In the north of Georgia, twelve kilometres from the Russian-influenced region of Abkhazia, a family are realising their dream. Under the optimistic motto “Plant the Future,” the Georgian government has launched a funding programme that enabled the people in this state which has been shaken by wars and crises for years to make a fresh start on their own farmland. With this support Soso, a retired engineer, took the big step in 2021 with his wife and two young sons and began growing blueberries.
Director Elene Mikaberidze and a dynamic camera follow the bold endeavour of the greenhorn farmers as they settle into their unfamiliar new life month by month. In the evenings, they pass the time with games and conversations, while the television is on in the background: images of a Ukraine under attack, news of the escalation in the Middle East remind the adults of the Russo-Georgian War sixteen years ago. Soso, the head of the family, contemplates his homeland in the midst of an escalating global situation. What dreams will still find a place there? Mother Nino is worried about her children’s future. She wants them to have the freedom to go their own way, to travel abroad and leave Georgia behind. Whether these ideas correspond with Soso’s remains to be seen.

Summer, dust, a burning sun. It is stock car race season, a loud, aggressive show that leaves only smashed carcasses of cars in the end. After each lap, the dents are worked over with heavy hammer blows before the damaged racing cars are sent back on the smoky track. The audience are standing at the edge of the sand pit and can’t get enough of the pile-ups.
From off screen, the director gives a matter-of-fact account of the violent relationship in which she got caught up at the age of 18 and from which she only managed to free herself two years later. She analyses precisely what happened to her back then, using the dented, destroyed vehicles as a powerful metaphor for her injured body. The interplay of images and words is spot-on – like precisely placed knife stabs.

The Phenakistiscope in 3D: Guido Devadder has created a sculpture that shows the ghostly march of silently screaming people across a landscape of stretched-out arms and grasping hands in small animation loops. To Kaitlin McSweeney’s enchanting vocals and the beat of an old machine, he tells the dark fairytale of the constant cycle of desire and greed.

While studying in Belgium, Daryna Mamaisur witnesses Russia’s attack on her home country Ukraine from a distance. It is getting warmer, the chestnut trees are already in bloom, here in Brussels as well as there in Kyiv. Because she cannot find the words, she makes a film that records this spring – in the distance and nearby. She starts a visual correspondence with Tanya in Kyiv who would rather talk about an argument with her partner or the singing of the birds than the droning of the bombs.
The filmmaker, too, is searching for a way of speaking commensurate with her helplessness and shock. She takes voice lessons and interweaves the shots of recital and vocal exercises with the observations she exchanges with her friend. She directs our attention to the fragility of everyday life – and the experience of war that weighs down even the most relaxed, banal moments.

Sanjivani, a young woman from a rural area in the state of Maharashtra in central India, is a loving and tender mother. After her husband’s suicide, she lives with her brother-in-law who makes her work in the fields. She is now solely responsible for her two kids, faced with a mountain of debt left by her husband and the structures of a patriarchal society that incapacitates and renders invisible widows like her. It is only when she joins a group of women who suffered similar fates that she slowly gains some self-confidence. She is not alone with her despair and grief – the suicide rate among peasants who took their lives in the face of crop failures and dumping prices on the globalised market is harrowing: 400,000 in the last twenty years.
Kinshuk Surjan not only observes people and circumstances with compassion; he also stands for a cinema that makes a difference. The women’s group he follows here only came together as a result of his film project. In impressive images and with great empathy for the protagonists he portrays, he not only succeeds in producing a careful representation of highly complex contexts, but also a truly documentary intervention into unacceptable conditions – with the aim of improving them.

For ten years, Belgian photographer and artist Léonard Pongo has been documenting the landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In his latest work, he enters into a sensual dialogue with them. The precise camera often focuses on light reflections that literally draw us into the moving images, while at the same time revealing the cinematographic apparatus behind them. In combination with the elaborate sound design and the restrained, beautiful music of “Bear Bones, Lay Low”, the solo project of the Belgium-based Venezuelan Ernesto González, the portrait of a landscape emerges which the captivating montage composition turns into a visual, auditive and meditative pleasure.
Nonetheless, “Tales from the Source” is not a traditional “nature film” but an aesthetic positioning inspired by Congolese traditions, art and philosophy which – as the artist himself emphasises – represents the Congolese landscape “as a source rather than a resource.” The result is best described as an experience rather than a representation.

One day, the young mother Christelle panics and runs. Her husband Laurent sets out to find her, baby in arms. He questions her father, sister, friends. Suddenly, Christelle’s disappearance exposes cracks that had remained hidden in a seemingly perfect world. A complex network of relationships turns out to be a fragile house of cards. Dominique Cabrera’s third feature film brings together a magnificent ensemble of actors, all of whom are allowed to express the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of their characters with wit and empathy, above all Marilyne Canto, who plays the leading role here and whom Cabrera cast in four of her five feature films.

Unexpectedly, Marion Guillard captures the perfect shot: A flock of birds pirouette in the evening sky, the camera follows their graceful movements as if hypnotized, symbiotically. The road to this moment was long. Guillard shares her journey to the USA with us, which is not only marked by feelings of alienation from her family – the postcard motifs spread before her eyes also leave her cold. In a voiceover, she talks about her relationship to herself and her body, about an ideal of femininity she does not conform to, and disturbing encounters with men.
“We Had Fun Yesterday” follows Guillard’s stream of thought, both autobiographical exploration and reflection about the way we look at others: animals – wild or caged; nature - unspoiled or shaped by humans. The result is a surprising weave in which mental and digital images arise and crumble.

Powerful poetry in image, word and sound – Max Ferguson’s work is a rough diamond that testifies to an emotional, unpolished force and whose light is refracted in many colours. Mixing elements from photography, painting and collage with short video sequences, Ferguson finds strong verbal and visual images to mark the tipping point between physical desire and emotional violation.
Rough aesthetics and a gloomy atmosphere reminiscent of early underground films are combined with extreme delicacy and a constantly alert, almost animalistic curiosity. They manifest a very contemporary female self-image. The balancing act between pain and self-respect takes place in a sound cosmos of electronic thunder and nervous buzzing. While the brawny truck cannot leave its lane, the deer follows its instinct and finds a (new) way, even if it must learn from the wolf.