experiment

We all perceive poetry differently. For some, a poem is a rhyming text, for others a metaphysical experience. For director Kateřina Dudová, it is an experiment with three people who are close to her, whom she places in one room for three days, leaving them to their fate with the task of writing a poem. Sometimes the recording of real events is more poetic than the poem itself. “I was given the task of making a 'film poem', but I hate poems, so I'm looking for something… the feeling I want to get from poetry, how I feel. What is a poem?” – Kateřina Dudová

Olga Chernykh originally wanted to make a portrait of her mother. However, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine again and everything fell apart. The director's three-generation kaleidoscope of memories is an attempt to find a foothold in the face of an uncertain future. Her video interviews with her mother and grandmother are interspersed with photographs and films from the family archive and reportage images of contemporary everyday Ukrainian life. Above all, a sense of longing and loss permeates the collage of past and present stories of three women and one country. At the same time, it speaks of the courage and defiance of a nation that has repeatedly faced external pressure.“We worked a lot on the balance of the portrait of the country and the history of this city and immersing it inside a family story because we did not want to have a historical film.”Quote source: Variety

Growing up in West Germany in the 1980s, Aline imagined a gregarious life on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, in communist Bulgaria, Veselina believed that everyone was happy under capitalism. In their collaborative hybrid documentary, they use their childhood fantasies to sketch a new utopia.

This film, at the intersection of visual art and documentary, reveals the shadowy past of the Dutch colonial empire through artfully edited archival footage. A dreamlike essay on the confectionery industry driven by the exploitation of Indonesian farmers, it also depicts the traditional rituals of the author's people and asks questions about modernity, the passage of time, the formation of memory and the nature of humanity.“Through the intersection of visual art and cinema, I plunge into Indonesia's haunting colonial past, exploring its hidden depths and intricate layers.” — Timoteus Anggawan Kusno

Kinetopsia, a disorder in which one believes that static objects are in motion, serves as a metaphor for the social situation we find ourselves in: the Velvet Revolution took place thirty-five years ago, and while the opaque present continues to bring new problems, public discussion often still revolves around the hunt for the "spectre of communism". From the perspective of a young couple, we discover the fascinating project of Sylvia's abandoned Discoland and become aware of the critical moments of the political transformation that has determined the economic and cultural conditions in which we live today. "We are fighting here. Against the fucking communists, for freedom."

Ida is cleaning out the house that her grandfather, an artist, used to live in. She wades through a studio overflowing with artefacts, oddities and lost history. Similarly to S P A C E S, Štrbová treats the theme of memory and loss, combining fiction and documentary, letting the images of nostalgic childhood and the suffocating past flow associatively. To the sound of Francesco Geminiani's Concerto grosso no. 12, subtitled Madness, the fragile physicality of both dead and living relics stands out. The head of a dead parrot, a cast of her grandmother's breasts or a moss-covered real estate agent represent the discoveries of a personal archaeological site and exhibits of an introspective museum of family history. “I like the fact that you don’t have to deal with whether things are fiction, animation or documentary. Nowadays, such pigeonholing is unnecessary. A film is just a film.”Source: Film a doba

Not far from the Estonian border is the Russian town of Pechory. When it was occupied by the Estonian army after World War I, a Danish cameraman came along with the soldiers. The director's great-grandmother appears to be in the footage. This formally playful film uses archival footage and animation to tell the moving life story of this courageous woman.

This playful poetic documentary finds its whole world in the library. In libraries, that is, because they are all connected in an imaginary universe made up of aisles, book spines, letters, words and stories. Night after night, two female travellers venture into it; sometimes their steps cross and they remain in brief conversation, sometimes they wander along their own routes of their thoughts and imaginations. Because in books you can find literally everything beyond the walls of the library. And all it takes is a slight change of letters, a red becomes read, an isle becomes aisle, and the whole cosmos is spun on its axis by the single powerful force of creativity and imagination. “I’m interested in the feeling and movement of everyday life and ordinary places. I start my films intuitively around that—the structure often comes from circumstances around making the film.” Source quote: Innersense