Director: Marusya Syroechkovskaya, 103', Sweden, Norway, France, Germany
A documentary about the nonconformist youth in Russia. Self-shot video footage, voice-over, and archives show a portrait of the director's relationship with her partner of 16 years, Kimi Morev. The film is a melancholy panorama of what it might mean to be young and rebellious in Putin’s Russia, and offers a testament to the life-saving power of love.
This is a heartfelt movie about a group of women from Vukovar discovering who they could be without the trauma they’re identified with. Director Pribačić spends two years with a group of women who took part in the Croatian empowerment program I Am Much More Than My Trauma created to help women who were raped and traumatized during the Croatian War of Independence. While war is usually connected to male suffering, this film shows the female perspective: the unjust, horrible stories of human rights violations that women from the region went through. The documentary answers a question that many have skeptical feelings about: Can therapy be effective in such heavy cases? Can the victims really heal?
In Eastern Ukraine, the Russian invasion has left a trail of ruin and desolation. Here lives Nastya, who became a witness to war at age six. Scarred by her experience and yet self-determined, she now makes her way through a dystopian landscape. The camera closely but unobtrusively follows a group of children who wander around the remnants of their former home and life.
Since the pro-Russian separatist uprisings began in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, hundreds of women have joined the armed struggle. Female soldiers are often relegated to administrative posts and portrayed by the media as oddities, who are more concerned with whether they will have enough time for a manicure. But even if the female soldiers at the front naturally don't give up their femininity, they want to play an important role and fight for their country just like their male colleagues. Filmmaker Masha Kondakova went to war with three of these women. This film is both an urgent and brave piece of war journalism — one scene literally capturing the filmmaker encamped in a cramped house under shellfire. As the title suggests, the film is not just about the war against Russian separatists, but it focuses also on the internal struggle of women for acceptance in a patriarchal society.
Directors: Mantas Kvedaravičius, Hanna Bilobrova, 112', Lithuania, France, Germany
Filmmaker and anthropologist Mantas Kvedaravičius was taken captive and killed by Russian soldiers on April 2nd, during the siege of Mariupol. Hanna Bilobrova's journey with her fiancé to document the suffering of the Ukrainians turned into a quest to find out how Kvedaravičius was killed, to bring his body back to his native Lithuania, and to complete his work. The movie is conceived as a follow-up to Kvedaravičius’ 2016 documentary Mariupolis 2. The film was shown for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
Michal and Lenka are borderline fanatical proponents of a child-rearing philosophy known as Kamevédа - turning every waking moment into a time to be “training”, both athletically and intellectually. Not that Lenka and Michal are raising a troublemaker; Miško is, so far, a pretty much model child, the product of the hyper-invested parenting of two people who firmly believe childrearing is a science — measurable in stats, charts, and gold stars.
This film traces the life of Jan Kapr, a prominent Czech composer of the 20th century, who got blacklisted and his music banned after he protested against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia in an open letter to Shostakovich. The film is built upon archive material, including letters, newspaper articles, photos, secret police reports, and Kapr's own Super 8 home videos. This documentary opera with ambitious libretto and playful and refined editing work is an unexpected celebration of creativity that shakes up our ideas of biography and pays tribute to the importance of resisting censorship through art.
Director: Matt Sarnecki, 102', Denmark, Czech Republic, USA
On the night of February 21, 2018, investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, both just 27 years old, were brutally murdered in their home. It was the first targeted killing of a journalist in Slovakia's history, and shocked citizens protested on a scale not seen since the fall of communism. Kuciak was well known for covering questionable financial connections between politicians and "elite" business tycoons, namely millionaire Marián Kocner. When police failed to meaningfully investigate the prime suspect, journalists mobilized the public.
Director: Vera Krichevskaya, 104' минути, UK, Germany
In 2008, Natasha, with no interest in politics, a newly rich woman, decides to open an independent TV station in Russia and builds an open-minded team of outcasts. Her channel - Dozhd, with its gay-friendly work culture, funky branding, and cheeky satire quickly gains a devoted fan base. In 2012, however, Dozhd dared to do something only a few journalists do: it covered the protests that followed Putin’s third-term election. The documentary follows the channel’s removal from lucrative national cable packages, the harassment of its staff, and Natasha’s legal prosecution. How far can one go in protecting fair broadcasting and freedom of speech?
Nic, Leo, Raff, and Andrea, aged between 20 to 30, have come together in Bologna, where each one of them is going through their female-to-male transition process. Produced by award-winning Canadian actor and trans man Elliot Page, Into My Name is an invaluable testimony of what it is like to feel in the wrong body and the difficulties of the legal systems. It is a very intimate and important film that lets us sense the lived experience of its four protagonists. It’s a film that everyone should see, especially in a society where decisions about the transgender community are taken by politicians who don’t have a clue about the harsh reality Nic, Leo, Raff, Andrea, and many people like them face on a daily basis.
Tbilisi Pride has been canceled in 2021 after violent clashes. Films about same-sex love are being protested in Georgia. In this environment, Ketevan Kapanadze makes a “quiet” poetic film. Her protagonists are members of a local women's football team who constitute the heart of a group of female and non-binary queer people. This is not a film about activists. It’s a film about those who live quietly, lead a sheltered existence, and do not want to be under the spotlight. Their truth comes out in their personal conversations. The film's title is borrowed from Audre Lorde’s poem Suspension (“How the room felt/ When your word was spoken – Warm/ As the center of your palms/ And as unfree”), depicting perfectly the mood on the screen.
It’s been widely reported that 42% of young people in the LGBTQ+ community considered suicide in the US in 2020. Director Daresha Kyi takes a brave and intimate look at the organization known as Mama Bears whose members are former evangelical Christians who now champion their children’s civil rights. Spread across the country but connected through private Facebook groups they fight ferociously to make the world kinder and safer for all LGBTQ+ people. Although some of the mothers may have grown up as fundamentalist, evangelical Christians, mama bears are willing to risk losing friends, family, and faith communities to keep their children safe.
In the 1920s, Emma and Marcelle met at school in Dijon. Secretly, love blossomed between the two teenage girls, but after two years they parted ways. Marcelle developed tuberculosis and was admitted to a sanatorium. Complementing the sparse photographs of the women, Hunzinger combines archive footage, avant-garde films, and music to create a sensuous, poetic atmosphere of absolute love between two women, who went beyond the limitations of the times they lived in.
Directors: Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt, 80', Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, USA
A symbol of bohemian life in New York, with residents like Mark Twain, Patti Smith, Stanley Kubrick and Bob Dylan, the Chelsea Hotel is legendary. Dreaming Walls is a film that juxtaposes the current fate of the hotel with its glamorous past. The documentary follows the process of evicting the artists and the ambitious renovation project aimed at turning the building into a boutique profit machine.
The film follows the bittersweet story of Leonie, a 14-year-old girl who becomes a social media ‘princess’ in Germany. Through the film, we become part of the huge love and dependence of her fans—love that leads to a popular brand’s big investment, with the price for an influencer's post with their product averaging 15,000 euros. Susanne Meures does not moralize what is happening in front of the camera, but her choice — to show the story not only of Leonie, but also the one of Melanie, founder of an Instagram fan page dedicated to the influencer, sets clear boundaries between distorted reality and real life.
Director Srđan Keča, 91', Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic
This film tells the story of a never-completed museum. Once a symbol of the future that would cherish the past, the documentary takes us into the present-day darkness of the basement of the Museum, the only part of it that has been completed where a community of marginalized people lives. Through the story of this never finished building and the characters connected to it the film makes a commentary on current Belgrade, telling a very different story from the one envisioned by the museum initiators 60 years ago.
Nina Menkes' film is an urgent and timely introduction to critical film theory. A fresh look at old norms and forms, this time from a female point of view. With 175 clips from Hollywood classics and cult films, this documentary investigates the politics of cinematic shot design, and how this meta-level of filmmaking contributes to the normalization of stereotypes connected to women and their portrayal on screen. The documentary's impressive research is enriched by specially made for this film interviews with pioneers of the feminist film theory such as Eliza Hittman, Julie Dash, and Laura Mulvey.
A beautiful text by Siddhant Adlakha describes best what you are about to experience with the Tik Tok, Boom documentary, which looks into the huge success of the first Chinese app to surpass Silicon valley app giants. “The opening frames of TikTok, Boom feature an extreme closeup of a ring-light reflected in a content creator’s eye. It is, at once, a reminder of a familiar cinematic image — the opening of the 1982 film Blade Runner, which explores the intersection of humanity and technology — and a promise of an up-close, intimate look at the omnipresent details of digital media, which you may or may not have noticed”.
Two-time Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus takes an inside look at Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s life, iconic films, inventions, and the experiences that made him the 20th century’s most unique and renowned environmental voice — and the man who inspired generations to protect the Earth. In his time, Cousteau aspired to go further and deeper before realizing that the ocean was in distress and rapidly changing before his very eyes. However Garbus doesn’t escape his flaws — the film shows his achievements, but doesn’t shy away from the contradictions too.
This is a documentary made in close collaboration with Brazil’s dwindling Uru-eu-wau-wau tribe. The film follows them over the course of three years observing their constantly decreasing in numbers community, while their supposedly protected patch of Amazon rainforest is under attack from all sides by farmers, miners, and settlers.
In August 2020, a plane traveling from Siberia to Moscow made an emergency landing. One of its passengers, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was deathly ill. Taken to a local Siberian hospital and eventually evacuated to Berlin, doctors confirmed that he had been poisoned. Developed as an espionage thriller, the film follows Navalny as he tries to find out who poisoned him, using the help of the Bulgarian investigative journalist Chirsto Grozev. Grozev and Navalny manage to find the Federal Security Service (FSB) agents sent to kill him, but they don't stop there. Navalny calls them, one by one, to ask why they did it.
A Q&A with Christo Grozev after the screening.
27.09, 19:00, Lumiere Cinema
Free admission, booking a free ticket is required. The event is organized in partnership with the European Parliament.
When the Law and Justice party took over the government in Poland in 2015, the authorities took aim at independent courts arresting judges whose rulings are not to their liking. The film follows Judge Igor Tuleya, the face of a protest movement that takes the public and judges to the streets. Tuleya is quite a character - his black humor brings an occasional note of lightness to this urgent and shocking topic.
We follow the stories of Hungarian women who have dedicated their lives to being strong and achieving a perfect body to their vision - we see the reality of women bodybuilders — their hopes, dreams, challenges, and stereotypes they need to fight. What triggers women to seek the perfect muscled body? The Hungarian director takes an insightful look into this unknown to the wide public world.
Directors: Maria Loohufvud, Love Martinsen, 83', Sweden
The Calendar Girls’ leader proclaims: that one individual does not make the team, the team is above all. However, each individual Calendar Girl has a deeper purpose to be in the team — escaping toxic relationships, finding meaning beyond the label of a mother and grandmother, continuing a career in dance, getting a sense of belonging, and discovering creative potential. An empowering film, which breaks the stereotypes about aging.
Directors: Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov, 93', Bulgaroa, Germany, Denmark, Croatia, Czech Republic
During the Cold War, almost every family in the Eastern Bloc treasured and impeccably maintained the car they had waited for so long. This film looks at the fascinating history of socialist automobiles based on select accounts which portray the events and hardships of the time with a touch of humour. The automobile was also seen as a weapon against the imperialist class enemy. For most communist countries, the car was an instrument of propaganda, used to symbolize technological progress and the equality, if not the superiority of their system.
28.09, 18:00, Lumiere Cinema - Bulgarian Premiere and Closing Screening 28.09, 20:00, Lumiere Cinema
Directors: Anne Cutaia, Sophie Peyrard, 54', France
“What better time to speak about issues than the time when there are people who don’t want to hear about them?” Poet or rock singer, performer, or mother — Patti Smith, the "Godmother of Punk," combines several roles in her life. She is the embodiment of freedom, living outside society's expectations. Her debut album Horses hits like a bomb. Patti Smith’s music, poetry, and politics are fearless, funny, raw, and original. The film follows Patti Smith’s punk-icon roots in the 70s through the trials of daily life, her fights for civil rights, anti-war activism and her conviction that artists must say something meaningful through their work instead of just entertain.
18.09, 20:00, Largo - Warm-Up Screening
Free admission. The screening is organized in partnership with kvARTal Festival.
No Place for You in Our Town takes the audience in the midst of a gang of football fans from Bulgaria’s toughest city — Pernik. A once flourishing industrial center, today Pernik is mostly known with the jokes about its citizens’ roughness. The film follows communal and personal crises, and shows life beyond the tough image and the clichéd jokes. Tsetso, Mimeto, Dado, and the whole gang are devoted to their team’s success, carrying the fighting spirit of their ancestors, the miners. The director explores the protagonists’ lives and shows that nothing is only black or white.
20.09, 20:00, Largo - Bulgarian Premiere 26.09, 20:00, Lumiere Cinema
Q&A with the film's director after the screenings.
At the heart of this film is the magic of a three-minute long celluloid film. Essentially a home video shot in 1938 by David Kurtz in a Polish Jewish town, this old film changes our perception of time. The voice of Helena Bohnam-Carter takes us through this essay film dedicated to history and to a memory in which the Holocaust hasn’t yet taken place.
Free admission. The screening is organized in partnership with the State Institute for Culture at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Bulgaria.
