Original title: Se Khahar
Duration: 12 min
Year: 2022.
Countries of origin: Iran
Direction: Iman Behrouzi
Showing: Wednesday 13.11.2024, 19:45-20:00 h
Sinopsis: A meditative symphony on the city and death. The filmmaker returns to places where he, 18 years earlier, had made a film about suicide. Now, in the crowded streets of Tehran and in the city’s rundown corners with flanked walls, he searches for the reasons that had led three sisters to end their live.
Original title: Ayda, Lioness among the Free Lions
Duration: 110 min
Year: 2024.
Countries of origin: Nederlands
Direction: Metje Postma
Showing: Wednesday 13.11.2024, 20:15-22:05 h
Sinopsis: “Ayda, Lioness among Free Lions” by Metje Postma follows the life of Ayda Saeed, a female member of the Free Lions Forces, an armed militia established by Sudanese Rashaida rebels between 1999 and 2006. Set in 2006 during peace negotiations with the Sudanese government, the film follows Ayda’s daily life in Al Gerda camp near the Sudanese border in Tessenei, Eritrea. Amidst working on a tent-restoration project for Mabruk Mubarak, the leader of the Free Lions, Ayda navigates personal and political dynamics, providing insight into the Rashaida community’s struggle for identity and autonomy.
Original title: Ahwach – Dance of the community
Duration: 70 min
Year: 2024
Countries of origin: Morocco
Direction: Michael Maurissens
Showing: Wednesday 13.11.2024, 22:30-23:40 h
Sinopsis: An ancient ritual from the edge of the Sahara – perhaps exemplary for many indigenous cultures – preserves another circular “knowledge” (of the spiral and circular movements of life) about the common, connecting, middle ground between the (its) opposites. In the language of those who have been calling themselves Imazighen, “the free”, for over 2000 years, Ahwach is the “dance of the community”. Although here, at the foot of the southern Moroccan Atlas, every village has its own Ahwach, singing, dancing, they all tell of one and the same, like the water of their springs, oases and rivers. Could we find it here again, the key to the dialog between identities, cultures and faculties that have become incommensurable?
Original title: Якутия – между мирами
Duration: 67 min
Year: 2024.
Countries of origin: Armenia
Direction: Vladimir Kocharyan
Showing: Thursday 14.11.2024, 18:00-19:10 h
Sinopsis: The phenomenon of Yakut cinema stands on par with other national cinematographies that have recently gained prominence, such as South Korean, Romanian, or Iranian cinema. Sakha (Yakutia) is the only republic within Russia with an independent film industry. Despite a population of 400 thousand Sakha people, more than 20 feature films are released annually in the republic. The director of the movie, Vladimir Kocharyan, was born in the early ’90s to an Armenian father and a Sakha mother. Ten years ago, he left to study cinema in St. Petersburg. After a long hiatus, he returns to his native republic and embarks on a road trip in search of the roots and meanings of Yakut cinema, as well as an attempt to understand the roots of his personal identity.
Original title: Eeele Man Bahmaee
Duration: 30 min
Year: 2024.
Countries of origin: Iran
Direction: Mohammad Ehsani
Showing: Thursday 14.11.2024, 22:45-23:15 h
Sinopsis: This is a documentary about an old Tribe in south west of Iran. This tribe is called Bahmaee and a few of them live traditionally now. And most of Bahmaee’ people has left mountains and black tends for towns. Now they feel nostalgia for their past lifestyle. In this documentary, we see how the climate change and settled neat the cities have led the nature and destiny of the tribe to ruin.
Original title: Empathy for Concrete Things
Duration: 61 min
Year: 2024.
Countries of origin: Germany
Direction: Gregory Gan
Showing: Friday 15.11.2024, 19:05-20:10 h
Sinopsis: Based on their experiences living and working amongst Soviet-era concrete, panel-block apartments, the filmmaker, together with five visual artists, examine past and present attitudes towards their former homes. Combining touching, personal stories with experimental research on the history of twentieth-century art and architecture, the film creates both a compelling narrative, and a contemporary aesthetic of panel-block mass housing using original watercolors, put into motion using digital animation and stop-motion techniques. As global and personal histories interweave, the film explores notions of moral and political responsibility as evinced in physical space. Empathy for Concrete Things thus considers how modern architecture has become the site of both utopian fantasies, and major calamities that shaped the history of the twentieth century. As former postsocialist countries have been thrust, or hang on the edge of new humanitarian and political crises, the film expresses its own rallying cry against destruction, all from the vantage point of concrete, panel-block apartments.
Original title: Game Over
Duration: 28 min
Year: 2023.
Countries of origin: Turkey
Direction: Saeed Mayahy
Showing: Friday 15.11.2024, 21:45-22:15 h
Sinopsis: In a basement in Istanbul a group of illegal Afghan teenage boys are determined to smuggle themselves into Europe – a utopia far away. Caught in the no-man’s land between childhood and adulthood they fearlessly play a dangerous game of destiny over and over again. But at what cost? In an underground basement, Mo and Ali live with 30 other boys. As the place is crammed, they spend their awakening hours outside moving around the streets and parks of Zeytinburnu, always on the go, to avoid being caught by the police. Left with no one but themselves to look after one another, their incredible strength and yet extreme vulnerability surface side by side in the no-man’s land between childhood and adulthood. Fearlessly, they play a dangerous game of destiny over and over again, determined to smuggle themselves into Europe – a utopia far away. They have all lost so much, they are willing to jeopardize everything to win the dreamy prize of safety and freedom. But at what cost?
Original title: KR Market
Duration: 5 min
Year: 2022.
Countries of origin: India
Direction: Michael Maurissens, Papia Chakraborty
Showing: Wednesday 13.11.2024, 19:40-19:45 h
Sinopsis: A danced exploration o the overwhelming flower market in Bangalore.
Original title: Lettre à ma fille
Duration: 4 min
Year: 2024.
Countries of origin: Benin
Direction: Michael Maurissens
Showing: Wednesday 13.11.2024, 22:25-22:30 h
Sinopsis: A letter from a mother to her future daughter, preparing her for challenges and inequalities she might encounter in her coming life.
Original title: My Body, Your Choice?
Duration: 12 min
Year: 2022.
Countries of origin: Pakistan
Direction: Fatima Syed Areeba Naveed
Showing: Thursday 14.11.2024, 19:20-19:35 h
Sinopsis: The documentary explores the evolution of feminist movements across three generations, highlighting the enduring struggle for bodily autonomy and personal freedom. The slogan “Mera Jism, Meri Marzi” which translates to “My Body, My Choice,” serves as a focal point, encapsulating the core principle that has driven feminist advocacy over the years.
Original title: Dea – Migrants Built This City
Duration: 72 min
Year: 2022.
Countries of origin: Hong Kong, Indonesia
Direction: Collectively made by Women Migrants in Hong Kong
Showing: Thursday 14.11.2024, 21:30-22:45 h
Sinopsis: Dea leaves rural Indonesia and her singing dreams to migrate to Hong Kong as a foreign domestic worker. The script is the result of a nine-months acting improv laboratory with a group of Indonesian women migrant domestic workers, who have been victims of domestic violence while working in Hong Kong.
Original title: Messa Partigiana
Duration: 11 min
Year: 2023.
Countries of origin: Switzerland
Direction: Monika Salzbrunn
Showing: Thursday 14.11.2024, 23:15-23:25 h
Sinopsis:
The feminist “Messa Partigiana” (Partisan Mass) was held on the Italian National Day, April 25th, in the ruins of the Santa Maria in Passione church in the historical part of Genoa. Directed by artist Simona Ugolotti, the satirical performance reinvented the Catholic mass in a carnivalesque way to commemorate Italian resistance activists such as Teresa Mattei and Ada Bernardi. Their memory was invoked by the performer, who saw herself as “guardian of memory”, and encouraged the participants to follow her example. In producing this documentary film, the research team and film crew led by Monika Salzbrunn worked closely with Simona Ugolotti and those who participated in the event to incorporate their feedback into the filmmaking process. A first edited version was screened on the anniversary of the founding of the artists’ squat where the performance took place. The film is one outcome of the research project ARTIVISM. Art and Activism. Creativity and Performance as Subversive Forms of Political Expression in Super-Diverse Cities, funded by the European Research Council.
Original title: A Family Portrait
Duration: 5 min
Year: 2022.
Countries of origin: India
Direction: Shubham Sharma
Showing: Thursday 14.11.2024, 19:10-19:15 h
Sinopsis: An auto-ethnographic film that explores the sensory relationship between distance and memory and what role they play in an immigrant’s experience of migration. After finding a family portrait on my phone one evening in Germany, I felt a longing for my hometown. I wanted to make a film about it. But how can you talk about your family portrait without talking about the reality they inhabit? They’re the sum of the people and environment they come from. By using the archive footage from back home I wanted to take an audience on a journey leading to my home where that family portrait exists.
Original title: ruinas de una memoria de infancia
Duration: 7 min
Year: 2023.
Countries of origin: Chile
Direction: Ignacio Rodriguez
Showing: Thursday 14.11.2024, 19:35-19:45 h
Sinopsis: The film is an autoethnographic journey to where I spent my childhood in northern Chile, between the Atacama Desert and the Pacific Ocean. It is a personal attempt to address the question of how do we remember those times and places we no longer inhabit, and where do we position our subjective memories within a broader context of national history, local geography and ruins of industrial architecture.
Original title: Uzaktan Yakindan
Duration: 39 min
Year: 2024.
Countries of origin: Germany
Direction: Yusuf Ölmez
Showing: Friday 15.11.2024, 18:00-18:40 h
Sinopsis: What is the role of an ethnographic filmmaker as an outsider and student of a culture? Is it about representing, demonstrating, and reflecting or exposing, participating, and transposing? Although these are not binary terms of the historic discussions in anthropology, they share a lot to be experimented through shared cine-anthropology and sensory multimodal ethnography.
Original title: മടക്കുകൾ
Duration: 19 min
Year: 2023.
Countries of origin: India
Direction: Saikiran M D
Showing: Friday 15.11.2024, 18:40-19:00 h
Sinopsis: Tucked away in a quiet corner of the bustling city of Kochi, India, is a unique institution that has been providing laundry services for over 300 years. From Dutch rule to British rule to independence, Dhobi Khana of Fort Kochi has seen it all and remains to be an integral part of history.
