a lack of physical evidence linking them to the crime. The HBO films Paradise Lost: The Child Murders of Robin Hills (1996) and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) sparked a national discussion about the innocence or guilt of the West Memphis 3. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory resumes the examination of a horrifying crime and its aftershocks with Echols still on death row and Baldwin and Misskelley still serving life sentences, and follows the story all the way to it’s stunning conclusion. For nearly two decades, Berlinger and Sinofsky have followed this story with extraordinary access to all of the players on both sides of this tragedy. “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory reveals recent DNA and other forensic evidence (unavailable at the time of the murders), as well as other troubling developments, including allegations of juror misconduct, that suggest the trio did not receive a fair trial. The film includes new interviews with Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley, who are now in their 30s. The result is an authoritative and completely new examination of the West Memphis Three case and a comprehensive portrait the American justice system at work.

Synopsis

Somewhere, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, in a country torn apart by a war … A beautiful woman in her thirties watches over her husband in a decrepit room. He is reduced to a vegetative state because of a bullet in the neck, and not only is he abandoned by his companions of the Jihad, but also by his brothers. One day, the woman starts a solitary confession to her silent husband. She talks about her childhood, her suffering, her frustrations, her loneliness, her dreams, her desires … She touches him, kisses him, things she could never have done before, even though they have been married for the past 10 years. Therefore, this paralysed man unconsciously becomes ‘syngué sabour’, a magic stone which, according to Persian mythology, when placed in front of a person shields him from unhappiness, suffering, pains and miseries. In this wait for her husband to come back to life, the woman struggles to survive and live. She finds refuge in her aunt’s place, who is a prostitute, and the only relative who understands her. The woman seeks to free herself from suffering through the words she delivers audaciously to her husband. But after weeks looking after him, she will actually reveal herself in the relationship she starts with a young soldier … With the production of The Patience Stone Atiq Rahimi succeeds in transforming the written words of his novel of the same title into spoken words and moving pictures.

Director’s Statement

Because what is exciting and challenging for a writer-director, is finding a way to exceed one’s own book to show and say in his film all the things he didn’t manage to write using words. The book’s central idea is the myth of Syngue Sabour, the patience stone, a stone on which you can shed your misfortunes, your complaints, your secrets until it’s so full it bursts. In this story, the stone is the husband, a warrior paralysed by a bullet in the neck. The woman, to bring him back to life, has to pray from morning till night for 99 days. But that prayer soon turns in to confession. She murmurs into his ear all the things she has kept locked inside her for so many years.

Synopsis

A young Russian mounts a one-woman protest in support for Pussy Riot. After a series of complications (her mother tries to get her off the street for example), she has to flee the police and ends up taking refuge in a church where the priest hides her. She impresses him with her painting skills and he asks her to help him restore the church. She doesn’t seem to be against the idea. This is a charming parable full of humour that asks about the meaning of protest and explores how to win over the trust of unexpected allies contrary to all clichés.

Synopsis

A love story like no other, Planet of Snail is a mesmerizing documentary about an accomplished young poet who can no longer hear or see and his relationship to the world around him. Young- Chan is deaf and blind. He learned to speak when he was very young, but soon after lost his sight and hearing. He lives with his wife, Soon-Ho, who is his soul mate, an inseparable part of his life, and a window to the outside world. Young-Chan and Soon-Ho communicate through finger braille, a unique form of touch-based sign language in which words are tapped out on each other’s hands. They rely on one another completely. However, Young-Chan must be able to survive on his own. One day, as Soon-Ho waits anxiously at home, Young-Chan embarks on the biggest adventure of his life.

Protagonist’s Statement

I come from planet of snail where people communicate by touching each other. We call ourselves “snails” because we cannot hear or see and our lives are as slow as the snails. Now I live on earth where time runs so fast which makes me hard to follow the life of the earthmen. When I first came to the earth, I was desperate because there was nothing I could do. However, an angel came into my life and I discovered a beautiful world that I can read under my fingers. Everything around me started changing. Hopes started replacing despairs and I started challenging for my long delayed dream. Now my heart is full of hope and I know there will be so much more I can do in this world: The reason for my life. Soon-Ho is my wife. I haven’t actually seen her with my own eyes but I know she is the most beautiful woman in the world. She has become my lifeline ever since she came into my life. She is my arms and legs that take me to school, to the gym, to the sea and everywhere I want to go. She is the eye and the ear of me that sees, hears and translates for me. I cannot live a day without her and feel sorry for that I cannot do much for her while herself has spine disability and often gets sick.

Synopsis

David vs. Goliath – electricity thief vs. buerocrat: Powerless is certainly one of the most entertaining and endearing documentaries coming out if India in the past few years! “It’s hard not to be frightened at how the sparks fly between chaotically knotted cables and dangerous fingers of flame lick away at the old transformers, as elderly men call upon the younger ones to pour a little water on the source of the fire. Suddenly, everything goes black. In Kanpur, India’s former leather capital, blackouts frequently take up more of the time in some districts than hours of normal electrical service. That is why Loha Singh – a latter-day Robin Hood – has made it his life’s task to supply the poorer families and ruffled small-time entrepreneurs with power in such a bizarre manner. His direct adversary is the woman at the top of the state energy supplier Kesco, even if Mrs. Ritu Maheshwari is by no means the villain in this film. These two protagonists are merely the lead dancers in an operetta which comes across as totally insane. Powerless is a documentary film about the electrical supply in an Indian city, the story unfurling along the tangled wires and tracing out lines of conflict of a diabolical complexity in the process.” (Dorothee Wenner, Berlinale 2013)

Fahad Mustafa on his film

We were shooting with the ‘katiyabaaz’ (electricity thieves), the bitterest of bitter Kanpur stock. The work is illegal and risky, and hearing of a ‘katiyabaaz’ who got ‘stuck’ due to the strong magnetic pull of high voltage lines is not rare. Loha Singh, our protagonist, is someone quite unlike anyone else I have ever met. He has a talent for becoming invisible even on an empty street, and yet he stands out as a product of Kanpur’s particular history. In many ways, he is a representative of the millions of citizens who live through this crisis.

Synopsis

By capturing a stunning mosaic of compelling characters and broken landscapes that live on the US-Mexico border, director Rodrigo Reyes reflects on the flaws of human nature and the powerful absurdities we have created in the world. This is not an ordinary border film. It is not news or reportage; it is not about a political agenda. Purgatorio is a fable of humanity, an epic and visceral experience that will leave audiences thinking and meditating long after viewing.

Director’s Statement

When I began to develop the idea to make a documentary or a film about this region or phenomenon, I wanted to avoid political causes, avoid finding an agenda, promoting a cause or solving a problem. When I set out to make Purgatorio what I really wanted was to capture an experience. I did not want to tell the audience, “look, this problem exists, do this to fix it.” I wanted to provide an intense experience of this border and in so doing I tried to move away from political and statistical details because these are things that change all the time, yet the border has been there for years and centuries. It still has some problems from its origin, and these are the problems of human nature, of how we get interact with one another. Political problems change every 4 to 6 years, with each change in the presidency on both sides. Purgatorio for me is a way of understanding the border between Mexico and the United States. I believe that the majority of Mexicans live with this border in way or the other. For us it is something that either consciously or subconsciously affects us; we are always conditioned by, always reacting to, always living out our relationship with the United States. Therefore, it seems to me that by being a migrant myself, by living in the United States for great part of my own life, I developed a desire to understand this strange and bizarre line that divides us.

Synopsis

„It was autumn when I arrived in Germany. I thought that in this exotic country I could distance myself a little bit from Mexico, but I was wrong. Drug traffickers managed to take me back in a ruthless way.“ A short animated documentary about the drug-related violence in Mexico.

Synopsis

It is 1978. Tehran in bloodshed. The young Bahman falls in love with Leila, the sister of his martyred friend. Unrests in the streets, unrests in the hearts. And a revolution makes the people attached and detached. Farahnaz Sharifi creatively compiles some family album photos and footage to narrate subversively the untold story of the missing, lost loves during revolutions. In her very personal style, with a post-humus voice over she moves on the boundaries of fiction and documentary.

Synopsis

“Naoshi is a hale old man of 79 from the Kesen district of Iwate Prefecture who has spent his whole life working as a woodcutter and carpenter. When the tsunami hit in March 2011, the wooden beams of his house didn’t even warp after water reached the second floor, although his son was washed away and drowned in the flood. Naoshi is determined to rebuild his house in the exact same spot, to live out his days in the place he was born and continue to honour his son’s memory. Yet this determination is challenged on several fronts: by his wife, who feels duty bound to stay with him, by the local authorities and their construction restrictions; and maybe even by his own body, given that his prostate cancer is only in remission. Kaoru Ikeya follows Naoshi’s rebuilding efforts for more than a year, exhibiting a perfect understanding of when to ask questions and when to remain silent. As the seasons pass, the debris is cleared, and roots reattach, this tender portrait of a quietly stubborn man opens out into a complex study of the many ambivalences the reconstruction process brings with it: a tangled web of family duty, traditional customs, community spirit and municipal legislation.” (James Lattimer, Berlinale, Forum 2013) as one of the leading figures of the young generation of Iranian documentary filmmakers. She has published a collection of short stories which was nominated „most distinguished“ fiction book of 2011. In 2012 Farahnaz attended IDFA Summer School. She lives in Tehran and is currently working on her new film.

Director’s Statement

While I was wandering in a daze through this disaster zone, I learned that one town was planning to hold a cherry blossom viewing party. […] Held in the hall of a temple on high ground, the party was heart-warming. […] One older man spoke quietly to the assembled residents of the neighbourhood: ’the cherries have bloomed just like they do every year.’ In these words, steeped in a valiant determination toward recovery, I heard the cry of the spirit of people who live rooted in this land. That night, when I watched the footage we’d shot, I decided to make a film about this man. He was Naoshi Sato, the hero of Roots.

Synopsis

“In villages inhabited by India’s Muslim minority in Tamil southern India, as soon as a girl reaches puberty she is locked away until her wedding. This was Salma’s fate when she turned thirteen. Hungry for an education, she avoided an arranged marriage for nine long years by keeping herself confined in a bare room. When she finally agrees to wed local politician Malik, she finds herself imprisoned once again – this time in her husband’s home where the only things she has to read are the newspapers wrapping the vegetables. Clandestinely, she begins to write poetry which her mother helps her smuggle out to a publisher. Her life changes completely when her poems are published and, with the aid of her publisher, she finally travels to Chennai for the first time. Now a well-known poet, she begins to apply for government positions, and inspires her sisters and other women also to fight for their freedom and independence. For, she argues, it is the mutual oppression of women by other women that perpetuates the status quo. Salma does not exoticise the lives of Muslim women; instead the film provides a sober account that is full of respect.” (Berlinale 2012) As with her other work (Pink Saris, Rough Aunties, Sisters in Law), master documentarian Kim Longinotto trains her camera on an iconoclastic woman. Salma’s extraordinary story is one of courage and resilience. Salma has hopes for a different life for the next generation of girls, but as she witnesses, familial ties run deep, and change happens very slowly. Salma helps us understand why the goal of global education of girls is one the most critical areas of empowerment and development of women worldwide.

Synopsis

Bosnian actress, Vernesa Berbo, leaves war-torn Bosnia and settles in Germany where, as an illegal immigrant, she tries to continue her acting career. The only roles she is able to get are roles depicting Eastern European women as, for example, a Polish cleaning lady, Romanian asylum seeker, Russian prostitute, or a Bosnian refugee, roles which take her back to her own personal nightmare. (Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival)

Synopsis

The knowledge needed to build the atomic bomb was not given to us, it was consciously pursued. And the world has been living with the consequences ever since. Neither wholly documentary nor work of fiction, Snake Dance is a stirring personal reading of humankind’s catastrophic decision to play God. The 75-minute film, jointly written by two veteran storytellers, the British writer Patrick Marnham and the Belgian filmmaker Manu Riche, uses a powerful choreography of words and images to construct a suspenseful, interwoven account of the invention of the first weapon of mass destruction. Visually poetic and historically insightful, Snake Dance explores the atomic legacy and the indelible stamp it has left on the world. We plunge into the jungle of the Congo in the footsteps of Leopold II in search of the place where uranium is mined. We cross the ocean to Los Alamos, the base in New Mexico where Robert J. Oppenheimer developed the atom bomb assisted by the best physicists in the world. We follow the bomb to Japan, where it destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Riche and Marnham introduce a second thread into their film, that of the German art historian and anthropologist Aby Warburg (1866 – 1929). Warburg was the first to demonstrate the importance of iconography – a history in images – in the study of civilizations and cultures. For instance, he studied the religious symbolism of the Pueblo Indians and more specifically the Hopi tribe, who lived very near the place where the Los Alamos camp was built. In 1923, the visionary Warburg wrote: ‘What interested me as a cultural historian was that in the midst of a country that had made technological culture into an admirable precision weapon in the hands of intellectual man, an enclave or primitive pagan humanity was able to maintain itself.’ Snake Dance is about the choices modern man has to make if he wants to survive. Like Prometheus, he makes fatal decisions that leave him alone in a world of chaos.” (Kaaitheater /Brussels)

Synopsis

For three weeks, towards the end of their military service, young Israelis who do not have a certificate of high-school graduation are offered the chance to obtain it by taking part in army-sponsored courses which require them to contemplate issues such as human rights, pluralism, the definition of the Jewish State and the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Director Silvina Landsmann goes for a fly-onthe- wall perspective to capture the mélange of ambivalence, stubbornness, argumentative spirit and resilience demonstrated by the students while they are repeatedly challenged by their teacher about their views, and encouraged to engage in some serious thinking before embarking on their future. As they are pushed to both sustain and question their convictions, we end up assisting to an animated course cum therapy session that often involves clashing, uncensored individual opinions. A briskly-paced, revealing look at a group of young people with deeply ingrained views gained through tough life experiences, Soldier/Citizen is a good reminder that a balanced perspective takes effort and a willingness to put yourself in the other’s shoes. (One World Romania 2013)

Director’s Statement

“A great deal has been said about the place of the military ethos within Israeli society. It is difficult to imagine a better opportunity to examine this than by following combat soldiers preparing for the final exam in civics studies before embarking on a journey back to civilian life. These soldiers, who were engaged in acts of extreme violence, are confronted with concepts such as human rights and democracy, which have unfortunately become controversial in many circles within Israeli society.”

Synopsis

Every day, a Romanian woman walks down a path near the Bijlmer prison in southeast Amsterdam. She then sits down on the bank, in front of a ditch where ducks and coots innocently splash about. A dragonfly sits on a stretch of barbed wire, a contradictory image in this unfriendly environment. The woman looks up, past the concrete wall and barbed wire, to the high white towers and their many dark windows. Behind one of them is her boyfriend. She shouts loving things to him and he replies. They talk about small details of daily life, like what they‘ve eaten, what’s on television – they even squabble. The man is locked up, but so is his girlfriend down by the waterside. The filmmaker stays out of the picture, and there is no voice-over. It’s the silence that speaks in Space in Between.

Synopsis

“The death of an old friend plunges Slavko into a dilemma. He is unsure whether he, a Croat, should attend the funeral in the Muslim part of Mostar. On the one hand, he feels like it’s his duty; on the other, he fears a hostile reaction from his own community. His wife is angry and his son is equally sick of his wellworn monologues. At odds with themselves and plagued by divisions: the man and his city have something in common. This psychological study is based on the fact that nearly two decades after the war, Mostar is still divided. An invisible border of distrust and suspicion governs people’s daily lives. Slavko doesn’t want to do the wrong thing, but has lost any sense of what he really wants. His actions verge on the grotesque and paranoid. The handheld camerawork is fluid and in constant motion for much of the film, calling all the more attention to the sense of agitation and tension. Brief emotional outbursts and dramatic exit scenarios seem like a cry into the void. The most impressive scenes are pointedly long, and often involve mute idling in waiting rooms or protracted, redundant debates over trivialities. Neither leads to any sort of change.” (Birgit Kohler) “Bobo Jelcic’s A Stranger portrays a Mostar so riven that even the most commonplace activities are blighted by disharmony, catastrophe hits frequently without warning and ‘ordinary people’ are near too fed up to go on. A morbidly absurdist twist — that occurs fairly early on but would compromise its nicely disorienting initial shock factor to disclose – jolts the film from the kind of naturalistic society- in-transition satire we’ve grown used to from the Balkan states into the more existential territory hinted at by the title, making for an interesting point of difference while pressing us to consider whether post-war Bosnia and hell itself may be interchangeable.“ (Carmen Gray)

Synopsis

The short documentary Two Girls Against the Rain by Cambodian female filmmaker Sao Sopheak (32) is the first locally produced documentary, which gives a voice to members of the lesbian community. It is a true story about two women struggling hard for their love. Soth Yun (57) and Sem Eang (58) met during the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, where more than two million people died. Soth and Sem survived. Today the couple lives in a village in Takeo province in southern Cambodia, approximately 40 kilometers away from the capital Phnom Penh. They do not have children of their own, but have raised several nieces and nephews. Theirs has been a long fight against stigmatization by fellow villagers and their family. And the fight continues – now for the right to marry legally.

Synopsis

In his opulent, playful and sometimes serene debut film Youlian Tabakov tells the chequered life story of his Grandmother, a Bulgarian woman who experienced three political systems: Monarchy, Socialism and Democracy. Tzvetanka Gosheva, was born in 1926 to a rich merchant’s family, which enabled her to attend a privileged school in Sofia. But this bourgeois background became her downfall after the war. Her parents were imprisoned as enemies of the party; her father would never recover from this. By sheer luck she managed to get permission to go to university. She became a doctor, though she suffered a lot of humiliation and obstruction in her work. Nonetheless she remained in the country even though she would have had opportunities to go abroad. Illness changes people, she says. Ironically, her last working day was 10 November 1989; the day Todor Zhivkov was overthrown. What follows is called democracy, but corruption and civil disappointment shape their everyday lives. Director Youlian Tabakov studied costume and design, which inspired him to interweave the documentary material with animated and staged sequences to produce a stream of imaginative and surprising images. This makes Tzvetanka an associative documentary with beautiful, experimental, and theatrical imagery which portrays the haunting and moving life story of a strong Eastern European woman. As a child she wanted to become an actress: in Tzvetanka she finally takes the stage.

Synopsis

Mikaela changed sex from male to female. One night out she meets a guy who follows her home. The movie Undress me examines our perceptions of gender and how our identity can be formed by the perceptions of others.

Synopsis

The film follows Niels, who is half Danish and half Inuit. The focal point is the story of Niels‘ relation to his Greenlandic roots, where for example the traditional dance with masks and drums has been performed for generations. It is a tale in which poetical imagery and magnificent Greenlandic scenery meet a socio-political perspective with documentary shots of everyday life in Greenland. The question of how a cultural identity like Inuit has been influenced after having had the norms of Danish society imposed on it for years, is central in the film. Is it possible to maintain a Greenlandic self-understanding even though an external system is threatening to wipe it out? In the film we meet artist Julie Hardenberg and author Helene Thisen as well, who like Niels live with a split cultural identity. The issue unfolds in the documentary shots, but also in the film’s poetic pictures where ice, water, vapour and clouds explore a transformation theme, producing a mystic atmosphere. The film seeks to create an understanding of the consequences of the colonisation of Greenland for the Intuits‘ identity as individuals and parts of a society.

Synopsis

Wadjda is a 10-year-old girl living in a suburb of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Although she lives in a conservative world, Wadjda is fun loving, entrepreneurial and always pushing the boundaries of what she can get away with. After a fight with her friend Abdullah, a neighborhood boy she shouldn’t be playing with, Wadjda sees a beautiful green bicycle for sale. She wants the bicycle desperately so that she can beat Abdullah in a race. But Wadjda’s mother won’t allow it, fearing repercussions from a society that sees bicycles as dangerous to a girl’s virtue. So Wadjda decides to try and raise the money herself. At first, Wadjda’s mother is too preoccupied with convincing her husband not to take a second wife to realize what’s going on. And soon enough Wadjda’s plans are thwarted when she is caught running various schemes at school. Just as she is losing hope of raising enough money, she hears of a cash prize for a Koran recitation competition at her school. She devotes herself to the memorization and recitation of Koranic verses, and her teachers begin to see Wadjda as a model pious girl. The competition isn’t going to be easy, especially for a troublemaker like Wadjda, but she refuses to give in. She is determined to continue fighting for her dreams…

Director’s Statement

I’m so proud to have shot the first full-length feature ever filmed entirely inside the Kingdom. I come from a small town in Saudi Arabia where there are many girls like Wadjda who have big dreams, strong characters and so much potential. These girls can, and will, reshape and redefine our nation. It was important for me to work with an all-Saudi cast, to tell this story with authentic, local voices. Filming was an amazing crosscultural collaboration that brought two immensely talented crews, from Germany and Saudi Arabia, into the heart of Riyadh. I hope the film offers a unique insight into my own country and speaks of universal themes of hope and perseverance that people of all cultures can relate to.

Synopsis

Deep in the woods and among some sheep pastures a block of flats stands on a former military base of the Soviet Army. Surrounded by ruinous barracks, an overgrown soccer field and a brand new wire mesh fence. This is where Aya, Momo and Mustafa grow up. They spend the holidays at home at the asylum seeker’s camp. The kids wander through the tall grass, ride their bikes down to the lake or look for scrap copper to sell. Filmed in luminous black-and-white, filmmakers Anne Kodura and Friede Clausz focus their gaze entirely on the way the children see things, managing to get them to reveal in casual conversations their feelings about home and identity. Their parents never appear but are only heard describing their difficult situation in a few spare pieces of voice-over. In order to concentrate on the children’s attitude to life, there are no specifics given about their background, and no dramatisations. A compelling documentary that stays with you long after it has ended.

Director’s Statement

“About 40,000 refugees, including families with children, live sometimes about more than ten years in camps throughout Germany, usually very isolated in poor living conditions. The children of these families are often born in Germany but not granted German nationality, rather the nationality of their parents. They are only tolerated in their own “homeland” and can be deported at any time. They are born in a country which would rather get rid of them. “Half-day” integrated at school and isolated from the outside world at home in the camp, they grow up in a state of limbo. Their perspective is uncertain. The only hope is to get the residence permit – the permission to move out of the camp at last.

Synopsis

Yoro S. arrived in Spain from Mali in 2007. Like many economic migrants from Africa, he was always on the verge of being deported. And then he was killed while working on a building site. His friend, the director Alex Garcia Martinez, has made a warm-hearted, intelligent and cleverly edited film essay about the circumstances of his death. The individual chapters are structured according to his belongings. Old film footage is also used, for example of a poll made on the street that asked the question “What is economics?”. The film astutely explains what Yoro’s death had to do with economics. To begin with, Yoro himself hardly appears in the film that seems to want to make do without him, since he is an example of many. However, he becomes increasingly present for longer spells at a time, and talks less about his story than about the clichés and small things of everyday life – this all comes together to create an impressive overall picture. The object of the film becomes the subject and gradually Yoro’s personality is distilled.

Synopsis

Funny, nostalgic, and uniquely engaging, filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel offers an intimate portrait of the Lebanese refugee camp of Ain El Helweh, and how the camp’s residents invest the World Cup series with their own ideas of home, community, victory and hope. “Danish director Mahdi Fleifel presents the life of three generations in Ain al-Hilweh, the Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon where he grew up. More than 70,000 people have lived there for over 60 years in one square kilometre. The director also includes video footage shot by his father in the 80s and 90s. His family and friends and their everyday conflicts are portrayed with delicacy and humour. Meanwhile, archive material helps provide political background for this cinematic diary that adopts an unusual approach that is far from heavy in spite of its topic, as can be seen in the filmmaker’s father repeatedly looking at his recording of Arafat’s handshake with Rabin in Washington. The film also tells the story of Mahdi Fleifel’s long-time friend Abu Eyad. The two men share a passion for Palestinian politics, melancholic music and football. During the football world cup, the Palestinians watch the matches on a TV in a sports shop. For a few weeks, they become Brazilians, Germans or Italians. But whereas Fleifel may enter and leave the camp as he pleases, Abu Eyad is left only with his decision to escape. (Berlinale 2013)

Synopsis

Yumen combines ghost stories and “ruin porn” to form a celluloid psycho-collage of wandering souls seeking connection with one another and a lost collective history among the frozen remnants of the abandoned oil town of Yumen in China’s northwest Gansu province. Set in a quasi-ghost town of Yumen that once thrived with oil production in China’s arid northwest, Yumen is a haunting, fragmented tale of hungry souls, restless youth, a wandering artist and a lonely woman, all searching for human connection and a collective past among the town’s crumbling landscape. One part „ruin porn“, one part ghost story, and shot entirely on 16mm, the film brings together narrative gesture, performance art, and socialist realism into a crude and radiant collage that not only plays with convention and defies genre, but also pays homage to a disappearing life-world and a fading medium.

Synopsis

Beirut, Lebanon, in 1982 is a dangerous place for anyone, not least a young Palestinian refugee like Fahed. He skips school to sell gum and cigarettes on the city’s streets. Lebanon is in the midst of a savage civil war and Fahed and his friends instead of joining the PLO prefer playing football in the rubble- strewn streets of Beirut. But Fahed’s life takes a tragic turn when his father is killed in a bombing raid and an unusual one when an Israeli Air Force pilot who he witnesses parachuting out of the sky is captured. And he makes a perilous decision: to return to the land of his ancestors and plant the olive tree his father had been nurturing before his dead he frees the captive Israeli pilot Yoni. In return, Yoni must agree to take Fahed to Israel. As their journey progresses, Fahed and Yoni must overcome bitter differences built up over generations in order to survive the dangers as Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese soldiers chase them across war-torn Lebanon. A tenuous friendship takes root and strengthens with every hurdle they overcome to reach a land they both consider home. From acclaimed Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis, Academy award-winning producer Gareth Unwin, and producer Fred Ritzenberg, comes Zaytoun, the powerful and moving story of an unlikely friendship that comes to fruition in two nations on the verge of war.

Director’s Statement

Zaytoun is a road movie, a war movie, a buddy movie. I wanted it to be serious and yet full of humour, realistic and yet a fantasy, true to the region and yet universal. I believe the result is all of the above with my view of the fragile, explosive, pessimistic, seldom optimistic fabric of the Middle East and its never ending conflicts.

Synopsis

“A lovely, elegant and stirring look at one man’s sometimes sturdy, sometimes wavering memories of being a fighter for Algeria’s liberation from French colonialism, Damien Ounouri’s Fidaï marks a striking advance in Arabic documentary filmmaking. With his great-uncle, Mohamed El Hadi Benadouda, keeping his exploits secret from his family for the 50 years since Algerian independence, Ounouri’s artfully made movie — with Jia Zhang-ke’s XStream Pictures as co-producer and showing some of Jia’s filmic influence — is an act of personal liberation as well.” (Robert Koehler, Variety)

Director’s Statement

What History remembers from wars are numbers, highlights and legends. What has been actually experienced by its participants, their day-to-day, personal stories and feelings are not passed on to us. Taking a more sensitive and human approach – that begins from the individual and heads towards major events – I wanted to give voice to the ordinary people. When I was a child, I often questioned my father about my great uncle, El Hadi – one of many humble soldiers who fought for Algerian independence. Since the elders never spoke openly about this period, his story was only ever revealed to me through footnotes and so my mind used to fill in the gaps with all kinds of imagined adventures. By recreating a path through France and Algeria of El Hadi during those dark years, hearing his words and those of the people he meets along the way and remembers with, we discover something new: a living history that enters into a dialogue with the official textbook versions we have become accustomed to or have been taught. Through Fidaï, I wish to bring a fresh perspective on the Algerian Revolution, a subjective and necessary look. In view of the situation of the increasing loss of its participants, it is urgent to build a memory that binds the intimate to the collective, my generation with that of the elders and that encourages the transmission of these memories.

Synopsis

„Tbilisi, Georgia, 1992: The Soviet era is over and Georgia must fend for itself. Civil war is raging in the province of Abkhazia. For Natia and Eka, the barely fourteen-year-old protagonists of In Bloom, childhood is coming to an end. Eka is growing up without her father, rebelling against her concerned mother and her older sister. And Natia’s father, a choleric alcoholic, terrorises the entire family. The two friends cannot find peace outside of the family either – not in school, not on the street, and not in the bread lines. Chaos, insecurity, and fear of what the future might bring hold sway in everyday life. An admirer gives Natia a pistol with one single bullet. A little later, she’s abducted by another admirer. This first feature film by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß takes up the buried traditions of Georgian cinema, weaving together loud and soft, melancholy and missing love, eruptions of violence and a sense of the idyllic, precocious cold-bloodedness and childlike naïveté into a wonderfully rhythmic, exciting cinematic composition. A new generation of filmmakers has emerged in Georgia and is starting out by remembering its own history.” (Christoph Terhechte, Berlinale, Forum 2013)

Directors’ Statement

“Our characters are in search of their identity as women and of the meaning of violence, revenge, and love. They seek an answer to the question of whether love can justify killing a human being. The answer seems clear: no, of course not! But what if this question is thrust upon one when one has only fourteen years of life experience and lives in a country ruled by chaos, anarchy, and vigilantism? What role models does one have? Which set of values offers the best chances for survival? Perhaps all of us can see a bit of ourselves in these two girls.”

Synopsis

Matthijs (English: Matthew) is autistic, his childhood friend Marc is a filmmaker. Out of their filmed encounters, spanning a couple of months, comes a strikingly beautiful and heartbreakingly complex documentary. “‘My apartment is my universe’, writes Matthew in his diary. Matthew is autistic. Highly intelligent and fragile, he spends his days taping telephone calls, hoping that they would help him understand what people ‘really’ mean – ‘not what they say, but what they mean: they are usually opposite’. Spending most of his time in his cluttered apartment, Matthew has established a complex system meant to help him put some order in the chaos around him and walk easier though the hallway of data that he is constantly struggling to organise. Marc Schmidt creates an affectionate film portrait of his autistic childhood friend – an intensely personal documentary that goes beyond autism, into the inability to translate between one’s understanding of order and another’s sense of chaos, the sense of vulnerability experienced when under the scrutiny of the camera, and the love and human connection needed by each and one of us. A moving story about a man’s attempt to live as close as possible to the border of social acceptability, Matthew’s Laws is also a reminder that housing is a fundamental human right: everyone deserves a place to call ‘home’.” (One World Romania) Matthew’s Laws won the Grand Prix Swiss Post for best feature at the prestigious Vision du Réel film festival on Nyon in 2012. In their statement, the jury wrote: “With love and courage the filmmaker places us face to face with his childhood friend. This film crosses a border into the unknown and mysterious world of autism. Matthew’s Laws gives us the opportunity to experience friendship and self-determination in the face of society’s demands from a unique point of view.”

Synopsis

“For many years, I have been looking for the missing picture: a photograph taken between 1975 and 1979 by the Khmer Rouge when they ruled over Cambodia … On its own, of course, an image cannot prove mass murder, but it gives us cause for thought, prompts us to meditate, to record History. I searched for it vainly in the archives, in old papers, in the country villages of Cambodia. Today I know: this image must be missing. I was not really looking for it; would it not be obscene and insignificant? So I created it. What I give you today is neither the picture nor the search for a unique image, but the picture of a quest: the quest that cinema allows.” (Rithy Panh) “A recreation of the era and Panh’s personal anecdotes is accomplished through the creation of countless clay figures—carved and painted, we see, by hand, out of “earth and water”—staged in static scenes through which the camera moves and the director cuts. They fill in a gap, the missing image of the title: a missing photographic record of the human experience of the horror and oppression behind the government’s official ideology. (An image not missing: the official image, the propaganda image, that of Cambodian films of the time.) Panh’s narration with moving straightforwardness segues between historical recount, deeply personal recollections, and broader criticism, illustrated by the savagely naïve and thereby at once terrifying and sweet figures of his clay populace, each working, living, starving, dying in unalterable repose. Some are laid over documentary film footage, creating historical scenes — like the mass exodus out of Phnom Phen — that apparently have little, if any, visual record. Others‘ colorful sculptural presence of existences eked out, carven-frozen in a solidarity of misery, are contrasted against official moving images of Pol Pot’s official visits and speeches. Pahn begins the film saying that upon reaching his middle age he has returned to his childhood, and so he does not just in recollections of his boyhood but in the toy-like imagining of those recollections. Their primitive form suggests, as does the ellipses in Panh’s storytelling, where it feels like eons pass in what must only be a few seasons or years, a work in progress to discover records of an era held mostly in memory.” (Daniel Kasman)

Synopsis

It begins as Crime & Punishment, with a pawnbroker (and her daughter) killed by a young student who believes he is a philosophical rebel, a unique individual contre dominant society. But the narrative’s triad structure which follows doesn’t pair the criminal against the investigator, but rather the criminal against two other victims. The three stories of cause-and-effect — a spiritual, interior kind of cause-and-effect, actions influencing self-consideration and different engagements with daily existence — alternate back and forth as time passes. Its one movement is that of the dissatisfied, destabilized youth, who the film introduces in its long, single-take discussion among prospective law students who range from fully committed to their careers of entering society and enforcing its status quo, to Fabian, the radical young man whose nihilism, his desire to do away with all relationships, all “history,” will lead him to kill. The other movements are that of Joaquin, an innocent man wrongly convicted of the murders, and Eliza, the wife he leaves behind. The impoverished housewife, in debt to the pawnbroker because a broken leg prevented her husband and her from starting a business — the coincidence that gets him accused of the crime — is stuck taking care of their kids and her sister, and they slump down further into poverty, stalwartly eking out an existence while her husband serves a life sentence in prison. It is, above all, an “everyday” story of observation and adherence, in that the filmmaker has a compassionate sensitivity towards his characters (even the amoral student) and what they do in the world. It is an approach profoundly complicated as North, the End of History turns down a path towards violence, and, later, gestures towards absorbing something mythical into the simple story. The vividly human scale of Diaz’s film, its telling of a classic story specifically within a topical context, its remarkably simultaneous magnitude and minuteness, it is a work so powerful that its tendrils of suggestion seem capable to connect all of the films of Cannes together. (Daniel Kasman, mubi.com)

Synopsis

The knowledge needed to build the atomic bomb was not given to us, it was consciously pursued. And the world has been living with the consequences ever since. Neither wholly documentary nor work of fiction, Snake Dance is a stirring personal reading of humankind’s catastrophic decision to play God. The 75-minute film, jointly written by two veteran storytellers, the British writer Patrick Marnham and the Belgian filmmaker Manu Riche, uses a powerful choreography of words and images to construct a suspenseful, interwoven account of the invention of the first weapon of mass destruction. Visually poetic and historically insightful, Snake Dance explores the atomic legacy and the indelible stamp it has left on the world. We plunge into the jungle of the Congo in the footsteps of Leopold II in search of the place where uranium is mined. We cross the ocean to Los Alamos, the base in New Mexico where Robert J. Oppenheimer developed the atom bomb assisted by the best physicists in the world. We follow the bomb to Japan, where it destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Riche and Marnham introduce a second thread into their film, that of the German art historian and anthropologist Aby Warburg (1866 – 1929). Warburg was the first to demonstrate the importance of iconography – a history in images – in the study of civilizations and cultures. For instance, he studied the religious symbolism of the Pueblo Indians and more specifically the Hopi tribe, who lived very near the place where the Los Alamos camp was built. In 1923, the visionary Warburg wrote: ‘What interested me as a cultural historian was that in the midst of a country that had made technological culture into an admirable precision weapon in the hands of intellectual man, an enclave or primitive pagan humanity was able to maintain itself.’ Snake Dance is about the choices modern man has to make if he wants to survive. Like Prometheus, he makes fatal decisions that leave him alone in a world of chaos.” (Kaaitheater /Brussels)

Synopsis

“The death of an old friend plunges Slavko into a dilemma. He is unsure whether he, a Croat, should attend the funeral in the Muslim part of Mostar. On the one hand, he feels like it’s his duty; on the other, he fears a hostile reaction from his own community. His wife is angry and his son is equally sick of his wellworn monologues. At odds with themselves and plagued by divisions: the man and his city have something in common. This psychological study is based on the fact that nearly two decades after the war, Mostar is still divided. An invisible border of distrust and suspicion governs people’s daily lives. Slavko doesn’t want to do the wrong thing, but has lost any sense of what he really wants. His actions verge on the grotesque and paranoid. The handheld camerawork is fluid and in constant motion for much of the film, calling all the more attention to the sense of agitation and tension. Brief emotional outbursts and dramatic exit scenarios seem like a cry into the void. The most impressive scenes are pointedly long, and often involve mute idling in waiting rooms or protracted, redundant debates over trivialities. Neither leads to any sort of change.” (Birgit Kohler) “Bobo Jelcic’s A Stranger portrays a Mostar so riven that even the most commonplace activities are blighted by disharmony, catastrophe hits frequently without warning and ‘ordinary people’ are near too fed up to go on. A morbidly absurdist twist — that occurs fairly early on but would compromise its nicely disorienting initial shock factor to disclose – jolts the film from the kind of naturalistic society- in-transition satire we’ve grown used to from the Balkan states into the more existential territory hinted at by the title, making for an interesting point of difference while pressing us to consider whether post-war Bosnia and hell itself may be interchangeable.“ (Carmen Gray)

Synopsis

What makes a hero? What type of individual maintains the integrity to fight for what is just under any circumstances? What compels someone to jump into a river, risking his own life to save a stranger? Why, during World War II, did some Germans put themselves at risk in order to save Jews? 10% attempts to penetrate and understand the very makeup of the human soul. “In the film 10 % director Yoav Shamir, asks ‘What makes a hero?’ and attempts to give an answer by taking us on a world wide tour from New York to the Congo, Slovenia, South Africa, Israel and Palestine. He tries to find a typical pattern in what makes a hero. In the film we meet many people along the way who have committed acts of heroism in various forms, from a guy in New York who threw himself under a subway train to save a life of someone who had fallen on the tracks, to a Belgian woman who hid Jews in her apartment during the second world war, to a white woman in South Africa who grew up protesting against apartheid and went against the grain of her peer group. This subject makes for a fascinating documentary. The characters, the heros that he speaks to are widely different; there is no common thread as to why each hero has gone the extra mile to help a fellow human being. The ‘hero’ that Shamir seems to be most affected by is one of his ‘own’, Yonatan Shapira, an ex-Israeli pilot who, like Shamir, trained with the Israeli army, but who then went on to denounce the Israeli government, to openly criticise them and accuse them of genocide, resulting in him being labelled a traitor in his own country but a hero elsewhere. This makes Shamir reassess his own position. He attempts to join Yonatan in a protest. There is a telling moment when Yonatan says to camera ‘you only need to taste tear gas in your mouth that was aimed at the Palestinians, to take that last bit of Zionism you ever had out of you’. Shamir looks openly shaken. The film has a hint of self mockery and irony throughout but in this scene, the seriousness of what it really takes to be a hero is brought home to the director.” (Catherine Nelson-Pollard)

Synopsis

In The 727 Days Without Karamo couples, whose love is put to a special test, give us insight into their lives. One partner of each couple is not originally from Europe and the lovers find themselves confronted with immigration law and its impact. Director Anja Salomonowitz depicts a story, which many couples experience, in which the snapshot moments of scene after scene form a continuous narrative, similar to a relay race. A sudden deportation could break them apart at any time. Those whose relationship can withstand enormous psychic and (also) financial burden hope for a lasting life together or for a reunion. As with Susanne, who has waited 727 days for Karamo, her husband and the father to her children, to be allowed to return. The personal insights are marked by hope, government intervention into private life, the dream of great love, and sobering reality. These couples go beyond lingual, territorial and social boundaries – with hope that their relationship can overcome the battle with immigration law regulations. Anja Salomonowitz combines very different facets into an exciting, very moving and strongly expressive documentary mosaic. A compelling, filmic plea for love without borders. “Documentary story-telling is always a dual process: on the one hand her story-telling style aims to address relevant socio-political conditions and raise awareness of intolerable situations and, on the other hand, to expand and vary and create anew the view on a theme with unusual narrative strategies. In The 727 Days Without Karamo the filmmaker has further refined her It Happend Just Before basic concept for telling a documentary story differently. The material drawn from reality, and its emotional potential, are thereby placed in constant tension with each other. Anja Salomonowitz denies both sides a cinema of pity. Above all, The 727 Days Without Karamo wants to tell the story of people fighting for another person and defending their right to choose their partner freely. Therefore the filmmaker (as in her previous films) has chosen a dominant colour in her shots: yellow. For courage and the fighting spirit and contempt.“ (Karin Schiefer)

Synopsis

After the Silence deals with how the effects of dictatorship are still extremely vivid, even after the fall of dictatorship. It is a film about the abuses of the state, about fear, how silence is passed on from one generation to the next. A film about the space which, despite all that is known, is left to ghosts that make it impossible to live fully in the present. Three generations walled in silence. The legacy of denial, as nothing has been put back in its place and nothing has been said. Killing the dictator is not enough to kill the dictatorship.

Director’s Statement
I met Ioana in 1991, in Bucharest, a year after the coup d’état that the media called the “Revolution”. When we met, we talked about everything except the dictatorship from which her country had recently emerged, as if silence could expunge everything that was still too raw. After my studies in Bucharest, I returned regularly to visit Ioana and her family, with whom I’d created strong family ties – I became the godmother of Ioana’s daughter, Téona, and Rodica, Ioana’s mother, had become like a substitute mother to me. I understand their country’s problems “from the inside”. Now I personally feel them. It helped me work on the subjects of abuse, silence and fear, on the cocoon that Ioana made for herself – an illusory cocoon that preserves her from the surrounding reality and protects her from the abuse, both present and past, for the old, intrusive reflexes die hard in Romania, and Ioana, powerless and depressed, has withdrawn into her family unit. She refuses the reality of the outside world in which she lives – she involuntarily maintains a connection with the historical injustice – her cocoon has become a cell. (…) Through the story of Ioana, a young, 40 year old Romanian woman, my film shows how living under a dictatorship becomes a way of life. And this is not the “privilege” of ex-communist countries.

Synopsis

Adapted from Gurdial Singh’s novel of the same title, Gurvinder Singh’s debut feature opens on the harsh reality of a small village situated in Punjab. The extreme poverty in which the villagers live colors each scene with a heaviness that, added to the rest of the injustices suffered by the villagers, makes the distressing effect all the more intense. Singh’s camera cleverly ventures outside the immediate space of the story, taking note of traces of misery imprinted on the villagers’ faces and in their eyes, and loudly pronounced by their deep silence. Most of the actors in the film are non-professionals, and Singh displays great skill in extracting wonderful dramatic moments from them. The story unfolds as a large company destroys one of the houses on the outskirts of the village. Despite their anger, the villagers simply stand still supervised by police while the demolition takes place. Later, the people convene in an attempt to mobilize and perhaps give voice to their frustration, but deep down they know all too well that things are beyond their control. They are, after all, a caste downtrodden by an historical injustice that fundamentally and completely denies them the right to protest or to try to change their reality. Haunting and beautiful cinematography augments Singh’s film, which is a siren that points to the latent violence that resides in those who see no possibility of a better life – a violence that might explode at any moment. (Raman Chawla)

Synopsis

In 1998 Wojciech Staroń made the documentary film „The Siberian Lesson“. The film told the story of a young teacher who emigrated to the vicinity of Lake Baikal in order to teach Polish deportees’ descendants their native language. Many years later, as a married couple with two children, the director and his wife are leaving for Argentina. For their little son, this trip will not only be an encounter with an unknown language. Influenced by their Argentinian friend, Janek enters the fascinating world of imagination, and is introduced to the bitterness of childhood prematurely contaminated by the problems of grown-ups. Wojciech Staroń has already had one of his works screened at NIHRFF: He was responsible for the haunting cinematography of NIHRFF’s 2011 award winner The Prize (directed by Paula Markovitch), which won him a Silver Bear for Best Cinematography at Berlin Film Festival 2011. The beautiful score for both films was composed by Sergio Gurrola who was a guest of NIHRFF 2011. Argentinian Lesson won the Silver Dove at prestigeous DOK Leipzig film festival in 2011. The jury stated: “This cinematic journey follows the filmmaker’s 8-year-old son from Poland to Argentina as he becomes acclimated to his new home and develops a friendship with a young girl that is both joyous and sorrowful. The film skillfully pushes the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Its filmmaker demonstrates a high degree of craft regarding the composition of his images and the rhythms of narrative editing. His finely-etched characters stay with us long after the movie’s final, surprisingly humorous image.”

Synopsis

The joy, pride and sense of community experienced during the revolution in Egypt was replaced by the everyday fight for survival. How did the transformation impact the lives of citizens? Employing the documentary essay form, director Petr Lom considers the character and depth of the revolutionary changes. He interviews not only opponents and supporters of the revolution, but also the bystanders. A guide at the pyramids, a minibus driver who refused to transport the arrested to prison, the wife of a wrongly accused man, a young girl stigmatised in her village for taking part in the uprising, the brother of an imprisoned blogger – all gradually paint a complex and unhappy portrait of post-revolutionary Egypt. The revolution has not managed to overthrow a system of repression rooted in both state organs and interpersonal relationships. On the contrary, it has led to increased despotism on the part of police. However, this film clearly shows that people have decided to take advantage of the increased leeway the revolution has brought.

Director’s Statement

We filmed in Egypt for ten months since the beginning of the Revolution in January. A year later, protests continue, but the euphoria of Tahrir Square and its Egyptian Velvet Revolution have given way to a more sober realization that Egypt has a long struggle ahead to free itself of old power structures, entrenched elites, endemic corruption, and above all, widespread abuse of basic human rights. More than 12 000 protesters have been detained and tried in military tribunals that hand down sentences of one to four years in trials often lasting merely one hour. There have been no systematic attempts to reform the police, which is responsible for the majority of the 900 killed during the revolution. Many Egyptians still live in a world of fear. But the difference is, in the new Egypt, they are not willing to remain silent in the face of injustice. Our film is about courage to resist injustice in post-revolutionary Egypt.

Synopsis

„In April 2009, Swedish filmmakers Fredrik Gertten and Margarete Jangård learned that the world premiere of Bananas!— their documentary about a lawsuit against the Dole Food Company — would take place at a major film festival in Los Angeles. Within weeks, they were embroiled in a legal and public-relations battle to save their premiere, their film, their reputations, and their freedom of speech. While censorship is, sadly, nothing new, its insidious power gains startling immediacy by playing out in front of Gertten’s camera. The filmmakers find themselves painted as villains due to Dole’s shrewd PR moves — even before their film has been screened. Gertten takes the offensive, filing a countersuit and media campaign of his own to confront Dole’s overgrown-schoolyard- bully tactics. As demonstrated over the past several months in actions held around the globe, corporations are being taken to task for their disproportionate political and financial influence. Big Boys Gone Bananas! is a telling case study of the power of individuals to fight back.“ (B.T., Sundance Film Festival).

Synopsis

A literal and metaphorical journey towards enlightenment, Black Out shows how children reconcile their daily lives in Guinea, one of the world’s poorest countries, with their desire to learn. Every day during exam season, as the sun sets over Conakry, Guinea, hundreds of school children begin a nightly pilgrimage to the airport, petrol stations and wealthy parts of the city, searching for light. This evocative documentary tells the story of these children’s inspiring struggle for education in the face of the country’s own fight for change.

Director’s Statement

„In philosophical terms, life is hope. Without hope it’s suicide.“ (Socrates, teacher in Conakry). For me, Socrates’ words sum up the mood and feeling I wanted to create in this film. Hopeful and dark at the same time, Black Out does not give any easy answers; it leaves us wondering what the future really holds for these children. When I first had the idea for this film, it was very clear to me that I did not want to make another inspirational film about children in Africa. I did not want to make a film that ultimately is designed to leave us, a Western audience, feeling good about the children and about ourselves; a film that shows that if you work hard, you can make it and achieve your dreams. For me, the situation in Guinea is way more ambiguous. Whilst the children in this film are inspirational, and you can’t help but feel moved by their determination and desire to improve their lives, it is also clear that most of them will not achieve their dreams or even get a job after studying so hard. These children are very much aware of this, they know that currently regardless of how hard they study, this might not make any difference. Black Out is a film about the resilience of the human spirit, the fact that we keep on trying to achieve our dreams against all odds, even when our lives seem shaped and dictated by forces outside of our control.

Inhalt

Award winning director Sridhar Rangayan offers a sneak preview of the 70 min feature length documentary Breaking Free and a selection of South Asian LGBT shorts. Crisscrossing across India, Breaking Free, a pathbreaking feature- length documentary, attempts to unravel the human rights violations faced by Indian LGBTH (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, hijra) persons at the hands of the law, family, and society because of their sexuality and sexual orientation. It also traces the history of the Indian queer rights movement – from ‘Invisibility to Empowerment’. „I’ve a right to love and live with dignity“, cry out the Indian LGBTH community who have been made invisible and pushed underground by a draconian law Sec 377 that criminalized homosexuality till recently. The film Breaking Free strings together anguished voices of those who were tortured, blackmailed and indicted by this law; along with voices of advocates, activists and opinion builders who have fought a decade-long battle to have this law read down in 2009. But it is now being challenged by religious fanatics and moral policemen who scream it will open the floodgates of immorality and destroy India’s cultural fabric. Even as hate crimes rise and LGBTH voices become strident demanding social acceptance, the Indian queer rights movement has gained a spotlight in the media and among the mainstream. The film captures a community in indignation, a society in transition and a country on the verge of historic changes. Breaking Free is the biggest LGBTQ project from India, with more than 100 interviews across 15 cities and towns in India, giving a candid and emotional voice to the still largely closeted and invisiblised by the society.

Synopsis

“Two brothers and their little sister are thrown out of their flat because they haven’t paid the rent. The orphans pack up their few possessions and go out to the country, where the family owns a small plot of land. The children set up camp, knowing they have to fend for themselves. But this solution is insecure, too: they are told, in no uncertain terms, that all plots will shortly pass to the state unless at least the foundations of a house have been laid. The threesome get down to work, making night-time visits to neighbouring sites to ‘borrow’ tools and materials, then building by day. But no sooner are the foundation walls complete than an unsympathetic policeman advises them that the law has changed. Foundations are not enough – the shell of a new building must be standing, or the land will be confiscated. The setbacks keep coming, but the plucky trio refuse to accept defeat. Delivered with sublime calm and infinitely laconic humour, Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s parable on homelessness and lawlessness also tells of the determination to overcome obstacles and fight for one’s rightful place in the world.” (goEast – Festival des mittel- und osteuropäischen Films)

Synopsis

In the constant stream of hoping, failing and making new plans, Denok and Gareng stay united in their passionate struggle to make it up the hill one day. In the modest house of Gareng’s mum, the young Muslim couple starts a small pig business, looking for the lucky streak to come over the family. But new challenges constantly arise, putting their cheerfulness and patience on trial. In an entirely observational approach Denok and Gareng explores a strong loving relationship inside a strikingly vivid family that sticks together, fights back and laughs, about what others would call a Sisyphus fate.

Director’s Statement

“Personally, I have learned a lot from Denok and Gareng’s life, from the spirit to love, how they accept and face problems that continue to come their way, as well as their courage in laughing about themselves and their lives. Not many people have that courage. Daring to laugh at yourself means to look at one’s own life from greater distance. That’s why I admire Denok and Gareng. I believe their daily life struggle should be seen. Their courage should be shared through a film that portrays them carefully and sincerely. I want to place Denok and Gareng into the centre of our perception, because their existence is hardly looked at, when we pass by.”

Synopsis

Two men representing two different cultures clash in the dust of the former Belgian colony, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lao Yang and Eddy both work for a company called CREC (Chinese Railway Engineering Company). They have just set up camp near the remote mining town of Kolwezi in the Katanga province of the RDC. The goal of the company is to redo the road – covering 300km – that connects Kolwezi with the capital of the province Lubumbashi. Lao Yang is head of logistics of the group. He is responsible for the equipment, building materials and food (mainly chickens) to arrive in the isolated Chinese prefab camp. The Congolese government was supposed to deliver these things but so far the team hasn’t received anything. With Eddy (a Congolese man who speaks Mandarin fluently) as an intermediate, Lao Yang is forced to leave the camp and deal with local Congolese entrepreneurs, because without the construction materials the road works will cease. What follows is an endless, harsh, but absurdly funny rollercoaster of negotiations and misunderstandings, as Lao Yan learns about the Congolese way of making deals.

Synopsis

Beth B takes us into the 21st century underground and reveals a secret world where cutting-edge performers are taking hold of a taboo art form, Burlesque, and driving it to extremes that most people have never seen. It’s satire. It’s parody. It’s a populist blend of art and entertainment that gives new meaning to the word “transgression.” Above all, it’s a lot of fun, and it will blow your mind. Operating on the far edge of Burlesque, these performers combine politics and physical comedy to question the very concept of “normal.” Through them, we get to examine our own inhibitions. Beth B has followed the lead characters with a “fly-on-the-wall” camera over several years, capturing rehearsals, backstage preparations, private struggles and triumphs, and the extraordinary performances. The film’s unique perspective allows us, the audience, into the clubs and other hidden spaces where these artists perform. This shocking and comedic art form thrives in the after-dark hours and cult venues of major metropolitan areas – renowned spots such as The Box, Coney Island Sideshow, Casa Mezcal, and The Slipper Room, founded by James Habacker, who also appears in the film. This performance art is powerful and enlightening because it challenges traditional notions of body, gender, and sexuality. The body types of the performers range from statuesque to transgender to disabled. Their personalities are scintillating, yet very real. They may be part of a unique subculture, but they come from surprisingly diverse economic and social backgrounds. As they peel away their clothes – describing their journeys and commenting on their performances – they peel away our own preconceptions and inhibitions. Ancient moral, religious and sexual shibboleths are seen from new perspectives, and a new generation of the cultural avant-garde comes to light.

Synopsis

The first Iranian fiction film that was shot in (in parts) Nuremberg! “Iranian female director Negar Azarbayjani’s first feature is also the first Iranian narrative film with a transgender protagonist. Adineh, or “Eddie” as she calls herself, is waiting impatiently for her passport to be processed so that she can get female-to-male sex-reassignment surgery in Germany. The reason she won’t get an operation in Iran (where sex reassignment is surprisingly accessible despite the fundamentalist government’s policies against homosexuality) is that her wealthy and humiliated father is just as impatient to marry her off to a male cousin. Having slipped from his clutches and needing to lay low while waiting for her passport, Eddie is on the verge of being assaulted by goons when Eddie flags down a passing car. It’s actually a clandestine taxi driven by Rana, a conservative young wife whose husband is in prison and can’t provide for the family. Although a woman driving a cab is taboo in her social class, she can’t resist when Eddie offers her triple fare to get her to her hideout. But when Eddie tries to explain that she’s “trans,” Rana panics and drives into the path of a bus. This remarkable film is anchored by a magnetic, heartbreaking performance by Shayesteh Irani as Eddie, who also played the butchest of the forbidden female soccer fans in the banned director Jafar Panahi’s Offside. What at first seems like an implausible friendship between Rana and Eddie achieves rare sympathy and solidarity through their mutual oppression, cutting through their class and ethical differences.” (Frameline FF 2012)

Inhalt

Transnistrien: Ein geographisches Gebiet, das an die Ukraine und an Moldawien angrenzt. Kein Staat und doch von Grenzen umgeben, keine Demokratie und doch steht mal wieder der Wahlkampf vor der Tür. Lukáš Kokeš und Klára Tasovská richten in ihrem kunstvollen Dokumentarfilm Fortress ihre Kamera wie ein Mikroskop auf einen Landstrich, dessen Bevölkerung mehrere Pässe benötigt, um reisen zu dürfen. Transnistrien ist zugleich multinationaler Staat und sowjetische Utopie: von keinem Staat anerkannt außer von Russland. Kurz vor den Präsidentschaftswahlen 2011 kommen die Filmemacher Lukáš Kokeš und Klára Tasovská in ein Land, in dem die Zeit stehen geblieben zu sein scheint: Sie finden ein Regime vor, das mit einer grotesken Staatspropaganda und einem riesigen Sicherheitsapparat die ständige Überwachung der Menschen und Diskriminierung regierungskritischer Bürger propagiert: Auf jeden einzelnen Bürger kommt ein Polizist – „deswegen ist Transnistrien ein paradiesischer Ort und deswegen kann hier jeder so gut schlafen“, sagt ein Staatsdiener. „Our Country, our Pride“ steht in roten Lettern auf einer Steinplatte, die direkt an einer spärlich befahrenen Straße prangt. Viele Menschen hier fühlen sich gut aufgehoben und sicher vor der großen weiten Welt da draußen. Sie bezeichnen das bestehende politische System als „modified democracy”, ein wirkliches Bewusstsein der staatlichen Kontrolle, der sie ausgesetzt sind, haben sie allerdings nicht. Meinungs- und Versammlungsfreiheit scheinen Fremdwörter zu sein. Mit großem Gespür für die feinen Zwischentöne blicken Kokeš und Tasovská, die größtenteils illegal drehen mussten, wie mit einem Brennglas auf eine unbekannte Region und geben einen faszinierenden und zugleich irritierenden Einblick in die Zustände Transnistriens, an dessen Existenz man kaum glauben mag.

Synopsis

God Loves Uganda explores the role of the American evangelical movement in Uganda, where American missionaries have been credited with both creating schools and hospitals and promoting dangerous religious bigotry. The film follows evangelical leaders in America and Uganda along with politicians and missionaries as they attempt the radical task of eliminating “sexual sin” and converting Ugandans to fundamentalist Christianity. As an American influenced bill to make homosexuality punishable by death wins widespread support, tension in Uganda mounts and an atmosphere of murderous hatred takes hold. The film reveals the conflicting motives of faith and greed, ecstasy and egotism, among Ugandan ministers, American evangelical leaders and the foot soldiers of a theology that sees Uganda as a test case, ground zero in a battle not for millions, but billions of souls. Through vérité, interviews, and hidden camera footage – and with unprecedented access – God Loves Uganda takes viewers inside the evangelical movement in both the US and Uganda. It features Lou Engle, the creator of The Call which brings tens of thousands of believers together to pray against sexual sin. It provides a rare view of the most powerful evangelical minister in Uganda, who lives in a mansion where he’s served by a white-coated chef. It goes into a Ugandan church where a preacher whips a congregation into mass hysteria with anti-gay rhetoric. It records the culture clash between enthusiastic Midwestern missionaries and world weary Ugandans. It features a heartbreaking interview with gay activist David Kato shortly before he was murdered. It tells the moving story of Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, a minister excommunicated, ostracized and literally spat on for being tolerant and his remarkable campaign for peace and healing in Uganda. Shocking, horrifying, touching and enlightening, God Loves Uganda will make you question what you thought you knew about religion.

Synopsis

Golden Slumbers is an elegantly assembled and deeply moving remembrance of Cambodian cinema, which shone brightly from 1960 to 1975 with more than 400 productions before the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime destroyed almost every film and executed most of the country’s creative community. Framed around the illuminating and frequently heartbreaking testimony of surviving industry figures, the docu reps an auspicious feature-length debut for young French-Cambodian helmer Davy Chou. A long fest life is indicated, and niche broadcasters should snap it up. The grandson of Vann Chan, one of Cambodia’s most prolific producers of the era, Chou goes against the grain of conventional documaking by showing only tiny snippets of moving footage. Given that only 30 old Cambodian movies have survived on poor quality VHS and VCD formats, Chou instead invites participants to describe films last seen theatrically 40 and 50 years ago. These recollections of supernatural thrillers, costume spectacles and heartrending melodramas prove so enthralling that clips — especially inferior-quality ones — hardly seem necessary. Using stills, lobby cards and old radio promo spots, the docu opens with a vivid picture of how the Cambodian film industry sprang up virtually overnight during the administration of prime minister Father-King Norodom Sihanouk, an enthusiastic patron of the arts and feature filmmaker. Cambodia’s first screen goddess and still an active performer and teacher, Dy Saveth (Love and War, The Snake King’s Wife) gives a marvelous account of starring in approximately 100 films, and will touch many auds’ hearts with her comments about the immortality of Cambodian cinema. (Richard Kuipers)

Synopsis

A documentary of small changes evolves into an historical record of New York. The resulting film is an essayistic requiem for a neighborhood and an entire way of life; it also provides a case study of the rapid gentrification of our cities. In 1989, together with a group of female friends, Su Friedrich rented and renovated an old loft in Williamsburg, an unassuming working-class district of Brooklyn. In 2005 this former industrial zone was designated a residential area and the factories, manufacturers and artists‘ lofts were priced out by property speculators lured by tax breaks. Friedrich spent five years documenting with her camera the changes in the area between East River and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. She shows the demolition of industrial buildings and the construction of trendy new apartments for wealthy clients, watching old tenants leave and new inhabitants arrive. As she keeps meticulous record of developments, the extent and speed of the upheaval becomes clear. Her own tenancy agreement expires too and so her documentary images and trenchant commentary become the tools of her growing anger. The Atlantic’s Sarah Goodyear writes: “Friedrich may be filled with righteous anger and deep sorrow, but she never loses her sense of humor. …She seems like she might be dangerous. Maybe she is. Artists are supposed to be that way, after all.” In Pop Matters, Cynthia Fuchs looks at a different angle: “On one hand, the movie mourns the loss of a community. On the other, however, it asks how this or any community is defined, who makes and misses it, and how it might be remembered.”

Director’s Statement

In making Gut Renovation I was concerned with documenting two central aspects of my experience as the neighborhood collapsed around me. These were the physical changes—the heart-rending loss of so many beautiful old industrial buildings, as well as the men and women who worked in them—and the changes in our lives—the loss of our living and working space and of the friendships we had forged with our roommates and neighbors.

Synopsis

The Paraguayan Chaco is one of the world’s last virgin frontiers, where modern-day cowboys battle with indigenous populations over agricultural and drilling rights. This not-so-Hollywood Western begins when Daniele Incalcaterra rolls into town and ruffles some feathers by announcing his plan to establish a national park in the middle of it all. Daniele and his brother inherited 12,355-acres of land that has remained untouched since their father purchased it from the Stroessner regime in the 1970s. The land is now worth millions and in an act of immense altruism, Daniele hopes to return the land to its rightful owners, the Nandeva people. But the neighbouring cattle baron has no intention of living beside pesky Indians, so he sends one of his cronies, Mr. Centurion, to drive Daniele away. Our chainsmoking protagonist retaliates by assembling a motley posse of his own. Jato is a hippy ornithologist who can identify every creature in the Chaco. Victor runs a pugilistic NGO that battles deforestation on a global scale. Enrique is all business and he strategizes against the long arm of bureaucracy. With Daniele as their fearless leader, the group sets out to fight the good fight and preserve a piece of magnificently rugged forest forever. (TW, DOXA Documentary Film Festival)

Synopsis

In Portugal, as in the whole of the European Union, the number of people subjected to immediate or almost immediate expulsion in airports is striking. Every year, the number goes unnoticed because the thousands of stories behind each of the figures remain untold. The way things stand today, what does it matter how many are expelled at airports? The images of African corpses in the seas around fortress Europe have become so commonplace that the daily interrogations and expulsions appear to be a minor matter. Nevertheless, thanks to our indifference, everyday thousands of individuals are interrogated straight off the aeroplane, in Europe. Hundreds are sent back to their country of origin. They are not criminals, they are not traffickers; most have their papers in order and valid entrance visas. These are people who have paid their airfare, a sum that often represents several months salary, yet are sometimes treated with hostility. Journey to Portugal throws light on a tiny tip of the iceberg: the fact that these everyday police practices are consigned to the silence of statistics. There is a total lack of transparency regarding police procedures in very many situations. In Portugal, civil society has no way of knowing what really happens in the majority of cases the police handle. Lawyers, Immigrant Protection Associations and journalists are forbidden access to police controlled areas in Portuguese airports (with few exceptions). In other EU countries, like France, this police impunity no longer exists. The regular presence of associations at interrogations is authorised and abuses do not go unreported.

Synopsis

Justice for Sale follows Claudine, a young and courageous human rights lawyer in Congo in her struggle against injustice and widespread impunity in Congo. She investigates the case of a soldier who was convicted of rape and discovers that his trial was unfair and corrupted. He was convicted without any concrete evidence. In her journey to obtain justice, she uncovers a system where the basic principles of law are virtually ignored. Questions are raised about the role of the international community and non-governmental organisations within the Congolese judicial system. Does their financial support cause justice to be for sale? And who pays the price? Justice for Sale is the third documentary in Ilse and Femke van Velzen’s trilogy about the Congo. Earlier they made Fighting the Silence (NIHRFF 2009) and Weapon of War.

Directors’ Statement

Justice for Sale is a very important film that needs to be told. Congo is officially in a post-conflict situation that in order to move forward needs a well functioning justice system, a judicial system that convicts perpetrators for their crimes. As long as this is not the case, more innocent people become victims and crimes against humanity will continue. Over the last few years there has been much more attention given to sexual violence by local and international NGOs. As a result, rape is becoming a ‘business’ – a business because people are abusing the law on sexual violence to settle conflicts, to earn money, and to show the international community that more perpetrators are indeed convicted. Justice for sale also raises questions about the financial support that the international community and NGOs offer to the Congolese judicial system. Is it creating a justice that is for sale? And if so, who pays the price? This film is extremely important because this is an emerging problem that is not yet public. It’s time to start a debate about this.

Synopsis

The story begins with an experiment. A filmmaker in the country of Georgia posts an ad inviting youth to audition for her film. Facing the camera, the hopefuls confess their struggles and dreams. These raw interviews unfold seamlessly into cinematic slivers of Georgian life. A teenager awaits news of his father’s surgery. A girl anticipates her wedding. The governor of a tiny village faces a monumental decision. A soldier attempts to link his imprisoned brother to the world outside, and a young woman confronts the mother who abandoned her. These threads form a fluid Altman-esque collage of characters—and a nation—teetering on the brink of change. It’s a world where tradition and modernity subtly intermingle: singing traditional ballads is as common a self-expression as listening to hip-hop or playing online poker. Mixing metanarrative with heightened visual aesthetics, The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear intuitively penetrates individual lives to conjure a richly layered, indelible portrait of a society, brilliantly becoming more than the sum of its parts. (C. L., Sundance Film Festival)

Synopsis

“The means by which an authoritarian regime succeeds in silencing independent voices is the subject of Manuscripts Don’t Burn, the slow-burning, clandestinely made fifth fiction feature by Iranian helmer-writer Mohammad Rasoulof. A brave, challenging picture that makes the viewer complicit in the action, it is also perhaps the first film since the declaration of the Islamic Republic to confront so directly the brutality of the feared security apparatus. The film opens like a thriller, with working-class man Khosrow running from a pursuer and jumping, in the nick of time, into a car driven by his colleague Morteza. It’s only after we follow Khosrow home and feel sympathy for his sick child and financial problems that we discover that he and Morteza are the torture and assassination arms of the state. Along with their silken-voiced boss, Khosrow and Morteza are searching for copies of a banned manuscript that describes a 1995 incident in which 21 poets on a bus bound for a conference in Armenia were slated for elimination. The bus driver, whom we later learn was Khosrow, was ordered to jump out of the bus just before sending the vehicle into a gorge. Luckily, fate forestalled the fatalities, but the writers were warned never to speak of the incident. The violence is, for the most part, understated, depicted as an everyday part of Khosrow and Morteza’s jobs. Yet even as these men go about their diabolical deeds, Rasoulof provides a sliver of hope by showing that there is always a witness, both within the film itself and by extension, via the audience. No warm tones intrude on the well-executed lensing, much of which is done in tightly framed closeups. The claustrophobic visuals, as well as the sophisticated and increasingly ominous sound design, reinforce a ‘no exit’ feel. Those in the know say all exteriors were shot in Iran, while the interior scenes were filmed in Germany.” (Variety)

Synopsis

What happens when your child comes out to you? My Child is a warm, inspiring and sometimes funny documentary about a very courageous and inspiring group of mothers and fathers in Turkey, who are parents of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender individuals. They have not only gone through the difficult path of accepting their children for who they are, but also have taken the next step to share their experiences with other LGBT families and the public. In five homes in Istanbul, Turkey, seven parents of LGBT individuals talk about their experiences of becoming parents; about their children growing up and opening up to them; about the difficult path they had to go through in dealing with this; about themselves opening up to their families, and re-learning how to be a parent. They talk about themes such as denial, trauma, helplessness, fear, shame, acceptance, and re-birth. Nothing has prepared them for this experience. None of the parenting guides, nothing passed on from their elders or schooling mentioned how one could be a parent of a LGBT child. They had to learn it from scratch. When they talk about how they experienced the coming out of their children, they refer to it as the death of a child and birth of a new one. They say this extremely traumatic experience has also led to their own rebirth, as they have been questioning what it means to be an individual, to be true to oneself, and to be a parent. In a conservative society, where family ties are important, they had to deal with their fears about what “others” would say, whether they would be ostracized if they were to come out to their own parents, families, and friends.

Synopsis

At the latest in summer 2008 the Sri Lankan Government decided to finish the Thirty Years civil war against Tamil rebels at any costs – which meant: irrespective of the sufferings of the civilian population. In the spring of 2009, the army trapped the last 10.000 rebels and 300.000 civilians on a small coast strip at the Northeast of the island and put them permanently under fire, from the sea, from the air and from the countryside. They did so although they had declared the area as a “No Fire Zone”. According to UN estimates, between 40.000 and 70.000 people were killed. No Fire Zone represents the culmination of three years of journalistic investigation and contains deeply disturbing new evidence, powerful eye-witness testimony and compelling personal stories of this century’s worst crime against humanity and of the failure of the international community to prevent this catastrophe. Carefully evidenced, the film uses mobile phone- and small camera footage from both the victims and the perpetrators of violence. Supplemented by expert opinion, No Fire Zone pieces together the day-to-day horror of this war, in a way almost never done before: Viscerally powerful actuality from the battlefield, from inside the crudely dug civilian bunkers and from over-crowded makeshift hospitals, of summary execution, torture and sexual violence.

Synopsis

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, the new installment of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s HBO Documentary Films series about the notorious 1993 “West Memphis Three” child murders, chronicles the 18-year fight to prove the innocence of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. On May 5, 1993, the bodies of three eight-year-old boys were found next to a muddy creek in the wooded Robin Hood Hills area of West Memphis, Arkansas. A month later, three teenagers, Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Misskelley, were arrested. Following trials fraught with innuendoes of satanic worship, emotionally charged statements and allegations of coerced confessions, the defendants were convicted, despite a lack of physical evidence linking them to the crime. The HBO films Paradise Lost: The Child Murders of Robin Hills (1996) and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) sparked a national discussion about the innocence or guilt of the West Memphis 3. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory resumes the examination of a horrifying crime and its aftershocks with Echols still on death row and Baldwin and Misskelley still serving life sentences, and follows the story all the way to it’s stunning conclusion. For nearly two decades, Berlinger and Sinofsky have followed this story with extraordinary access to all of the players on both sides of this tragedy. “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory reveals recent DNA and other forensic evidence (unavailable at the time of the murders), as well as other troubling developments, including allegations of juror misconduct, that suggest the trio did not receive a fair trial. The film includes new interviews with Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley, who are now in their 30s. The result is an authoritative and completely new examination of the West Memphis Three case and a comprehensive portrait the American justice system at work.

Synopsis

A love story like no other, Planet of Snail is a mesmerizing documentary about an accomplished young poet who can no longer hear or see and his relationship to the world around him. Young- Chan is deaf and blind. He learned to speak when he was very young, but soon after lost his sight and hearing. He lives with his wife, Soon-Ho, who is his soul mate, an inseparable part of his life, and a window to the outside world. Young-Chan and Soon-Ho communicate through finger braille, a unique form of touch-based sign language in which words are tapped out on each other’s hands. They rely on one another completely. However, Young-Chan must be able to survive on his own. One day, as Soon-Ho waits anxiously at home, Young-Chan embarks on the biggest adventure of his life.

Protagonist’s Statement

I come from planet of snail where people communicate by touching each other. We call ourselves “snails” because we cannot hear or see and our lives are as slow as the snails. Now I live on earth where time runs so fast which makes me hard to follow the life of the earthmen. When I first came to the earth, I was desperate because there was nothing I could do. However, an angel came into my life and I discovered a beautiful world that I can read under my fingers. Everything around me started changing. Hopes started replacing despairs and I started challenging for my long delayed dream. Now my heart is full of hope and I know there will be so much more I can do in this world: The reason for my life. Soon-Ho is my wife. I haven’t actually seen her with my own eyes but I know she is the most beautiful woman in the world. She has become my lifeline ever since she came into my life. She is my arms and legs that take me to school, to the gym, to the sea and everywhere I want to go. She is the eye and the ear of me that sees, hears and translates for me. I cannot live a day without her and feel sorry for that I cannot do much for her while herself has spine disability and often gets sick.

Synopsis

David vs. Goliath – electricity thief vs. buerocrat: Powerless is certainly one of the most entertaining and endearing documentaries coming out if India in the past few years! “It’s hard not to be frightened at how the sparks fly between chaotically knotted cables and dangerous fingers of flame lick away at the old transformers, as elderly men call upon the younger ones to pour a little water on the source of the fire. Suddenly, everything goes black. In Kanpur, India’s former leather capital, blackouts frequently take up more of the time in some districts than hours of normal electrical service. That is why Loha Singh – a latter-day Robin Hood – has made it his life’s task to supply the poorer families and ruffled small-time entrepreneurs with power in such a bizarre manner. His direct adversary is the woman at the top of the state energy supplier Kesco, even if Mrs. Ritu Maheshwari is by no means the villain in this film. These two protagonists are merely the lead dancers in an operetta which comes across as totally insane. Powerless is a documentary film about the electrical supply in an Indian city, the story unfurling along the tangled wires and tracing out lines of conflict of a diabolical complexity in the process.” (Dorothee Wenner, Berlinale 2013)

Fahad Mustafa on his film

We were shooting with the ‘katiyabaaz’ (electricity thieves), the bitterest of bitter Kanpur stock. The work is illegal and risky, and hearing of a ‘katiyabaaz’ who got ‘stuck’ due to the strong magnetic pull of high voltage lines is not rare. Loha Singh, our protagonist, is someone quite unlike anyone else I have ever met. He has a talent for becoming invisible even on an empty street, and yet he stands out as a product of Kanpur’s particular history. In many ways, he is a representative of the millions of citizens who live through this crisis.

Synopsis

By capturing a stunning mosaic of compelling characters and broken landscapes that live on the US-Mexico border, director Rodrigo Reyes reflects on the flaws of human nature and the powerful absurdities we have created in the world. This is not an ordinary border film. It is not news or reportage; it is not about a political agenda. Purgatorio is a fable of humanity, an epic and visceral experience that will leave audiences thinking and meditating long after viewing.

Director’s Statement

When I began to develop the idea to make a documentary or a film about this region or phenomenon, I wanted to avoid political causes, avoid finding an agenda, promoting a cause or solving a problem. When I set out to make Purgatorio what I really wanted was to capture an experience. I did not want to tell the audience, “look, this problem exists, do this to fix it.” I wanted to provide an intense experience of this border and in so doing I tried to move away from political and statistical details because these are things that change all the time, yet the border has been there for years and centuries. It still has some problems from its origin, and these are the problems of human nature, of how we get interact with one another. Political problems change every 4 to 6 years, with each change in the presidency on both sides. Purgatorio for me is a way of understanding the border between Mexico and the United States. I believe that the majority of Mexicans live with this border in way or the other. For us it is something that either consciously or subconsciously affects us; we are always conditioned by, always reacting to, always living out our relationship with the United States. Therefore, it seems to me that by being a migrant myself, by living in the United States for great part of my own life, I developed a desire to understand this strange and bizarre line that divides us.

Synopsis

“Naoshi is a hale old man of 79 from the Kesen district of Iwate Prefecture who has spent his whole life working as a woodcutter and carpenter. When the tsunami hit in March 2011, the wooden beams of his house didn’t even warp after water reached the second floor, although his son was washed away and drowned in the flood. Naoshi is determined to rebuild his house in the exact same spot, to live out his days in the place he was born and continue to honour his son’s memory. Yet this determination is challenged on several fronts: by his wife, who feels duty bound to stay with him, by the local authorities and their construction restrictions; and maybe even by his own body, given that his prostate cancer is only in remission. Kaoru Ikeya follows Naoshi’s rebuilding efforts for more than a year, exhibiting a perfect understanding of when to ask questions and when to remain silent. As the seasons pass, the debris is cleared, and roots reattach, this tender portrait of a quietly stubborn man opens out into a complex study of the many ambivalences the reconstruction process brings with it: a tangled web of family duty, traditional customs, community spirit and municipal legislation.” (James Lattimer, Berlinale, Forum 2013) as one of the leading figures of the young generation of Iranian documentary filmmakers. She has published a collection of short stories which was nominated „most distinguished“ fiction book of 2011. In 2012 Farahnaz attended IDFA Summer School. She lives in Tehran and is currently working on her new film.

Director’s Statement

While I was wandering in a daze through this disaster zone, I learned that one town was planning to hold a cherry blossom viewing party. […] Held in the hall of a temple on high ground, the party was heart-warming. […] One older man spoke quietly to the assembled residents of the neighbourhood: ’the cherries have bloomed just like they do every year.’ In these words, steeped in a valiant determination toward recovery, I heard the cry of the spirit of people who live rooted in this land. That night, when I watched the footage we’d shot, I decided to make a film about this man. He was Naoshi Sato, the hero of Roots.

Synopsis

“In villages inhabited by India’s Muslim minority in Tamil southern India, as soon as a girl reaches puberty she is locked away until her wedding. This was Salma’s fate when she turned thirteen. Hungry for an education, she avoided an arranged marriage for nine long years by keeping herself confined in a bare room. When she finally agrees to wed local politician Malik, she finds herself imprisoned once again – this time in her husband’s home where the only things she has to read are the newspapers wrapping the vegetables. Clandestinely, she begins to write poetry which her mother helps her smuggle out to a publisher. Her life changes completely when her poems are published and, with the aid of her publisher, she finally travels to Chennai for the first time. Now a well-known poet, she begins to apply for government positions, and inspires her sisters and other women also to fight for their freedom and independence. For, she argues, it is the mutual oppression of women by other women that perpetuates the status quo. Salma does not exoticise the lives of Muslim women; instead the film provides a sober account that is full of respect.” (Berlinale 2012) As with her other work (Pink Saris, Rough Aunties, Sisters in Law), master documentarian Kim Longinotto trains her camera on an iconoclastic woman. Salma’s extraordinary story is one of courage and resilience. Salma has hopes for a different life for the next generation of girls, but as she witnesses, familial ties run deep, and change happens very slowly. Salma helps us understand why the goal of global education of girls is one the most critical areas of empowerment and development of women worldwide.

Synopsis

For three weeks, towards the end of their military service, young Israelis who do not have a certificate of high-school graduation are offered the chance to obtain it by taking part in army-sponsored courses which require them to contemplate issues such as human rights, pluralism, the definition of the Jewish State and the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Director Silvina Landsmann goes for a fly-onthe- wall perspective to capture the mélange of ambivalence, stubbornness, argumentative spirit and resilience demonstrated by the students while they are repeatedly challenged by their teacher about their views, and encouraged to engage in some serious thinking before embarking on their future. As they are pushed to both sustain and question their convictions, we end up assisting to an animated course cum therapy session that often involves clashing, uncensored individual opinions. A briskly-paced, revealing look at a group of young people with deeply ingrained views gained through tough life experiences, Soldier/Citizen is a good reminder that a balanced perspective takes effort and a willingness to put yourself in the other’s shoes. (One World Romania 2013)

Director’s Statement

“A great deal has been said about the place of the military ethos within Israeli society. It is difficult to imagine a better opportunity to examine this than by following combat soldiers preparing for the final exam in civics studies before embarking on a journey back to civilian life. These soldiers, who were engaged in acts of extreme violence, are confronted with concepts such as human rights and democracy, which have unfortunately become controversial in many circles within Israeli society.”

Synopsis

In his opulent, playful and sometimes serene debut film Youlian Tabakov tells the chequered life story of his Grandmother, a Bulgarian woman who experienced three political systems: Monarchy, Socialism and Democracy. Tzvetanka Gosheva, was born in 1926 to a rich merchant’s family, which enabled her to attend a privileged school in Sofia. But this bourgeois background became her downfall after the war. Her parents were imprisoned as enemies of the party; her father would never recover from this. By sheer luck she managed to get permission to go to university. She became a doctor, though she suffered a lot of humiliation and obstruction in her work. Nonetheless she remained in the country even though she would have had opportunities to go abroad. Illness changes people, she says. Ironically, her last working day was 10 November 1989; the day Todor Zhivkov was overthrown. What follows is called democracy, but corruption and civil disappointment shape their everyday lives. Director Youlian Tabakov studied costume and design, which inspired him to interweave the documentary material with animated and staged sequences to produce a stream of imaginative and surprising images. This makes Tzvetanka an associative documentary with beautiful, experimental, and theatrical imagery which portrays the haunting and moving life story of a strong Eastern European woman. As a child she wanted to become an actress: in Tzvetanka she finally takes the stage.

Synopsis

The film follows Niels, who is half Danish and half Inuit. The focal point is the story of Niels‘ relation to his Greenlandic roots, where for example the traditional dance with masks and drums has been performed for generations. It is a tale in which poetical imagery and magnificent Greenlandic scenery meet a socio-political perspective with documentary shots of everyday life in Greenland. The question of how a cultural identity like Inuit has been influenced after having had the norms of Danish society imposed on it for years, is central in the film. Is it possible to maintain a Greenlandic self-understanding even though an external system is threatening to wipe it out? In the film we meet artist Julie Hardenberg and author Helene Thisen as well, who like Niels live with a split cultural identity. The issue unfolds in the documentary shots, but also in the film’s poetic pictures where ice, water, vapour and clouds explore a transformation theme, producing a mystic atmosphere. The film seeks to create an understanding of the consequences of the colonisation of Greenland for the Intuits‘ identity as individuals and parts of a society.

Synopsis

Deep in the woods and among some sheep pastures a block of flats stands on a former military base of the Soviet Army. Surrounded by ruinous barracks, an overgrown soccer field and a brand new wire mesh fence. This is where Aya, Momo and Mustafa grow up. They spend the holidays at home at the asylum seeker’s camp. The kids wander through the tall grass, ride their bikes down to the lake or look for scrap copper to sell. Filmed in luminous black-and-white, filmmakers Anne Kodura and Friede Clausz focus their gaze entirely on the way the children see things, managing to get them to reveal in casual conversations their feelings about home and identity. Their parents never appear but are only heard describing their difficult situation in a few spare pieces of voice-over. In order to concentrate on the children’s attitude to life, there are no specifics given about their background, and no dramatisations. A compelling documentary that stays with you long after it has ended.

Director’s Statement

“About 40,000 refugees, including families with children, live sometimes about more than ten years in camps throughout Germany, usually very isolated in poor living conditions. The children of these families are often born in Germany but not granted German nationality, rather the nationality of their parents. They are only tolerated in their own “homeland” and can be deported at any time. They are born in a country which would rather get rid of them. “Half-day” integrated at school and isolated from the outside world at home in the camp, they grow up in a state of limbo. Their perspective is uncertain. The only hope is to get the residence permit – the permission to move out of the camp at last.

Synopsis

Funny, nostalgic, and uniquely engaging, filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel offers an intimate portrait of the Lebanese refugee camp of Ain El Helweh, and how the camp’s residents invest the World Cup series with their own ideas of home, community, victory and hope. “Danish director Mahdi Fleifel presents the life of three generations in Ain al-Hilweh, the Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon where he grew up. More than 70,000 people have lived there for over 60 years in one square kilometre. The director also includes video footage shot by his father in the 80s and 90s. His family and friends and their everyday conflicts are portrayed with delicacy and humour. Meanwhile, archive material helps provide political background for this cinematic diary that adopts an unusual approach that is far from heavy in spite of its topic, as can be seen in the filmmaker’s father repeatedly looking at his recording of Arafat’s handshake with Rabin in Washington. The film also tells the story of Mahdi Fleifel’s long-time friend Abu Eyad. The two men share a passion for Palestinian politics, melancholic music and football. During the football world cup, the Palestinians watch the matches on a TV in a sports shop. For a few weeks, they become Brazilians, Germans or Italians. But whereas Fleifel may enter and leave the camp as he pleases, Abu Eyad is left only with his decision to escape. (Berlinale 2013)

Synopsis

Yumen combines ghost stories and “ruin porn” to form a celluloid psycho-collage of wandering souls seeking connection with one another and a lost collective history among the frozen remnants of the abandoned oil town of Yumen in China’s northwest Gansu province. Set in a quasi-ghost town of Yumen that once thrived with oil production in China’s arid northwest, Yumen is a haunting, fragmented tale of hungry souls, restless youth, a wandering artist and a lonely woman, all searching for human connection and a collective past among the town’s crumbling landscape. One part „ruin porn“, one part ghost story, and shot entirely on 16mm, the film brings together narrative gesture, performance art, and socialist realism into a crude and radiant collage that not only plays with convention and defies genre, but also pays homage to a disappearing life-world and a fading medium.

Synopsis

Homosexuality remains strictly taboo in Russia. In 2012 Moscow courts banned gay pride parades in the capital for the next 100 years. Any pride marches planned in previous years also faced bans and were forcibly broken up by the police if they went ahead. This documentary portrays a young man who loves being a policeman and happens to love men too. Torn between his sense of duty and his personal desires, he talks about his anxieties, his yearnings, and what it means to be homosexual in a deeply patriarchal environment. (goEast Film Festival 2013)

Synopsis

The history of the Iranian revolution as the history of cinema: In 1978, on the verge of the Islamic revolution, more than 130 cinemas burned down across Iran, including 28 in Tehran. Great strikes, signs of the onset of the revolution, affected cinema at large. The debates also addressed the films as such: which films should be shown, which should be made? Which cinema could or should be abandoned, what did people want and what were they allowed to see? After the cinemas were closed or burned down, the state of things is inverted in Falgoosh. The characters abandon the screen, the people take to the streets and try to direct themselves. And cinema becomes the spectator. (Forum Expanded)

Synopsis

Asylum matters have crept out of politics and the public eye since the number of applications decreased in Germany as a result of a balancing out of laws at EU level. Tacitly, we rely on an administrative system and perhaps a legal procedure to clarify the status of asylum seekers. The responsibility for either accepting or rejecting an application lies with decision makers at the German Federal Office for Migrants and Refugees. The most the large majority of refugees who leave their home for reasons of hunger, poverty or lack of prospects can expect is refugee status according to the Geneva Convention or protection from deportation. In the worst case, the application will be rejected with deportation as a consequence. Gerda Wittstatt lived in a caring home in Nuremberg until her death. Until she was forced out for reasons of age, she worked for the Office for Migration and Refugees. For this film she spoke for the first time about her experiences with refugees – people who are regularly confronted with abuse and torture – and about the difficulties of making decisions of conscience.

Synopsis

Have you ever wondered what happens to your electronics at the end of their life? Almost 50 million tonnes of e-waste (electronic waste) are generated worldwide every year. A large volume of second-hand and condemned electronic goods arrive in developing countries from the “developed” world, with a significant quantity arriving as e-waste, exported illegally as “second hand goods”. Without dialogue or narration, E-WASTELAND presents a visual portrait of unregulated e-waste recycling in Ghana, West Africa, where electronics are not seen for what they once were, but rather for what they have become.

Synopsis

Fire Under the Ashes tells, through handycam footage kept unreleased for four years and brought out of Iran under difficult circumstances, how the ordinary life of a couple is seriously affected by the political conditions during and after the Presidential Elections in 2009.

Synopsis

In a small apartment in Buenos Aires, an old woman eagerly awaits the birth of her grandchild and all the joys of becoming a grandmother. However, horrific circumstances mean she is forced to wait over 30 years. Abuelas explores the traumatic ramifications of General Videla’s military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976-83, whereby an estimated 30,000 men, women and children, ‚disappeared‘. Using real-life testimonials from members of the ‚Grandmothers of May Square‘, this animated-documentary raises issues of memory and loss. The film is testament to the extraordinary tenacity of these women, who continue fighting for the truth about their missing relatives.

Synopsis

Based on real-life events, Home is the story of an old man who stays behind in war-torn Grozny during the Chechen War. He is alone and cannot go anywhere. His house is all that he has. During the day, he repairs his house with tools that he finds in the ruins and rubble around him. At night, he hides from the army’s attacks and plundering in his cellar. The next day, he once again climbs the stairs to observe the destruction and begin his reparations. The camera accompanies his search for wood, water and gas and gives the viewer an insight into his environment and loneliness. The images are as poetic as they are mundane, telling of survival at times of war but also of hope for a better future.

Synopsis

17 year old Jasper lives in a very grey, small town. In his family, he cannot be himself. Jaspers dad is a singer, named Lukkie Luk. All the attention in the family goes to his career. Jasper searches a way to handle this and is faced with the typical questions in the live of an adolescent. Questions that will not be answered when he stays in his own routine.

Synopsis

Richard, an unemployed 55-year-old, arrives 3 minutes late for his appointment at a job centre. An advisor, stifled by the limits of the system she works in, has no choice but to penalise him for his tardiness. To avoid plunging further into destitution, Richard takes desperate measures. Inspired by the events surrounding the London Riots in 2011 and the subsequent infamous speech made by Prime Minister David Cameron, Mass of Men gives a harsh insight into the dangers of repression, disillusionment and apathy. Sehsüchte Internationales Studentenfilmfestival calls it: “An exploration of the absurdity of life, whose interchangeable protagonists, whose societal excess lead to a violent conclusion. With its razor-sharp irony, the film manages to create a nightmarish feeling of the zeitgeist.”

Synopsis

Oscar, a teenage graffiti artist, only cares about one thing – getting his name seen. When he is arrested for vandalism, he is sentenced to community service at an old folks’ home. He is forced to clean up, spend time with the elderly, and accompany some of the residents on walks outside. One night after his shift is over, Oscar decides to ‘bomb’ a utility truck parked nearby the home. Lost in his own world, he is unaware of Isabel, a lonely and isolated resident, watching him spray his name. The next day, Isabel forces him to take her on walks so she can continue watching him write his name. Fascinated, she insists Oscar teach her how to ’tag’ her name. They create her alias – ‘NANI’ – and as the graffiti consumes her, the two form an unlikely bond over their visceral vandalism. While Isabel seems to grow younger through her newfound love of graffiti, her battle with Alzheimer’s is on a steady decline. When Isabel’s memory fades as quickly as the art they’ve created, will their friendship be able to survive?

Synopsis

The story of a deportation that ended with the tragic death of an asylum seeker in March 2010. In the film, the camera itself is this asylum seeker, and what it captures is a subjective view of reality.

Synopsis

A young Russian mounts a one-woman protest in support for Pussy Riot. After a series of complications (her mother tries to get her off the street for example), she has to flee the police and ends up taking refuge in a church where the priest hides her. She impresses him with her painting skills and he asks her to help him restore the church. She doesn’t seem to be against the idea. This is a charming parable full of humour that asks about the meaning of protest and explores how to win over the trust of unexpected allies contrary to all clichés.

Synopsis

„It was autumn when I arrived in Germany. I thought that in this exotic country I could distance myself a little bit from Mexico, but I was wrong. Drug traffickers managed to take me back in a ruthless way.“ A short animated documentary about the drug-related violence in Mexico.

Synopsis

It is 1978. Tehran in bloodshed. The young Bahman falls in love with Leila, the sister of his martyred friend. Unrests in the streets, unrests in the hearts. And a revolution makes the people attached and detached. Farahnaz Sharifi creatively compiles some family album photos and footage to narrate subversively the untold story of the missing, lost loves during revolutions. In her very personal style, with a post-humus voice over she moves on the boundaries of fiction and documentary.

Synopsis

Bosnian actress, Vernesa Berbo, leaves war-torn Bosnia and settles in Germany where, as an illegal immigrant, she tries to continue her acting career. The only roles she is able to get are roles depicting Eastern European women as, for example, a Polish cleaning lady, Romanian asylum seeker, Russian prostitute, or a Bosnian refugee, roles which take her back to her own personal nightmare. (Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival)

Synopsis

Every day, a Romanian woman walks down a path near the Bijlmer prison in southeast Amsterdam. She then sits down on the bank, in front of a ditch where ducks and coots innocently splash about. A dragonfly sits on a stretch of barbed wire, a contradictory image in this unfriendly environment. The woman looks up, past the concrete wall and barbed wire, to the high white towers and their many dark windows. Behind one of them is her boyfriend. She shouts loving things to him and he replies. They talk about small details of daily life, like what they‘ve eaten, what’s on television – they even squabble. The man is locked up, but so is his girlfriend down by the waterside. The filmmaker stays out of the picture, and there is no voice-over. It’s the silence that speaks in Space in Between.

Synopsis

The short documentary Two Girls Against the Rain by Cambodian female filmmaker Sao Sopheak (32) is the first locally produced documentary, which gives a voice to members of the lesbian community. It is a true story about two women struggling hard for their love. Soth Yun (57) and Sem Eang (58) met during the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, where more than two million people died. Soth and Sem survived. Today the couple lives in a village in Takeo province in southern Cambodia, approximately 40 kilometers away from the capital Phnom Penh. They do not have children of their own, but have raised several nieces and nephews. Theirs has been a long fight against stigmatization by fellow villagers and their family. And the fight continues – now for the right to marry legally.

Synopsis

Mikaela changed sex from male to female. One night out she meets a guy who follows her home. The movie Undress me examines our perceptions of gender and how our identity can be formed by the perceptions of others.

Synopsis

Yoro S. arrived in Spain from Mali in 2007. Like many economic migrants from Africa, he was always on the verge of being deported. And then he was killed while working on a building site. His friend, the director Alex Garcia Martinez, has made a warm-hearted, intelligent and cleverly edited film essay about the circumstances of his death. The individual chapters are structured according to his belongings. Old film footage is also used, for example of a poll made on the street that asked the question “What is economics?”. The film astutely explains what Yoro’s death had to do with economics. To begin with, Yoro himself hardly appears in the film that seems to want to make do without him, since he is an example of many. However, he becomes increasingly present for longer spells at a time, and talks less about his story than about the clichés and small things of everyday life – this all comes together to create an impressive overall picture. The object of the film becomes the subject and gradually Yoro’s personality is distilled.

Synopsis

“I feel like a chess player”, says Chinese avant-garde artist and political activist Ai Weiwei, “my opponent makes a move, and then I make the next one.” No sooner did he realise that the 2008 Olympics were to be used for party propaganda than Ai Weiwei boycotted the event and, when the authorities tried to cover up the earthquake in Sichuan Province, he began researching the names of more than 5,000 children who lost their lives in the rubble of poorly built schools. Ai Weiwei has always made public his opposition to silence and oppression. His appearances on the internet and the unsparing truths he airs in his blogs have often led to police harassment. But even then he never gives up, and instead films his official pursuers and minders with his video camera and publishes his footage on the web. And alongside all of these activities he still manages to casually prepare his exhibitions and maintain his close relationship with his family . Alison Klayman spent two years following this internationally celebrated activist and has distilled this first feature-length portrait from one hundred hours of material. Her documentary provides an informed insight into conditions on the ground in China today with oppression on one side and resistance on the other. (Berlinale Special 2012)

Synopsis

Daniel Abma’s documentary accompanies three young offenders – Imo (22), Jano (17) and Marcel (25) – on the day they are released from Wriezen prison in Brandenburg, eastern Germany, and over the three years that follow. At first sight, the three young protagonists are very different. Jano is a small-time drug dealer from a nearby village. Imo’s face reveals his aggression and every other emotion he experiences. Then there’s Marcel, who was convicted of murdering 16-year-old Marinus from Potzlow. The young men’s new life begins at Wriezen station, where they all set out hoping for the same things: a job, somewhere to live, a girlfriend. Three simple concepts, embodying the yearning for security, emotional safety, respect and love. But the very first day turns out differently for each of the protagonists. Marcel’s girlfriend has planned the day down to the last minute and organized all the necessary bureaucracy, while Imo invests his discharge grant in drugs and beer. Finding a job proves difficult – one rejection after another, now and again an unpaid work placement. After a while all three young men find a girlfriend. Life settles down a bit, and starting a family seems the obvious thing to do next. Each of the three has a daughter. They are caring fathers, selling drugs and renovating their homes in their attempts to look after their children and satisfy the welfare office’s requirements. Now, though, problems can no longer be solved simply by socking your opponent in the face. How do you fight a court that says you’re incapable of looking after your own child? What happens when you end up back in jail – this time as a dad? What does life in our society ask of each of us? What do we need in order to live an autonomous, successful life? Is release day a chance to start afresh, or do you stay a jailbird forever, unable to cope with the challenges of everyday life?

Synopsis

In Uganda, a new bill threatens to make homosexuality punishable by death. David Kato – Uganda’s first openly gay man – and his fellow activists work against the clock to defeat the legislation while combatting vicious persecution in their daily lives. But no one is prepared for the brutal murder that shakes their movement to its core and sends shock waves around the world. In an unmarked office at the end of a dirt track, veteran activist David Kato labors to repeal Uganda’s homophobic laws and liberate his fellow lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender men and women, or “kuchus.” But David’s formidable task just became much more difficult. A new “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” proposes death for HIV-positive gay men, and prison for anyone who fails to turn in a known homosexual. Inspired by American evangelicals who have christened Uganda ground zero in their war on the “homosexual agenda,” the bill awaits debate in Uganda’s Parliament. Meanwhile, local newspapers have begun outing kuchus with vicious fervor under headlines such as: “HOMO TERROR! We Name and Shame Top Gays in the City.” David, Uganda’s first openly gay man, is one of the few who dare to publicly protest state-sanctioned homophobia. Working with an idiosyncratic clan of fellow activists, David fights Uganda’s government and tabloids in the courts, on television, and at the United Nations. Because, he insists, “if we keep on hiding, they will say we’re not here.” But one year into filming Call Me Kuchu and just three weeks after a landmark legal victory, on January 26, 2011, the unthinkable happens: David is brutally murdered in his home. His death sends shock waves around the world, and leaves Kampala’s kuchus traumatized and seeking answers for a way forward. With unprecedented access, Call Me Kuchu depicts the last year in the life of a courageous, quick-witted and steadfast man whose wisdom and achievements were not fully recognized until after his death. While heartbreaking, the documentary traces a narrative that takes the viewer beyond the chronicle of victimization depicted in international news media: it tells the nuanced story of David and Kampala’s kuchus as they work to change their fate, and that of other kuchus across Africa.

Synopsis

German musician Heinz Ratz felt asylum seekers in Germany weren’t being treated fairly. So he found some of the best musicians among them and went on tour to raise awareness. Now the ensemble is part of a documentary. Two year ago, 45-year-old Heinz Ratz went on a bike tour through Germany with his band Strom & Wasser. But it wasn’t just a leisurely summer outing – their aim was to campaign for justice for refugees in German politics and collect donations for their cause. Along the way, they visited 80 different refugee camps where they came into contact with musicians who had been well known in their home countries, but weren’t allowed to work – let alone travel – within Germany. „Back then I had the idea to invite [the musicians] to Hamburg to record a CD with them and then go on tour,“ said Ratz. And that’s how the band’s next album, Strom & Wasser featuring The Refugees, came about. The Refugees were 30 musicians from 15 countries that had nothing to do with Lauryn Hill’s former band with the same name. The resulting CD, whose cover features a green rowboat stranded in a desert, is a mix of world music, rap, folk, and pop and texts about life in refugee homes. Can’t Be Silent isn’t a portrait of Ratz as a person, though, but rather of the refugees he’s put in the limelight. Ratz only appears three or four times in the film to explain the project and the tour schedule. The film’s focus lies fully on the music, fears and hopes of the artists on stage. For the film, director Julia Oelkers had to rely on video material that the asylum seekers made themselves, because she wasn’t granted permission to film inside the residences. Nevertheless, she managed to weave together a documentary that tells the stories of people caught between the euphoria of applause and the hope of a better life.

Synopsis

The subject remains a taboo. Almost 65 years had to pass before Austria finally overturned the Nazi judgements in 2009 and deserters from the Wehrmacht were vindicated. The film takes us back to 1946/1947, the Winter of Starvation in Salzburg. Scarred by traumatic wartime experiences and confronted by social exclusion, four young deserters – a cook, a farmer, an altar boy and a pig keeper – reveal to us the reasons behind their desertion. Successfully walking a tightrope between fiction and documentary, Gabriele Neudecker reveals touching insights into the forgotten victims of National Socialism and their ostracism after the war. “Taking a look behind the stereotype of the blond-haired, blueeyed Nazi soldier, Glorious Deserter studies a collection of brave young Austrians, men who chose to champion their own beliefs rather taking orders from the Third Reich’s war machine. Linked once by their acts of desertion and now by circumstance, the men try to forge normal lives in post-war Austria but find their paths strewn with disillusionment, guilt, estrangement and painful recollection. Some of them have their wives, others have religion to support and help them move on – but for many, it seems, things can never be quite the same again. In an unconventional twist, Glorious Deserter is written almost entirely in direct address to the audience, and shot like a contemporary documentary; each of the characters have their part of the film, and although their narrative is fluid you can’t help but feel as if there’s someone just behind the camera, asking questions. If there were, that ‘someone’ would be Gabriele Neudecker: producer, writer, director and editor of Glorious Deserter, a veteran of three short films taking her first step into the world of features – and finding she can stand.” (Orestes Kouzof)

Synopsis

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, the new installment of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s HBO Documentary Films series about the notorious 1993 “West Memphis Three” child murders, chronicles the 18-year fight to prove the innocence of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. On May 5, 1993, the bodies of three eight-year-old boys were found next to a muddy creek in the wooded Robin Hood Hills area of West Memphis, Arkansas. A month later, three teenagers, Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Misskelley, were arrested. Following trials fraught with innuendoes of satanic worship, emotionally charged statements and allegations of coerced confessions, the defendants were convicted, despite a lack of physical evidence linking them to the crime. The HBO films Paradise Lost: The Child Murders of Robin Hills (1996) and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) sparked a national discussion about the innocence or guilt of the West Memphis 3. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory resumes the examination of a horrifying crime and its aftershocks with Echols still on death row and Baldwin and Misskelley still serving life sentences, and follows the story all the way to it’s stunning conclusion. For nearly two decades, Berlinger and Sinofsky have followed this story with extraordinary access to all of the players on both sides of this tragedy. “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory reveals recent DNA and other forensic evidence (unavailable at the time of the murders), as well as other troubling developments, including allegations of juror misconduct, that suggest the trio did not receive a fair trial. The film includes new interviews with Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley, who are now in their 30s. The result is an authoritative and completely new examination of the West Memphis Three case and a comprehensive portrait the American justice system at work.

Synopsis

For three weeks, towards the end of their military service, young Israelis who do not have a certificate of high-school graduation are offered the chance to obtain it by taking part in army-sponsored courses which require them to contemplate issues such as human rights, pluralism, the definition of the Jewish State and the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Director Silvina Landsmann goes for a fly-onthe- wall perspective to capture the mélange of ambivalence, stubbornness, argumentative spirit and resilience demonstrated by the students while they are repeatedly challenged by their teacher about their views, and encouraged to engage in some serious thinking before embarking on their future. As they are pushed to both sustain and question their convictions, we end up assisting to an animated course cum therapy session that often involves clashing, uncensored individual opinions. A briskly-paced, revealing look at a group of young people with deeply ingrained views gained through tough life experiences, Soldier/Citizen is a good reminder that a balanced perspective takes effort and a willingness to put yourself in the other’s shoes. (One World Romania 2013)

Director’s Statement

“A great deal has been said about the place of the military ethos within Israeli society. It is difficult to imagine a better opportunity to examine this than by following combat soldiers preparing for the final exam in civics studies before embarking on a journey back to civilian life. These soldiers, who were engaged in acts of extreme violence, are confronted with concepts such as human rights and democracy, which have unfortunately become controversial in many circles within Israeli society.”

Synopsis

Wadjda is a 10-year-old girl living in a suburb of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Although she lives in a conservative world, Wadjda is fun loving, entrepreneurial and always pushing the boundaries of what she can get away with. After a fight with her friend Abdullah, a neighborhood boy she shouldn’t be playing with, Wadjda sees a beautiful green bicycle for sale. She wants the bicycle desperately so that she can beat Abdullah in a race. But Wadjda’s mother won’t allow it, fearing repercussions from a society that sees bicycles as dangerous to a girl’s virtue. So Wadjda decides to try and raise the money herself. At first, Wadjda’s mother is too preoccupied with convincing her husband not to take a second wife to realize what’s going on. And soon enough Wadjda’s plans are thwarted when she is caught running various schemes at school. Just as she is losing hope of raising enough money, she hears of a cash prize for a Koran recitation competition at her school. She devotes herself to the memorization and recitation of Koranic verses, and her teachers begin to see Wadjda as a model pious girl. The competition isn’t going to be easy, especially for a troublemaker like Wadjda, but she refuses to give in. She is determined to continue fighting for her dreams…

Director’s Statement

I’m so proud to have shot the first full-length feature ever filmed entirely inside the Kingdom. I come from a small town in Saudi Arabia where there are many girls like Wadjda who have big dreams, strong characters and so much potential. These girls can, and will, reshape and redefine our nation. It was important for me to work with an all-Saudi cast, to tell this story with authentic, local voices. Filming was an amazing crosscultural collaboration that brought two immensely talented crews, from Germany and Saudi Arabia, into the heart of Riyadh. I hope the film offers a unique insight into my own country and speaks of universal themes of hope and perseverance that people of all cultures can relate to.

Synopsis

Deep in the woods and among some sheep pastures a block of flats stands on a former military base of the Soviet Army. Surrounded by ruinous barracks, an overgrown soccer field and a brand new wire mesh fence. This is where Aya, Momo and Mustafa grow up. They spend the holidays at home at the asylum seeker’s camp. The kids wander through the tall grass, ride their bikes down to the lake or look for scrap copper to sell. Filmed in luminous black-and-white, filmmakers Anne Kodura and Friede Clausz focus their gaze entirely on the way the children see things, managing to get them to reveal in casual conversations their feelings about home and identity. Their parents never appear but are only heard describing their difficult situation in a few spare pieces of voice-over. In order to concentrate on the children’s attitude to life, there are no specifics given about their background, and no dramatisations. A compelling documentary that stays with you long after it has ended.

Director’s Statement

“About 40,000 refugees, including families with children, live sometimes about more than ten years in camps throughout Germany, usually very isolated in poor living conditions. The children of these families are often born in Germany but not granted German nationality, rather the nationality of their parents. They are only tolerated in their own “homeland” and can be deported at any time. They are born in a country which would rather get rid of them. “Half-day” integrated at school and isolated from the outside world at home in the camp, they grow up in a state of limbo. Their perspective is uncertain. The only hope is to get the residence permit – the permission to move out of the camp at last.

Synopsis

A road movie set in the Middle East. Two Palestinian brothers take a trip to Ramallah that they do not want to last longer than 45 minutes because they are smuggling the body of their late father. However, a whole series of misfortune lands them in trouble with the Russian mafia and Palestinian terrorists and the short journey becomes a nightmare. Rafik, who lives in Germany, comes home for his brother Jamal’s wedding. During the celebrations, ancient conflicts surface and the father has a fatal heart attack. The two brothers have to smuggle him from Jerusalem to Ramallah for his burial. However, they run into one predicament after the next and get landed into trouble with the Russian mafia and Palestinian terrorists. In the end, the Israeli security forces are the least of their problems. German-Iranian director Ali Samadi Ahadi sets his story about a family against the backdrop of the Middle East conflict, telling it with charm and a good dosage of irony. The screenplay for this turbulent comedy was written by the German- Israeli Gabriel Bornstein. It treats its deadly serious subject matter with means of entertainment. “I think that comedies about uncomfortable themes have the strongest and most lasting effect on the viewer. The result is not only a few hours of entertainment – audiences can take something away from the cinema visit, something that challenges them and hopefully leads to discussions or even to action. (…) It’s important to me personally to deal with this issue and to reach as many people as possible with the story – laughing and crying at the same time.” (Ali Samadi Ahadi)

Synopsis

Before Elvis, before Elton John, Madonna and Lady Gaga, there was Liberace: virtuoso pianist, outrageous entertainer and flamboyant star of stage and television. A name synonymous with showmanship, extravagance and candelabras, he was a world‑renowned performer with a flair that endeared him to his audiences and created a loyal fan base spanning his 40‑year career. Liberace lived lavishly and embraced a lifestyle of excess both on and off stage. In summer 1977, handsome young stranger Scott Thorson walked into his dressing room and, despite their age difference and seemingly different worlds, the two embarked on a secretive five‑year love affair. Behind the Candelabra takes a behind‑the‑scenes look at their tempestuous relationship – from their first meeting backstage at the Las Vegas Hilton to their bitter and public break‑up. HBO’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra has generated so much enthusiasm thanks to its subject matter – the tormented relationship between the pianist and his much younger lover, Scott Thorson – and its well-known leading men – Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. But it is also happens to be the last film directed by Steven Soderbergh before he goes into self-imposed exile from moviemaking.

Director’s Statement

Even though Soderbergh was unable to find Hollywood money for this film – reportedly because the story was perceived as “too gay” by studio execs – and eventually produced the film with HBO, he does not aim for the political dimension of the two men in love: “I really was trying to strip away any of that sort of …” Soderbergh begins. Both he and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese “were very conscious of trying to not look at it through any sort of political lens … And halfway through the movie I really feel like you’re just watching a relationship. When the relationship starts to fall apart it’s wrenching because Michael and Matt have done such a god job of showing that Liberace and Scott were connected, if only by the fact that they were both kind of broken, I think.” (from “I needed to see Jason Bourne on top of Gordon Gekko,” The Telegraph)

Synopsis

After working menial jobs in Germany for several years, Alina (Cristina Flutur) returns to her homeland determined to rescue her childhood friend Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) from the monastery she was sent to after both girls were ejected from an orphanage at the age of eighteen. Alina’s single-minded resolve excludes any consideration that the docile Voichita might have actually found fulfillment in this austere retreat — and a means of forgetting the lesbian relationship she and Alina once shared, a forbidden love that Alina is eager to rekindle. Standing between the women is the unyielding „Papa“ (Valeriu Andriuta), the head of the monastic order, who responds to Alina’s aggression with an ever more zealous dogmatism. He soon comes to believe that Alina has fallen prey to demonic possession, and it is his duty to chastise her soul — even if it means destroying her body. Brilliantly exploring the nuances and complexities of a scenario that could easily have been rendered as a simplistic contest between freethinking and backwards tradition, Mungiu firmly establishes himself as one of the most accomplished artists in contemporary world cinema. With Beyond the Hills Cristian Mungiu has created a powerful story about women living under an authoritarian regime — in this case, a remote Orthodox monastery in the Moldavian wilderness, where archaic beliefs still regulate communal life. (Toronto Film Festival)

Director’s Statement

Beyond the Hills is for me primarily a film about love and free will: mostly about how love can turn the concepts of good and evil into very relative ones. Most of the greatest mistakes of this world have been made in the name of faith, and with the absolute conviction they were done for a good cause.

Inhalt

At 15, Adèle doesn’t question it: girls go out with boys. Her life is changed forever when she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair, who will allow her to discover desire, to assert herself as a woman and as an adult. In front of others, Adèle grows, seeks herself, loses herself, finds herself … Abdellatif Kechiche’s adaption of Julie Maroh’s graphic novel Blue is the Warmest Color won the Palme d‘Or at the 2013 Cannes Film festival.

Director’s Statement

I was interested in developing a female character who was passionate about her professional life and wanted to pass on her enthusiasm … Each of us remembers that turning point in our school life when a passionate teacher … instilled the seeds of a vocation in us. But in the end my screenplay never reached fruition. So when I came across Julie Maroh’s graphic novel, the story of absolute love between two women and, at the same time, of a young woman becoming a schoolteacher, I saw how I could link these two projects.“

Synopsis

Adam is a Catholic priest who discovered his calling as a servant of God at the relatively late age of 21. He now lives in a village in rural Poland where he works with teenagers with behavioural problems who fight and yell abuse. He declines the advances of a young blonde named Ewa, saying he is already spoken for. However, celibacy is not the only reason for his rejection. Adam knows that he desires men and that his embrace of the priesthood has been a flight from his own sexuality. When he meets Łukasz, the strange and taciturn son of a simple rural family, Adam’s self-imposed abstinence becomes a heavy burden. Małgośka Szumowska’s visually powerful film, charged with striking imagery from Christ’s Passion, dares to broach the still taboo topic of homosexuality in the priesthood. Confronted with his ‘forbidden’ desires, her protagonist experiences both moments of bliss and utter despair. A film about confused emotions, repression and loneliness – and the possibility of perhaps finding oneself after all. The film’s topic quickly evokes associations such as pedophilia and sexual abuse. Yet Małgośka Szumowska points at a far different problem.

Directors’s statement

It’s strange, but I wanted to make a film about this kind of yearning for love, affection, closeness. It sounds trivial, but this feeling of somehow being torn from the inside,a feeling of being unfulfilled in contacts with other people, this great longing for something strong and powerful, was the startingpoint for me. I found a short note in a newspaper, about a boy, a young man really, who killed a priest in a very brutal way. Even though this story was completely different, I suddenly got an idea, to tell a story about a priest who dares to love.

Synopsis

“A soldier father guides his family with a firm but understanding hand. He gives his two 13-year-old sons a notebook in which they are to write down their everyday experiences. It’s the Second World War, the family is broken up, and the boys are taken to their grandmother’s village to take shelter in her house. But the old woman would rather nurse a bottle of booze than care for her own flesh and blood. Thus instead of finding a safe refuge, the brothers fully experience the cruelty of war and the utter absence of love. Nothing good can come of the situation, and the bitter reality is reflected in their matter-of-fact, emotion-deprived entries in the notebook. The picture graphically portrays the war through the eyes of children – but differently than we’re used to in such cases. Wholly unidyllic, the film takes a brutal look at the loss of illusions and the forced transformation of the protagonists into adults (or whatever the war makes of them). Moreover, the cruelty the brothers learned out of necessity extends beyond the end of the conflict, and thus we may perceive the film as a broader social critique. This elegiac motion picture benefits from Christian Berger’s dazzling camerawork.” (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival) Based on the worldwide bestseller by the Hungarian born Swiss author Àgota Kristóf, The Notebook is a postmodern antiwar drama, an oppressive parable about what war does to children and intensely describes the misery of entire populations in Eastern countries.

Director’s Statement

The Notebook is a war film with no war, a story about innocent but cruel children who resist all morals. It is the story of early adolescent, murderous twin boys. Two bodies, one spirit; two bodies, one will. They speak the same way and they finish each other’s sentences, always on the same wavelength. One boy thinks of something and the other carries it through. When they kill, it is an act of justice. Two bodies and one soul.

Synopsis

Somewhere, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, in a country torn apart by a war … A beautiful woman in her thirties watches over her husband in a decrepit room. He is reduced to a vegetative state because of a bullet in the neck, and not only is he abandoned by his companions of the Jihad, but also by his brothers. One day, the woman starts a solitary confession to her silent husband. She talks about her childhood, her suffering, her frustrations, her loneliness, her dreams, her desires … She touches him, kisses him, things she could never have done before, even though they have been married for the past 10 years. Therefore, this paralysed man unconsciously becomes ‘syngué sabour’, a magic stone which, according to Persian mythology, when placed in front of a person shields him from unhappiness, suffering, pains and miseries. In this wait for her husband to come back to life, the woman struggles to survive and live. She finds refuge in her aunt’s place, who is a prostitute, and the only relative who understands her. The woman seeks to free herself from suffering through the words she delivers audaciously to her husband. But after weeks looking after him, she will actually reveal herself in the relationship she starts with a young soldier … With the production of The Patience Stone Atiq Rahimi succeeds in transforming the written words of his novel of the same title into spoken words and moving pictures.

Director’s Statement

Because what is exciting and challenging for a writer-director, is finding a way to exceed one’s own book to show and say in his film all the things he didn’t manage to write using words. The book’s central idea is the myth of Syngue Sabour, the patience stone, a stone on which you can shed your misfortunes, your complaints, your secrets until it’s so full it bursts. In this story, the stone is the husband, a warrior paralysed by a bullet in the neck. The woman, to bring him back to life, has to pray from morning till night for 99 days. But that prayer soon turns in to confession. She murmurs into his ear all the things she has kept locked inside her for so many years.

Synopsis

Beirut, Lebanon, in 1982 is a dangerous place for anyone, not least a young Palestinian refugee like Fahed. He skips school to sell gum and cigarettes on the city’s streets. Lebanon is in the midst of a savage civil war and Fahed and his friends instead of joining the PLO prefer playing football in the rubble- strewn streets of Beirut. But Fahed’s life takes a tragic turn when his father is killed in a bombing raid and an unusual one when an Israeli Air Force pilot who he witnesses parachuting out of the sky is captured. And he makes a perilous decision: to return to the land of his ancestors and plant the olive tree his father had been nurturing before his dead he frees the captive Israeli pilot Yoni. In return, Yoni must agree to take Fahed to Israel. As their journey progresses, Fahed and Yoni must overcome bitter differences built up over generations in order to survive the dangers as Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese soldiers chase them across war-torn Lebanon. A tenuous friendship takes root and strengthens with every hurdle they overcome to reach a land they both consider home. From acclaimed Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis, Academy award-winning producer Gareth Unwin, and producer Fred Ritzenberg, comes Zaytoun, the powerful and moving story of an unlikely friendship that comes to fruition in two nations on the verge of war.

Director’s Statement

Zaytoun is a road movie, a war movie, a buddy movie. I wanted it to be serious and yet full of humour, realistic and yet a fantasy, true to the region and yet universal. I believe the result is all of the above with my view of the fragile, explosive, pessimistic, seldom optimistic fabric of the Middle East and its never ending conflicts.