Filmmaker Elahe returns to her hometown of Mashhad in Iran to help her parents move house. Boxes must be packed, old stuff must be rummaged through together. Meanwhile everyone involved discusses what Elahe should wear at the upcoming big party, because Mr. Hossein, the respected and devout patriarch of the extended family, has invited his relatives to his garden.
Elahe will not wear a headscarf, nor a hat, not even a borrowed baseball cap for this occasion. On previous visits, she was willing to make a lot of compromises in order not to shame anybody at home. But those days are over. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement encourages her to force a change. In Hossein’s garden the director has intimate and moving conversations with sisters and cousins. They have all had similar experiences with hijab and chador but found different ways of dealing with it. Elahe boldly confronts her family’s fears and wishes and films the honest discussions.

More than twenty years have passed since the death of Catalan architect Enric Miralles. He left iconic traces with his buildings, not just in and around Barcelona – the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh is also based on his designs. Maria Mauti chooses a poetic approach to her impressive protagonist, in eleven variations. They take us from the Igualada cemetery to a community centre in Hostalets de Balenyà, a gym in Huesca or the Torre Marenostrum office skyscraper in Barcelona. The architect’s home with its open and at the same time labyrinthine character is given a major role, becoming the starting point and epicentre of a unique mind.
Maria Mauti carefully scans the still lively architectures, stages them. In Huesca, the smell of a sweating soccer team seems to mingle with the omnipresent cool raw concrete, while a group of Spanish cowboys and cowgirls shake their leather boots in the futuristic community centre. Despite the tragic note that comes from the work of the prematurely deceased, “Miralles” is not without a certain wit. This poised essay which combines personal and theoretical statements achieves a multi-layered quality that is in itself evocative of a Miralles design: airy and dense, abrupt and fluid, always idiosyncratic.

In the deliberately chosen style of an old-fashioned field report, a fictional explorer describes his observations on gold-mining in Venezuela. His mission takes him along the Orinoco, from remote jungle mines to industrial zones. His focus stays on the workers and their environment. The titular Moriche palm tree, an edible and crop plant growing along the river, serves as an example for the relationship between humans and nature and their use of raw materials. Paradoxically, the gold-diggers live in harmony with Mother Earth as their nourisher and healer, but at the same time destroy her. As in so many other places in the world, their very survival depends on an economic system inherited from colonialism. The rapid pace of capitalism is in glaring contradiction to the arduous extraction of the gold dust, produced only by slow processes of erosion.
As the narrator drifts along the river and meditates on different contexts, the images work their way through the layers of the complex subject. The immersive poetic journey alternates between observational Bolex shots, hand-drawn illustrations and abstract visualisations of photochemical reactions. Accompanied by a sound design both distinct and elaborate, the lustre of the gold literally glitters from the screen.

“My therapist said it’s like an Abschied,” Monica Vanesa Tedja says. Monic embarks on a journey from Berlin to Indonesia to return to the bosom of the family for a short while. The camera is in the luggage, and an important question: Can the devout Christian parents who are so happy about the visit accept their child’s non-binary, queer concept of life and identity instead of blocking it out?
In the beginning we see private archival footage of a supposedly perfect childhood. Monic talks about their own dreams and fears. We listen to tense phone calls with the mother and exchanges with friends, we learn details from therapy sessions. This film is not about harsh confrontations but rather about a quiet departure, about changing relationships, the significance of biological and chosen families, about letting go and arriving – perhaps where you least expect it.