The film weaves together the filmmaker's introspections with survivor's collective memories. Amid deciphering a diary, the filmmaker reflects on personal encounters.
As herself
27 Apr 2018
This documentary recounts the difficult choice actress Mary Astor had to make after learning her personal, very intimate, diaries had been stolen. The film tells the story of Astor's 1936 child custody case.
15 Nov 2024
“Can I be nostalgic about something I’ve never experienced?” asks debut filmmaker Pranami Koch. She has in mind her grandmother, a person she never knew who belonged to the Koches, a people in India with their own culture and traditions. In her search for connection and identity, Pranami travels to the countryside and immerses herself in the Koch community.
09 Jan 2024
It was one of the great crimes of the Second World War: from 1941 to 1944, a total of 872 days, the siege and starvation of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht on Hitler's orders lasted. Over a million people fell victim to the blockade, most of them dying of hunger. Countless of these starving people wrote diaries with the last of their strength, and cameramen filmed in the paralyzed city. Evidence from the hell of the siege, many of the film recordings, but above all the written memories on which this documentary on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation is based, remained under lock and key after the war. The voices of those who had suffered through this terrible time should not be heard by anyone, because they did not fit the pathos of the Leningrad heroic song that was officially sung. Most of the recordings come from women. The writers feared neither the enemy nor the Communist Party or Stalin, who often proved incompetent in providing for the population.
12 Jul 1993
In July 1990, a dispute over a proposed golf course to be built on Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) lands in Oka, Quebec, sets the stage for a historic confrontation that would grab international headlines and sear itself into the Canadian consciousness.
04 Feb 2025
In Wind, Talk to Me, Stefan reunites with his family to celebrate his grandmother's birthday for the first time after his mother's recent passing. This homecoming, driven by his urge to complete a film about his mother and an attempt to make amends by rescuing a stray dog, will ignite an introspective journey for Stefan. Inspired by the director's real-life experiences and starring his actual family members in a mission to complete a lake house and a film, Wind, Talk to Me is an intimate cinematic exploration of the timeless mother-son relationship.
24 Oct 2020
For centuries, Inuit in the Arctic have lived on and around the frozen ocean. Now, as climate change is rapidly melting the sea ice between Canada and Greenland, the outside world sees unprecedented opportunity. Oil and gas deposits, faster shipping routes, tourism, and fishing all provide financial incentive to exploit the newly opened waters. But for more than 100,000 Inuit, an entire way of life is at stake. Development here threatens to upset the delicate balance between their communities, land, and wildlife. Divided by aggressive colonization and decades of hardship, Inuit in Canada and Greenland are once again coming together, fighting to protect what will remain of their world. The question is, will the world listen?
11 May 2020
No overview found
01 May 2020
In this era of “reconciliation”, Indigenous land is still being taken at gunpoint. Unist’ot’en Camp, Gidimt’en checkpoint and the larger Wet’suwet’en Nation are standing up to the Canadian government and corporations who continue colonial violence against Indigenous people. The Unist’ot’en Camp has been a beacon of resistance for nearly 10 years. It is a healing space for Indigenous people and settlers alike, and an active example of decolonization. The violence, environmental destruction, and disregard for human rights following TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) / Coastal GasLink’s interim injunction has been devastating to bear, but this fight is far from over.
28 Jun 2024
Mauri (life principle, life force, vital essence inherent in all living things) The film is an intimate, visually stunning testament to a land and a people who have survived removal, exploitation and colonization — and to the healing ways that are part of the Māori ancestral knowledge. It juxtaposes the enduring trauma of colonialism with the resilience offered through Māori ancestral healing traditions.
18 Nov 2021
When director Iván Guarnizo's mother passes during the first days of peace talks with FARC-EP in Colombia, a door opens to explore a dark and painful past and, perhaps, find forgiveness. Iván's mother had been kidnapped by FARC-EP forces and held in captivity for 603 days. As they marched her through the jungles and mountains of the Colombian countryside, she was able to keep a diary that in great detail documented the places she was taken, her experiences and the names and descriptions of her captors.
09 Sep 2023
Hit Him on the Head with a Hard, Heavy Hammer departs from the handwritten memoir of the filmmaker’s father and his experience of displacement during wartime. Referring to the notion Thomas Hardy termed ‘The Self-Unseeing’ in his eponymous 1901 poem, the film returns to childhood and the matters that harden us: upbringing, social status, education, labour, and familial bonds. The memoir weaves into the film as both a contemplation on mortality and an illustration of fading memory, reflecting on how we pen our pasts and how they can be re-told.
25 Apr 2024
RAPE PLAY is an experimental documentary that explores fanfiction writing amongst teenage girls online and the learned narrativization of sexual experiences. Through interviews, lyrical essays, and fantastical reenactment, it touches on internet history, sexual assault discourse, and the magical cultural production happening in the bedrooms of teenage girls worldwide every day.
08 Mar 2024
This short, started early on into sobriety, finished about nine months in, is a collage of diaries and notes, collected from within addiction and into recovery.
02 Mar 2024
Every morning, Marcel confides in his tape recorder. It is from his reflections on life that this film takes us into the wake of his story.
01 Jun 2022
No overview found
09 Jan 2024
No overview found
21 Oct 2022
Migrant families experience violence, but they also keep beautiful memories when they arrive in new lands. Fantastic and intimate stories, recalled from childhood, travel across time and space, magically intermingling with the help of the four elements and breaking the boundaries of cinema.
17 Jul 2021
How do German couples communicate in private? What are they arguing about? Is the way to a man’s heart really through his stomach? This docu-fictional hybrid production discusses such questions with the help of authentic interview snippets that were edited under the staged plot. We get an insight into the life of an animal couple, who experience typical everyday situations on behalf of us humans. At first, our fox is emotionally contained, while the penguin lady may get wild as hell. With a wink, the filmmakers hold up a mirror to the audience in the cinema.
21 Oct 2020
A Sámi woman fights for her right to claim a tax deduction against the purchase of a dog. Why the Swedish authorities fail to recognize the dog's use as a reindeer herding tool versus a pet opens up a larger discussion about Indigenous rights and economic discrimination in this humorous takedown of the Swedish government's ignorance of Sámi culture.
01 Dec 2020
While cleaning the apartment of Lucía, her deceased grandmother, Anna finds a notebook where she discovers the story of a secretly kept love, lived during the turbulent years of the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War.