I grew up in Yangon. In February 2021, my dreams came to an end. My mother said: “Son, wake up. The military has taken over the country”. The days got darker. The window in my narrow room and the piece of sky I watched seemed to be the only freedom I had left. I wanted to say something about this new undercurrent in my life. I wrote things down, recorded my voice, and searched for images that might reflect my feelings and those of other young people. And now there is a film which conveys what it's like to lose the ground beneath your feet.
An intimate conversation between father and daughter about a fermenting family secret amidst experimental image and sound recordings of work on a winery in southwest France.
Within a dialogue through different stages, a woman evokes with her father, a historian and a stranger, events that she didn't live through and that somehow, she seems to have gone through.
The director, a stateless Filipino, returns to his native country. For more than twenty years, he lived without papers in the USA and feels trapped in a world full of borders.
A poetic essay film through the lens of an undocumented immigrant becoming disillusioned by their future in the United States and deciding to return to an estranged homeland. Nowhere Near tracks down the origin of a family curse backtracking through the post 9/11 era, the US occupation of the Philippines and the spiritual conquest of the Spanish empire. The film is a years-long diary towards understanding the causes of migration to the United States, though ultimately this odyssey deviates far from the expected course.
After the coup in Uruguay in 1973, thousands of intellectuals and artists fled the country. My father was among them and left for Europe. After his passing three years ago, I came upon some Super 8 movies and audio recordings he had made. Through this archive, I started building a new family story trying to reveal and understand the silent pain of his exile and the fierce will to be a family despite the estrangement.
Built in the 19th century, this Tamil Hindu temple in Thanlyin, across the Bago River from Yangon, is unique in the largely Buddhist Myanmar: this is a place where people from different religious backgrounds come to pray in the hope that their wishes will be fulfilled. Fortune-teller “Yellow Mother” is one of four inhabitants of Pilikan village who – in between lively spectacles of leaping cows and cow-catching – explain what the temple and its rituals mean to them.
Diabetes: Matthew Lancit lives in constant fear of the complications of his disease, so he simply anticipates the body horror himself. The result is equally funny and disturbing.
What started as a nostalgic film diary about his diabetes has been gradually contaminated by Matthew's anticipation of possible futures. Introducing monstrous elements into his family home movies, he re-appropriates tropes from the body horror films of his youth to create an image of the invisible disease.
Invited by a mysterious friend, a film team sets out on a journey into a hidden Yenish Europe that stretches from dusty banlieues in France to the forests of Carinthia. Told by the voices of young and old Travellers, a kaleidoscopic panorama of their lives unfolds: Diverse people relate to each other, bound together by their love of freedom but also by deep wounds from the past. Their otherness is mirrored and reflected not least in the exchange between the filmmakers and the Yenish.
The film follows three young Russian women after the attack on Ukraine. Stay or leave? A haunting look at a generation in today’s Russia and their lives on the go.
Silent Sun of Russia portrays a generation of young Russians between 2018 and 2022. The film follows three young women – Alika, Alyona, and Katya. They are rebels and anarchists and part of a global youth who dream of living a modern life in freedom. A pervasive sense of anxiety and restlessness about the future haunts the lives of the young women. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, they find themselves in a new reality that requires difficult choices. In their quest for love, friendship, and the dream of escaping Putin's Russia, they live in uncertainty, where longing is replaced by difficult emotions and attempts to repress reality. The film provides an intimate and poetic view of the current living conditions and the urgent decisions faced today by young Russians who cannot see a future in their native country.
Shan folk singer Nan Mya was a star when she was young. Her metaphorical verses reflect the deep sense of loss that pervades a people battered by Myanmar's ruinous politics.
Shan State in Myanmar is home to a rich culture filled with ancient songs, traditional dances and beliefs. It is also a place where civil war has been raging for over sixty years. Shan folk singer Nan Mya Han was a star when she was young. Now she is older, her metaphorical verses reflect the deep sense of loss that pervades a people battered by Myanmar's ruinous politics. Interweaving her songs with compelling scenes of rituals around healing, death and birth, the film transcends the purely observational to become a multilayered, elliptical exploration of decay and impermanence that is both moving and totally mesmerising.
The Lisu people's bond with nature is a profoundly spiritual one. The harvest season may have come to an end but the souls of villagers have a habit of lingering in the fields.
The Lisu people's bond with nature is a profoundly spiritual one. Theirs is a world that is filled with the spirits of the forests and mountains where they live and farm. The harvest season may have come to an end but the souls of many a villager have a habit of lingering in the fields of the uplands where they can cause all kinds of mischief. This richly atmospheric exploration of Lisu animism brings us closer to the mellifluous-voiced shaman Byar Wu, whose job it is to summon these lost souls back into the bodies of his community in Chaung Gyi village in Shan State and by doing so prevent sickness and disease.
Inspired by a feminist science fiction story, the Spaniard Inés embarks on a journey of discovery through India. She is looking for Ladyland, the utopian land of women.
Taking inspiration from a feminist sci-fi short story written in Bengal in 1905, Inés sets out on a voyage of discovery around India in search of Ladyland, the utopian land of women.
Every summer, Paul’s family has a picnic on a small island that can be reached via a causeway at low tide. This year the tide takes them by surprise and they are forced to spend the night.
The eternal “August 15 Picnic” on Callot Island. But this year, Paul, his family and their friends find themselves trapped by the tide. Paul, upset and stuck between the world of adults and that of children, becomes aware of his individuality.
Suzanne, 91 years old, lives alone in the Vosges in a house without water or electricity, where she enjoys the little pleasures of life. A laconic and humorous portrait.
“We'll see!” Suzanne takes life as it comes, with calm and serenity. She lives alone on the farm where she was born in 1930, on the edge of a forest in the Hautes-Vosges. The house is not connected to water or electricity. According to the seasons, Suzanne cultivates her vegetable garden, prepares her preserves, reads the press, walks in the mountains, and welcomes passing visitors. She savours all the little pleasures of life while laughing, having fun and embodying this happy sobriety to which her contemporaries aspire.
Joan Tomàs Monfort, Carlos Pérez-Reche, Juanjo Sáez
Even Phil Collins cannot stop the development of a deep friendship between Juanjo and Miquel. The two teenage boys have bonded forever over Heavy Metal.
Joan Tomàs Monfort, Carlos Pérez-Reche, Juanjo Sáez
International Competition Animated Film
Animated Film
Spain
2023
80 minutes
Catalan
German premiere
Trailer
Synopsis
Juanjo is an asthmatic boy who has lived protected by his family to the point of drowning him. Miquel grows up in a family with an absent father. His mother tries to get on by herself, but she does not always succeed.
Tender Metalheads is a film about the relationship between Juanjo and Miquel, two teenage boys from Barcelona in 1991 who will take refuge from the grey world they live in in their friendship and heavy music.
Adam’s body becomes a mirror of his soul, making every grievance visible to everyone through strange deformations. A brilliant insight into the mind of a 15-year-old boy.
Adam is a 15-year-old teenager who has the strange peculiarity of having a body that changes, based on the mockery and negative comments he receives from those around him. The accumulation of its physical changes, only adds a layer of complexity to those already present in his life. The summer when Ange, his grandmother, dies, he has to work to develop his autonomy. He maintains the huge house of the family of Kevin Brousseau, a haughty teenager who left on summer vacation. He also has to maintain Mr. Bibeau's lawn, but he can no longer care for himself, because of his heart operation. In addition to his strange body which deforms without end, Adam must learn to juggle summer jobs, his friendship with Timothée, the desire that he feels towards Jeanne, the intimidation he suffers from Glazer's gang, his natural clumsiness, the family complications with his sister Karine, self-discovery and several other facets of teenage life that can be as difficult as they can be beautiful.
Gone in search of stray and abandoned Spanish greyhounds in Almeria, I decided to deal with the theme of abandonment through a documentary focusing on the introspection of emotions linked to this trauma. Inspired by Leopardi's poem about resilience, I tried to bring together human and canine feelings in the experience of being abandoned by someone. The urge to make a documentary came after my first documentary last year. I wanted to try to give the project an aesthetic sense linked to fiction, to have two contrasting worlds in the film. The film is accompanied by a narrative voice, not a didactic one, in order to unite the reportage side with the photogenic and more experimental part.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.