In January 2017, a video of a young Gambian drowning in
the waters of Venice’s Grand Canal went viral on social
networks.
From the shore, passers-by insulted him without helping
him. Filmed with a mobile phone, the body, petrified by the
cold, appears to be sinking despite the lifebuoys thrown in
its direction. He was 22 and his name was Pateh Sabally.
2500 miles away, the voices and faces of his family tell the
story that preceded this tragedy, the story behind the
images…
Section: Internationales Forum
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Last Shore, The
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Shards of Light
After the liberation of Bucha, Ukraine, the residents are rebuilding their city from the rubble after surviving the horrors of Russian occupation. A newly married couple, a schoolgirl, a city official, and an elderly housewife have all endured the painful experiences of war, yet they manage to hold onto hope and solidarity. But how do you rebuild in the wake of growing trauma, especially with war still raging in your country? As time goes on and hopes for a peaceful life fade, they must grapple with mounting tensions within their communities.
Entering Bucha on the first day when the survivors cautiously left their hiding places and the full extent of the war crimes became visible, the directors’ camera captured a “zero hour” of history. Shot over a three-year period, the film follows closely five protagonists navigating the complex terrain of inner conflicts, trauma, and a longing for justice, posing questions about the future of a society at war. SHARDS OF LIGHT will have its German premiere in Nuremberg. -
My Dear Théo
February 2022. Ukrainian filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko decides to follow a promise to herself to volunteer in the Ukrainian Armed Forces if the Russian invasion in her country turns full scale. Alisa goes to fight on the frontline, leaving behind her 5-year-old son Théo.
This film that should never have existed was born out of the effort to preserve, amidst the horrors and dangers of war, the evidence of the unwavering love that the mother has for her child.
Through intimate video diaries and poetic letters addressed to a future grown-up Théo, Kovalenko captures the devastating reality of war while reflecting on her choice to serve. Her camera reveals both the chaos of destruction and the profound humanity she finds among her fellow soldiers – their unwavering friendships, mutual support, and tender connections maintained with distant loved ones.
Serving both as a mother’s testament of love and a war documentary, the film weaves together Kovalenko’s personal story with the larger narrative of those who fight to ensure future generations may live in peace.
This first-person documentary offers an intense and intimate perspective on the human cost of war and the profound bonds between parent and child that endure even in the darkest circumstances.
Through her lens, Alisa Kovalenko honors both the living who serve and those who made the ultimate sacrifice, never to return to their families. -
Cell 5 – A Reconstruction
On January 7th 2005 an asylum seeker, shackled at his hands and feet, dies in a fire in cell number five of a police station in Dessau, Germany. The Police claim that he set himself on fire even though he was fixated – one of the biggest scandals in Germany surrounding racist police brutality.
With CELL 5 – A RECONSTRUCTION, Mario Pfeifer reconstructs the case of Oury Jalloh’s death using legal documents, testimonies, audio-visual archives, and collaborates with the forensic expert Iain Peck to reproduce an accurate fire experiment. All in an attempt to answer the question: how could Oury Jalloh burn to death?
In this hybrid documentary, the director embarks on a search for clues that also serves as forensic evidence. Dennenesch Zoudé plays a fictitious investigator, who unravels the case with us; original witness statements from the police officers at the time are spoken directly into the camera by citizens. It is precisely these distancing effects that create an atmospherically and argumentatively dense film – intelligently told, partisan in the best sense of the word and enlightening. -
Coriolis Effect, The
Cape Verde is the literal and metaphorical epicenter of our world spinning out of control. It is the place where some of the most powerful hurricanes in the world are born. It’s on these dry and wind-blown islands that the filmmakers find humans and animals alike who tell a universal story of the will to live.
The hurricanes are caused by the Coriolis Effect: the earth’s rotation bends and deflects trade winds running between the islands, turning them into storms. The effect is increased by global warming and the rise of sea temperatures, causing the hurricanes to become more devastating.
A centipede makes its way across the arid desert. Workers clean a dried up well, hoping for rain that has not come for five years. A newborn turtle struggles through a garbage-filled
beach to the sea. A fisherman gets lost in the fog and runs out of water as he tries to find his way back home.
There is a driving force, a common demeanor, that propels all living things forward and keeps us going. Like the Cape Verdean composer and poet Vasco Martins says: -„whether we realize it or not, we are all on a pilgrimage“.
Instead of despair, the filmmakers turn to those trying to help. A naturalist cares for sea turtles maimed by fishing nets. Young environmental volunteers clean up garbage drifting endlessly from the sea, in a Sisyphean labor. Yet human beings are not the focus in the film. Here, all beings are equally worthy of importance. All life is sacred and awe inspiring. An awe that might point to a way out of our predicament, if only we could leave behind our anthropomorphic hubris.
The antagonist in the film is unnamed and unseen, but it is clear there is a collective adversary. As Vasco Martins says: – “we are ungrateful guests”, but ones who “deep down love you [the earth] and don’t want to leave.” -
Playtime
PLAYTIME deals with the issue of education in Brazil through both a documentary and fictional approach. The students talk about problems that affect them, such as violence, racism, and femicide, citing experiences from their families. What’s more, they dramatize situations they’ve experienced, as they do when it’s impossible to film in schools surrounded by police operations. In another school, they rehearse the book Clara dos Anjos, by Lima Barreto, written at the beginning of the 20th century and which shows the abuse of a young black suburban girl. From this dramatization, they compare
this story with their experience of today’s problems. The documentary was based on a survey we carried out with public school teachers from primary and secondary schools. We then l ooked for schools representing different neighborhoods and communities in
Rio de Janeiro. The documentary part was developed from classroom debates on the topics raised in the research: school dropouts, racism, drug trafficking, stray bullets, and early pr egnancy. We also included in the film the events we faced both the police
operation and the difficulty and sometimes impossibility of getting permission to film. -
Queer as Punk
Faris is the transman lead singer of Shh..Diam!, an openly queer punk band in Malaysia. Together with his bandmates Yon and Yoyo, they use their music to fight for LGBTQI+ rights in a country where human rights and freedom of expression is severely curtailed by a conservative Muslim society. Faced with increasing discrimination, Yoyo decides to leave Malaysia. Despite the challenges, Faris chooses to stay, determined to continue using their music as a platform for advocating for freedom and equality, refusing to let the pressures of society silence their voice.
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Kontinental ’25
Cluj, Transylvania. After being driven from his shelter in a house cellar, a homeless man commits suicide. Orsolya, the bailiff who carried out the eviction, is impelled to make various attempts to address her feelings of guilt. Using a mixture of drama and comedy, topics as diverse as the housing crisis, post-socialist economics, nationalism and the power of language to maintain social status are dissected with a sharp, absurdist scalpel, in a movie-literate narrative that plays partly as a homage to Rossellini’s Europa ’51 – not least in the modesty of this independent, low-budget production’s means. But while in Rossellini’s film a woman’s crisis of conscience leads to meaningful activity, here the protagonist facing the dilemma is unable to find anybody to understand her and becomes increasingly desperate for external reassurance and validation, in a manner that would be easy to condemn if Orsolya’s moral relativism were not such an uncomfortably accurate reflection of a modern-day malaise from which few of us are wholly immune.
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My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow
What begins as an intimate portrait of Russian independent journalists facing persecution by Putin’s regime takes a drastic turn when Russia starts a full-scale war in Ukraine and they are all forced into exile. The film offers a front row seat to how authoritarianism works and the lives of those who resist, which becomes all the more globally relevant every day.
Soviet-born American filmmaker Julia Loktev came to Moscow in 2021 to make a film about independent journalists being declared “foreign agents” by Putin’s regime — as it turns out, just four months before Russia started a full-scale war in Ukraine. With her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk show host at TV Rain, Russia’s last remaining independent news channel, Loktev brings us into a community of sharp, warm and funny young women speaking truth to power as they face increasing threats. Loktev filmed in Moscow during the first week of the full-scale invasion, as the journalists tried to counter Russian propaganda and report the truth on the war, until all independent media was shut down and they were forced to flee the country. Structured in five chapters, feeling like a cross between a Russian novel and a reality show about frighteningly real reality, Loktev’s film is an extraordinary historic record of a country on the verge of fascism and an immersive and intimate inside view of the opposition in an authoritarian society, which becomes all the more globally relevant every day. -
Writing Hawa
Filmed over five years, “Writing Hawa” is the story of three generations of Hazara women from the same family in Afghanistan. With unique access and empathy, director Najiba Noori films her mother Hawa and her niece Zahra in their aspirations to emancipate themselves from patriarchal traditions.
Forced into marriage as a child, Hawa is 52 years old when she can truly start learning to read and write. With the support of her daughter, she opens a small textile business: she searches for traditional Hazara embroideries in the Bamiyan region and turns them into modern dresses to sell in Kabul.
Hawa eventually saves her granddaughter Zahra from her abusive father in a remote village and brings her to the capital. There, they study together and make plans for the future. However, the takeover by the Taliban in August 2021 turns the lives of the three women upside down: Zahra has to return to the village she escaped from, and Najiba is
forced to flee the country, living as a refugee in France. From afar, she helps Hawa continue fighting for her dreams.