MY NAME IS SALT
Farida Pacha, Switzerland & India 2013, 92 min
Every year Sanabhai brings his family to a seasonal saline desert in Gujarat India, where they harvest what they proclaim to be the world‘s whitest salt, using the manual techniques as generations before them. Hardship and exploitation are omnipresent in this film, but director Farida Pacha‘s exquisite camerawork exposes the beauty of the subject.
SOCOTRA
Jordi Esteva, Yemen 2016, 65 min
The island of Socotra lies in the Indian Ocean between Arabia and Somalia. The first commercial flights, at the start of this century, marked for almost a couple of decades the end of Socotra's century of isolation. The current situation of civil war in Yemen has isolated again the remote island. In the film, a group of camel drivers heads to the secret interior of Socotra before the rainy season and they explain by the fire ancient stories of djinns and giant snakes.
HIKKIKOMORI
Dorothée Lorang & David Beautru, France/Japan 2013, 53 min
There are between 600 000 – 1 million Japanese youths who stay hidden away in their bedroom, sometimes cut off from all kind of social interaction for several years. These youths, named hikikomori, are renounced in Japanese society as being the ‘lost generation’. This film meets some of them in a rare center set up to help them re-socialize, and tries to understand the reasoning.
THE DAY THE SUN FELL
Aya Domenig, Switzerland/
Finland/Japan 2015, 78 min
Swiss-Japanese filmmaker Aya Domenig, the granddaughter of a doctor on duty for the Red Cross during the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, approaches the experience of her deceased grandfather by tracing the lives of a doctor and of former nurses who once shared the same experience.
AMA-SAN
Cláudia Varejão, Portugal/ Switzerland/Japan 2016, 113 min
In Wagu, a fishing village in the Ise Peninsula, three women, Matsumi, Mayumi and Masumi dive everyday with no aid from air tanks, not knowing what they will find. Underwater, their delicate bodies turn into those of sea hunters. The Ama-San have been diving like this in Japan for over 2000 years.
EMPLOYMENT OFFICE
Anne Schiltz and Charlotte Grégoire, Belgium 2015, 74 min
An office interior, a row of desks, people facing each other. This is where unemployed people come to meet with their advisers. What is at stake are their benefit payments. Here everyone has to abide by the same rigid bureaucratic procedures, but each person has their own life and story. This film shows what it means to not have a job today, as work becomes more and more precarious, employed and unemployed alike are less and less secure, and the welfare state is under attack and shrinking.
5 WAYS IN
Mike Poltorak, UK 2014, 73 min
Watch the story of five people and their journeys through the Freiburg International Contact Improvisation Festival of 2012. The documentary follows the development of the intentions and expectations of the five participants through the week, capturing moments when they were tested and satisfied.
GOLDEN DAWN GIRLS
Håvard Bustnes, Greece 2017,
94 min
In recent years, Greece's image as a country of sunny beaches and friendly people has been overshadowed by political ideologies that are terrifyingly close to Nazism. With many prominent members of the far-right Golden Dawn party now behind bars, a daughter, a wife and a mother continue to propagate its message—and all three of them are seasoned enough to avoid any slips of the tongue during interviews.
OYATE
Dan Girmus, USA 2016, 73 min
An observational film about life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The film follows two families on Pine Ridge as they go about their daily activities over the course of one summer. They attend rodeos, shoot clay pigeons and participate in pow wows. Family members get married, have children and celebrate the 4th of July. All the while, the difficult realities of modern reservation life threaten to encroach upon them.
THE POSSIBILITY OF SPIRITS
Mattijs van de Port,
Netherlands 2016, 71min
Shot in Bahia (Brazil), The Possibility of Spirits is an essay film that keeps the baffling mystery of spirit possession center stage. In a poetic assemblage of images and words, it offers an alternative for the kind of documentary that either exoticizes spirit possession in spectacular imagery, or extinguishes the wonder of the phenomenon in explanatory prose.
DUSK CHORUS
Alessandro D’Emilia and Nika Saravanja, Ecuador 2017, 67 min
Follow the eco-acoustic composer David Monacchi on his quest to record pure continuous 24-hour 3D soundscapes in the area with the world’s highest biodiversity in Ecuador’s remote primary forests. A unique listening experience of fragments of the disappearing sonic heritage of millions of years of evolution.
BALLAD FOR SYRIA
Eda Elif Tibet and Maisa Alhafez, Turkey 2017, 47 min
This self-reflective musical documentary mirrors the life of Maisa Alhafez, a musician and Syrian refugee living in Istanbul. The film is about her longing to her loved ones as she tries to make a place for herself in the world of the displaced. Her family still in Syria, Maisa’s true love (fiancé) is in the Netherlands. Maisa works hard for her vision to transform the borders by building a multicultural community “The oriental Istanbul Mosaic Choir”.
TIBETAN WARRIOR
Dodo Hunziker, Switzerland 2015, 84min
For more than 60 years Tibetans have been fighting Chinese oppression. But their non-violent struggle appears to be in vain. Now, as a new form of peaceful protest, Tibetans are setting themselves on fire. Loten Namling - an exiled Tibetan and musician living in Switzerland - is deeply disturbed by such self-destructive action. So he sets off to India, on a one-man mission to meet top politicians, experts and young radicals.
DESCENDING WITH ANGELS
Christian Suhr, Denmark 2013,
80 min
Descending with angels delivers a compelling exegesis of the way that faith is integrated into secular society through the particular lens of psychiatric illness and spirit possession. Both elements of this work make a huge contribution to medical anthropology and Islamic studies.
MAKALA
Emmanuel Gras, France/Congo 2017, 96 min
A young man from a village in the RD Congo hopes to offer his family a better future. His only resources are his own two hands, the surrounding bush, and an iron will.
When he sets out on an exhausting, perilous journey to sell the fruit of his labor, he discovers the true value of his efforts, and the price of his dreams.
MAKALA
Emmanuel Gras, France/Congo 2017, 96 min
A young man from a village in the RD Congo hopes to offer his family a better future. His only resources are his own two hands, the surrounding bush, and an iron will.
When he sets out on an exhausting, perilous journey to sell the fruit of his labor, he discovers the true value of his efforts, and the price of his dreams.
WILD RELATIVES
Jumana Manna, Lebanon/Norway 2018, 66 min
Filmmaker Jumana Manna investigates the complex pathway of seed distribution between Lebanon's Beqaa Valley and the Global Seed Vault deep inside Norway's Svalbard archipelago.
MAKALA
Emmanuel Gras, France/Congo 2017, 96 min
A young man from a village in the RD Congo hopes to offer his family a better future. His only resources are his own two hands, the surrounding bush, and an iron will.
When he sets out on an exhausting, perilous journey to sell the fruit of his labor, he discovers the true value of his efforts, and the price of his dreams.
AWAKENING: A FAIRY TALE
Eda Elif Tibet and Inanc Tekguc, Turkey 2019, 40 min
Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken". Following the path of our Cappadocian ancestors, this documentary tells the story of a father and his son trying to revitalize the traditional methods of vine keeping through the fertilization of the volcanic ash soil with pigeon guano. Unique relationship and the sentient ecology between people, pigeons and fairy chimneys are being revealed in a magical yet experimental fairy tale, questioning what cultural heritage is to a landscape emptied by migration.