biography

The director, a young man in his thirties going through a life crisis, approaches his estranged parents to help him paint his apartment. Conversations accompanied by a paint roller and paint thinner open up old wrongs while revealing the complexity of interpersonal relationships. The absence of communication, or the lack of will to communicate, as a symptom of contemporary family ties, stands in contrast to caring for a family of pigeons that has made its nest on the director's balcony. The film, in its civility and authenticity, follows the lessons of a book dedicated to amateur filmmakers and thus enters into a subversive dialogue with the paradigms of film pedagogy. How can we live today, how can we create?“A family portrait of a diary-like, commemorative nature is a very good lesson for a beginner.” Source: Camera tortura and the book KUČERA, Jan: Filmová tvorba amatéra

Jan Merta (1952) is currently one of the most important Czech visual artists. In his painting work, shaped by the postmodernism of the 1980s, he leans towards abstract abbreviation and symbolic depiction of reality through everyday objects. The film is a snapshot of his life filled with painting, working in his garden and cohabitation with his partner. The civilian camera follows Merta as he prepares an exhibition for which he attempts to create new works. However, his engagement with the current geopolitical situation enters into the work, as well as the discovery of new compositional principles and creative otherworldliness that co-create his enchanted personal world. “Is this art, or can I throw it away?”

Czech painter and artist Otto Placht (1962) is sometimes called the painter of the jungle. His creative and private life is divided between Prague and Peru, where he draws inspiration from the depths of the Amazon rainforest, ayahuasca and the local people. The film shows his creative process in the interiors of Prague and a studio built right in the rainforest. Poetic shots of nature are interspersed with the harsh realities of the big city, in which Placht's passionate love life and complicated family life are also revealed. The artist's paintings have proven to be not only a fascination with and homage to immaculate nature, but also an environmental plea for its protection. “My material base is Europe, and my spiritual space is opened by the South American rainforest. One cannot exist without the other.” Source: Czech Radio

Enric Miralles, one of the most gifted Spanish architects of his generation, died prematurely in 2000 at the age of 45. He found his final resting place in Barcelona's Igualada Cemetery, which embodies everything that characterised Miralles' work. In the seemingly unfinished space of the forest burial ground, it is difficult to separate the inside from the outside, and nature permeates the architecture. The documentary portrait of an extraordinary personality unfolds as a dialogue between the author's lyrical subject and Miralles' presence in the buildings he designed. The architect himself saw his work almost musically, as a “variation of the same thing”, the same motif and melody. The documentary film, which introduces us to eleven of Miralles' exceptional buildings, is in tune with this wave. Whether it's the Santa Caterina market in Barcelona, the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh or the boarding school in Morell, there is always a clear imprint of the same authorial hand. An artist always defying conventions and, above all, all boundaries, real and imaginary.“Moving with freedom through different places and floating in the city of Barcelona, the narrator's voice, written by one of the most interesting Spanish authors of the moment Sara Mesa, talks to a ghost; it searches for him, evokes him in its spaces, asks questions about his architectures, crossing the threshold between death and life.”Quote source: FilmFreeway

A short poetic essay depicting a young girl, Faustine, explores the relationship between the director and the protagonist and how the film camera, as a silent, omnipresent mediator, defines it. With a certain amount of self-reflection, the film understands documentary film as a medium that has a dominant power over the subjects it captures by locking their souls and likenesses forever into the cinematic image.“The act of looking becomes tangible through technology, superstitions and phantasmic vision. A film, it states, is a space that takes a real-life person hostage, engulfs, and seals them in forever.”

Nyege Nyege Tapes! is probably the most famous label introducing today's African electronica to the European independent scene. A cinematic context now comes to the unique sound. Polish filmmakers went straight to Tanzania to capture how musicians and DJs cultivating the style called singeli live. As Tanzania embarked on the road to capitalism twenty years ago, the film is also a testament to the changes that are shaping Tanzanian society today.

Diego Revollo first had to go deaf to learn to listen. According to conventional medicine, the director's deafness was incurable until he met Ortiz Ramos, a Bolivian healer from the Kallawaya shamanic nation. According to their teachings, which are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, urbanisation has severed man's connection with place, resulting in a rift between body and soul. Civilisation is sick and can only be cured by reconnecting with nature. The intoxicating details of the structures, the contemplatively ethnographic cinematography and the atmospheric soundtrack therapeutically return to matter, shapes, touch and the senses and restore the connection to our animal origins.“Perhaps for humans, healing is more akin to the ability to understand than to regenerate. To understand is to discover the deep meaning of something, to embrace it from all sides.”

A lyrical tapestry of life and landscape, The Unfixing reveals one mother’s path from illness to healing and from climate despair to environmental awakening. American filmmaker Nicole Betancourt fell ill in 2014. For a long time, she did not know the cause of the disease affecting her body and mind. But she could not devote herself properly to her work or raising two children. The stress, uncertainty and isolation made her stop and reflect. She began to perceive the health problems of herself and her loved ones in the context of the destruction of the entire planet. Her journey to the roots of personal and global grief takes the form of a layered collage in which themes and visual styles alternate cyclically. Through an intimate diary, animation, archival family films or interviews with doctors, indigenous teachers, and systems thinkers she looks for parallels between her own life and the landscape and finds hope at the intersection of both.“I hope that this film offers another way to face the sickness in our bodies and the earth, a path of allowing, listening, receiving – all things I thought were passive. Now I know they are active, courageous, and acts of rebellion.” — Nicole BetancourtSource: The Unfixing

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