activism

Simone, Francesca and Olivia are three young people from Bologna who are members of the Communist Renewal Party. Full of life, they take part in demonstrations and party meetings and believe that they can change the current world, dominated by ruthless capitalism and pressure for performance, for the better. At least until the moment when it turns out that it is almost impossible to change the minds of the older party members and the unsuccessful attempts to win new supporters intersect with the difficulties in their personal lives. Comrades is an empathetic time-lapse portrait that shows how the current young generation is losing its illusions due to social pressure and turbulent internal changes, and how difficult it is to keep faith in what we believe makes sense.“By telling the stories of Olivia, Francesca and Simone, I try to show topics shared by many 20-30-year-olds: overstimulation, confusion, and awareness of social inequalities, accompanied by a difficulty in translating their good intentions into actions that bring about real change.” — Joanna JanikowskaQuote source: CineLink Industry Days

What is life? asks Max Kestner in the introduction to his expansive reflection on the greatest mysteries of the universe. He looks for answers that would shed light on why we exist at all in philosophy, biology and quantum physics. In addition to his curiosity, he is guided by an incident from Copenhagen Zoo that took place 10 years ago. At the time, its director had a healthy giraffe killed because it was no longer needed as part of an international breeding program. The fact that so many people around the world have expressed sympathy for the “unnecessary” animal suggests that we share much more with the world around us, including invisible microbes, than we admit, according to Kestner. “I could have made a story about how media works and how it [the story] exploded in the media but to me it was the scientific and philosophical questions that I felt were there at the time, but weren’t really answered.” — Max Kestner 

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

The United States is the largest producer of pistachios in the world. Growing them in California requires huge volumes of water, which many people can no longer get in the quantities they need. In the meantime, the vast inland plains, once plundered by oil production in the state, have become giant industrial farms. Investigative journalist Yasha Levine's reporting journey uncovers the context of the reckless trafficking of one of the most basic raw materials – water. Changes in legislation and massive encroachment on natural watercourses are transforming not only the landscape, but above all the human value of this life-giving liquid.“The thing I find most shocking is comparing the images of the past—a lush wetland with abundant bird life—to now, a landscape dominated by industrial farming.” Quote source: Film Fest Report

Ivana Svobodová, a journalist for the weekly Respekt magazine specializing in the Czech disinformation scene, does not create her reports from her desk, but in the field. She engages in clashes of opinion with people who believe in the positions propagated by bloggers like Vidlák. The plurality of opinion has been transformed by their influence into a battlefield divided into good and bad media. This confrontational portrait of the role of a liberal periodical in the era of rampant social media conspiracies with a sociological overlay discusses the impossibility of dialogue. It asks questions about the difference between opinion and fact, as well as what authority is respected by those who oppose authority and who is the watchdog of democracy.“I don't know what kind of world this is; I don't mean that politically, I mean it humanly. How often does a person get so angry that they want to insult a stranger?”

A cross between a reportage film and a video essay, the film follows an ordinary evening with the Pugnant Film Series, a Greek independent organisation that organises unconventional screenings for audiences who want to see the most interesting things from the world of independent, auteur and experimental film. This time, the venue for the cinephilic event is an abandoned house in the centre of Athens. Its empty spaces are transformed into cinema halls, which, through the influence of culture and a shared cinematic experience, momentarily return to life. “The empty houses are ours to do what we want with them.”

The director Tomáš Hlaváček is loosely building upon the time-lapse documentary Housing Against Everyone, in which he captured the dispute surrounding the Rapid Re-Housing project in Brno. The topic of decent housing for families in need is also addressed in The Impossibility. People occupying rental apartments in Brno's “Kuncovka” wanted hot water, electricity and fair negotiations. Instead, they received bullying and threats from the owner, who, in his own words, “does not like coloured people”. Neither the police nor the city helped them. So they joined forces with activists and lawyers to fight for their rights. Hlaváček chronicles the months-long conflict with its legal follow-up as an engaged observer. "When I first set foot in that house, I came roughly against the gap between theoretical understanding and the real experience of extreme poverty and inequality that plunges the lot of the inhabitants into lived hopelessness. I observed a space where defending one’s own rights, let alone human dignity, is so expensive and dangerous that claiming it is tantamount to existential endangerment of self and family. At Kuncovka, I learned that to be poor is to become a commodity of abuse that no one wants to hear, because poverty is itself a guilt. It wasn’t a matter of just turning my head and pretending that this world didn’t exist." - Tomáš Hlaváček

The populist Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) organised a train for its supporters on the national holiday of Unification Day to visit celebrations culminating in the nationalist speeches of AUR’s President George Simion. The observational footage of passengers and participants in the grand convention brings to light the dangerous rise of the far right in Romania.“We need leaders who love their country, their people and those people’s values.”

James Joyce created his monumental work on the basis of Homer's epic. The Belarusian director decided to “scrape” words from the writer's text and “write” his own modern odyssey through it. In his film-palimpsest, he not only refers to the famous modernist novel by the Irish writer, but uses the opening scene to bring into play the no-less-famous attempt at a film adaptation from 1967. Only Dublin was replaced by Minsk, and instead of a Jewish busybody, Ruslyk, the personal director of President Lukashenko wanders the labyrinth of the city all day long. On his convoluted postmodern pilgrimage, he meets doctors, politicians, propagandists, artists, drunkards and outcasts. He conducts blasphemous dialogues with them about the rotten nature of the ruling regime, vents creative and personal frustrations, or just tries to borrow a cell phone to call home to his wife. The cinematic colossus that unfolds over nine hours fascinates with the omnipresence of intense moments, ordered one after the other with a wild rhythmic cadence.“I thought it would be nice to show the real Minsk. That’s the diss track aspect of it.”Quote source: Mubi

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