Four paramedics in a distant mountain village at the beginning of the Covid pandemic go from one house to another, from measurements to diagnoses, from tired older women to drunk middle-aged men. Hreshko watches them closely: They get baptised, married and buried. Yet the ambulance team stays the same, does its job, and ultimately provides the emotional core of this kaleidoscopic view of people’s stories and tragedies.
Two mice discover a big wheel of cheese. Paradise, no less! But how to get in? One mouse has made it, its little brother is outside on his own and must watch out for the hungry cat. Inside the cheese wheel, the mouse lives like a king, eating its way through the yellow treat. But every bite brings it closer to the collapse of its house …
Jane’s mother is going through hard times and informs her that she will have to spend Christmas with her grandmother “Onion” in the country this year. No argument. Jane doesn’t feel like it at all: how boring! Against all odds, the holidays turn out to be a real adventure. Jane meets new friends and begins to open up to others.
Today is the great derby between FC Cubs and FC Tigers. With the brawny Cheeky in the goal, the kitten’s victory is all but guaranteed. But their plan is thwarted by the cunning Scallywag. Will his tricks be enough to win the match? “Muri the Cat” is a mini-series based on Slovenian children’s books: gaudy and merry.
Sexual hallucinations of an abandoned man in which literally everything turns into a questionable object of throbbing lust. The hell of jealousy mingles with the bonfire of vanities and pink longing fades into purple desire: lecherous bodies. Pounding pain. Panting music. Phallus seeks vagina. Eternal, restless, greedy.
Once again ten-year-old Romy must say goodbye to her school class to travel through Europe with her family. She pitches in at home because circus life makes children grow up quickly. This film lets us share in her everyday life and the passion for the grand performance. It talks about her longing for the familiar, but also the freedom of being on the road.
Twenty years ago, filmmaker Wiam Al-Zabari fled Baghdad with his family in the middle of the night. His father, a dissident former ambassador, had already escaped from Iraq and was waiting for them in the Netherlands. Since then, no one in the family has ever spoken about the events. What exactly happened was always a taboo. Now that Wiam has become a father himself, he realises that his past life is catching up with him and that more and more questions are arising, the biggest being: Why did they have to flee in the first place? Wiam wants to finally find out. For the first time, he breaks the silence and begins to research the past in dialogues with his parents and siblings. Above all he wants to prevent passing on these traumatic experiences to his son.
In this filmic family therapy, he addresses Nour, his little son, directly. Wiam promised himself and the boy this film to clear up the long-suppressed themes in a way that will allow Nour to feel firm ground under his feet when he is grown up. In doing so, Wiam is unsparingly honest with himself and his relatives and chooses a number of unusual artistic tricks. For example, he inserts himself as a director from offscreen, critically analysing his own position in the fabric of speaking and silence: an attempted inside view from the outside.
“Beware of everything, especially men”, Zelma was told as a rule of thumb for a successful life as a woman. But when you meet the greatest love of all, and it happens to Zelma several times, biochemistry takes over and all advice is forgotten. In an animated musical, Signe Baumane’s protagonist dances her way through promising romantic beginnings, disappointed hopes and failing marriages – only to find out that she had better make the rules herself.
A Turkish woman emigrates to Germany in the 1970s to earn money as a guest worker. Her children have to stay with their grandparents and it takes a few years before the mother can bring them over. In memory, this period feels almost unbearable and endless. Özgür, the family’s youngest daughter, describes what it’s like to grow up without a mother.
Everything in Edgar’s life is well-ordered and always in the same place. And his favourite food is meat. A trip to the slaughterhouse takes his appetite away and he brings a calf home. The calf grows into a cow and, of course, turns his well-ordered life upside-down. His favourite cup and the television set break and Edgar realises that he needs to make more changes.
For eight months, Ole Jacobs’s and Arne Büttner’s film team followed the Afghan Nasim and her family in the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, where at times 20,000 people had to live in a space designed for less than 3,000 people. This documentary observation shows with great empathy the daily life of the mother of two who time and again manages to deal impressively with the challenges of this unacceptable and extreme situation.
An escalating neighbourhood dispute as a pacifist parable on the Korean War. The pixilation, which Norman McLaren is said to have pioneered, makes plot and scenery look more and more absurd. The madness is heihgtened by frantic electronic sounds, which were also created by a special technique: McLaren drew optical sound signals in lines and dots by hand directly on the soundtrack.
On the balcony Nele is really close to the clouds, though it would be much nicer to take a balloon ride and be even closer. The plan isn’t easy to realise, as Nele’s mother has mobility problems. They need help with every activity and their daily life is co-organised by many other people. They are doing fine together, but a trip in a hot air balloon would be something else …
The biggest gold deposit in Europe is located underneath Roșia Montană, Romania. The ancient Romans dug shafts with hammers and chisels, later gunpowder and dynamite were used to mine the precious metal. But when the possibilities of traditional mining methods seem exhausted in the early 2000s, a Canadian company enters the scene, planning to pulverise the whole village and the four neighbouring mountains – and to use highly toxic hydrocyanic acid to extract the gold from the rock. Tibor Kocsis observes over several years how the corporation is trying to drive out the inhabitants of the village, and how a resistance is forming that lasts until today.
A drunken drive through the night with a badger at the wheel. The car radio is a crooning, rhythmic companion and rhythm generator to the reeling road, the will-o’-the-wisp headlights of oncoming cars. The beginning becomes the end of a bizarre journey that turns our heads not by speed but by narrative sophistication in visually magnificent concentration.
Manuela lives in Cameroon and was four years old when her parents went abroad to work. She’s eleven now and preparing for her first graduation. She is growing up with her grandparents and, despite leading a good life, had to struggle with grief for a long time. Now she has learned how to cope with absence and how to be together despite the long distance.
