Months after the incident on April 13th 1975, during which Palestinian civilians were gunned down by the Phalangist militia, the numbers are even more horrifying: 6,000 dead, 20,000 injured, daily kidnappings and a capital city half destroyed. This film, a unique documentation of the Lebanese Civil War, goes back to the origins of the conflict as seen by a society that went to war singing and with their heads held high.

In the first nine years of his pontificate, Pope Francis made 37 trips to 53 countries and focused on the most painful wounds in today’s society: poverty, migration, war, environmental issues. The film assembles a mosaic of these meetings, using both archival footage and images shot by director Gianfranco Rosi himself over the course of the visits during which he accompanied the Pope to Malta and Canada, in 2022. The moments of vulnerability, worry, and exhaustion engendered by one’s physical proximity to the Pope are not censored. Perhaps for the first time, the full extent of the Pope’s duties and the emotional baggage they come with are revealed to us: from defending the victims of the Armenian genocide to praying for the immigrants arriving in boats in Lampedusa and discussions with the crew of the International Space Station. This is a world the Pope travels far and wide, in which he nevertheless doesn’t actually live. More than a dialogue between the various realities united by the red thread of Catholicism, more than the portrait of one of the most revered persons in the world, the film leaves you with a feeling of hope in the possibility of goodness and the realization that we are the only ones responsible for it. (Sorana Stănescu)

Perhaps the most difficult position in a conflict – since it is secluded, dismal and inglorious –, is that of an exile in a foreign country where the echoes of the horrors taking place at home arrive muffled, devitalized, as if unreal. In “Republic of Silence,” a film made from footage recorded over the course of 12 years, the conflict in question is the interminable Syrian civil war that filmmaker Diana El Jeiroudi, now living in Europe as a refugee, experiences as a perpetual negotiation between an immediate reality and a distant nightmare, alienation and identification, the state of witness and that of participant. The simplicity of the images composing the segment featuring El Jeiroudi’s filmed diary – the camera is often static, placed next to a doorway or in the corner of a room, where the limits of the frame tend to point to what the camera doesn’t capture from the everyday life unfolding around it – are in stark contrast with the kaleidoscopic footage shot in Syria, where each frame trembles under the threat of imminent violence.(Liri Chapelan)

Riotsville is a fictional city erected by the American army in the 1960s to serve as training ground for the increasingly militarized police, in the attempt to build a counter-narrative to the popular revolts and discontentment of those years. People were protesting against the Vietnam War and were demanding equal rights for people of colour, but the answer given by the authorities proved both sinister and ridiculous. In an almost kaleidoscopic manner, the film uses previously unexplored archival footage to recreate and shed light on a national consciousness more and more obsessed with maintaining order and obeying the law, by any means. Yes, the resemblance to the current reality is built on purpose, and this mental back-and-forth that the viewer operates almost unconsciously explores the relationship between authority and individual, power and resistance, state and citizen. (Sorana Stănescu)

“The Fabulous Ones” takes its name from a group of transgender female friends who, having reached middle age, reunite in the villa that witnessed their process of identity formation.
The reunion is occasioned by the unsealing of a letter written by one of them (Antonia, now deceased) to the others, in which she leaves them her possessions (the most precious one being their story itself) and addresses them a final request. Roberta Torre, a fiction film director with a fascination for the dynamics of disadvantaged or even marginal communities, indulges here in a game without rules, in which she playfully blends documentary and fiction, reality and its mise-en-scène, as well as the face and its mask: the group of friends plays their own roles, thus offering a profoundly subjective perspective, yet one that is all the more revelatory in regards to the past – and, by implication, the present – of the transgender community. (Liri Chapelan)

Shuli Huang’s short film unfolds as a dialogue – at times real, at times imagined – between him and his mother: the young man calmly defends his life choices, from his artistic vocation to his attraction to men, while the woman is overwhelmed by the panic of seeing him irrevocably drift away from the model of the perfect son which others - relatives, neighbours, acquaintances - seem to have ingrained in her. The images, shot with a Super-8 camera, exude the warmth and the solar nostalgia that characterize the remembrance of a generic, postcard-like childhood, beneath which, the filmmaker suggests, boil the passions and the insubordination which will eventually define us as adults. (Liri Chapelan)

As the 2014 war in Eastern Ukraine was wreaking havoc, a group of social workers were toiling away in a temporary accommodation centre near the front. They wanted to create a safe space for children in the maximum nine months they could spend there and to then offer them the best future possible – sometimes this would be a family and other times an orphanage. Through the destinies of three children who struggle against the uncertainty of the future, the film manages to tell the story of an entire generation, that of children who lose their parents “to war or to alcohol” and become adults much too early. We thus have an unprecedented and intimate perspective on a subject everyone thinks they know (the war in Ukraine and its consequences) and on a reality everyone thinks they understand (the combination of alcohol, violence, and poverty in Eastern countries.) There is despair in this reality – every child who leaves the centre is immediately replaced by another, with an almost identical story –, but there is also hope and raw joy, in the children’s play or in the reunion with a grandmother who assumes the role of both mother and father. (Sorana Stănescu)

A few months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, five young women and men participate in a unique stage production that attempts to relate their war experiences to Shakespeare’s ”Hamlet.” For each of them, the stage is a platform to express their grief and trauma through the famous question, “to be or not to be,” a dilemma that applies to their own lives. The protagonists fight against disappointment, powerlessness, and anger, trying to put their lives back in order while processing their painful past: Slavik, who went through a hell of war and captivity as a soldier, Katya, who longs for her mother’s forgiveness for joining the army, Rodion, who escaped from Donbas and is now facing growing homophobia, Roman, who is still struggling with the traumatic memories of his war experience as a paramedic on the battlefield, and Oxana who struggles on an artistic frontline as an actress.

In a striking sequence from “All That Breathes” the protagonists of our film engage in a dangerous river crossing to bring back from the other shore a baby black kite in need of help. Brothers Nadeem and Saud, together with their apprentice, build a small veterinary clinic around this bird of prey, which acts as an oasis of altruism and friendship in the midst of a polluted, noisy metropolis. No money comes out of it and even the glory is fragile, while the obstacles – the ever-increasing costs and the winding course of life itself – abound on all sides. If “All That Breathes” proves so important, it is because it joins these people for whom the bird goes beyond any slogan or peace of mind during sleep – the bird is the very litmus test of our own humanity. Gently oscillating between environmental anxiety and the humour of the delightful interactions between man and bird, the film brings to light thick layers of social hypocrisy, while searching for a breach that allows hope to flow freely. (Victor Morozov)