One moment she is sitting at the kitchen table with her mother, the next she is in the courtroom, awaiting her sentence. The life of 17-year-old Anya changed overnight in 2018, when she was arrested, along with nine other adolescents, accused of forming an extremist group that was planning to overthrow the government. It’s happening in Russia, the country that is willing to morally annihilate even its youngest, most innocent citizens. Three years later, her mother is still fighting to prove her innocence. 
Despite the very limited freedom of expression, which partially represents both the subject of the film and an obstacle to its actual making, “The New Greatness Case” offers remarkable access to the inner world of this group of teenagers caught in a trap by the secret police and its members who have infiltrated it and fabricated incriminating “evidence.” Furthermore, the film also features an insider’s insight into the court case and brings the reality of repression closer to each one of us – what we see on TV is no longer generic, it now takes on a face of its own, it has hopes and disappointments. (Sorana Stănescu)

“Xaraasi Xanne: Crossing Voices” is a profound cinematic experience which manages to captivate aesthetically and to provoke intellectually. By using a rare archive belonging, for the most part, to co-director Bouba Touré (whose role was simultaneously that of worker, activist, and documentarian), the film tells the story of an agricultural cooperative, which West African immigrants, fed up with the humiliations and the underpaid work endured in France, created in Mali in 1977. This improbable return to the motherland is followed in time, from the ecological challenges and political conflicts of 1970s Africa to the present day. Far from being merely a retrospective diagnostic look or simply a critique of industrial and colonial agriculture, the film also demonstrates how agricultural knowledge and the cooperation with French farmers helped locals regain their lands and perhaps even secure food autonomy. In equal measure, it sheds light on a fragment in the history of the fight for immigrant workers’ rights, which continues up to this day. (Sorana Stănescu)

When a small Bulgarian town is severly affected by COVID-19, the soul of the entire community of 50,000 inhabitants moves to the hospital – understaffed and under-resources, as is the case with this part of the world. Classmates reunite, people tell stories and sometimes they laugh, and the character who joins them together is the somewhat eccentric doctor, Evgeni Popov, the one who offers both medication and encouragement. The directing team manages to observe with fresh eyes behaviours and characters in life-and-death situations and to build a cinematic experience that stays with you, because the film is a story about humanity and hope, told with typically Balkan humour, which you will find familiar. It becomes a weapon itself in the fight against the invisible and omnipotent virus, for which humanity hadn’t found a cure at that point. (Sorana Stănescu)

“Europa Passage”: not only the name of a famous commercial centre in Hamburg – but also, whether one likes it or not, a wider present reality, which for many Romanians turns emigration into a bitter baptism by fire. Filmmaker Andrei Schwartz follows a series of conationals who find themselves stuck in such a situation: some sort of a purgatory – neither here, in their native village, nor there, in the Western economic centre – that reduces the life of Roma families depicted in the film to a back-and-forth between a dejected precarious situation and one that is even worse. Forced to live in ghettos, humiliated through improvised jobs and rejected by society, these people represent the unseen outcast face of a supposed success story about the integration into “the great European family.” The film makes sure it offers these people a presence and a name - Țîrloi, Maria, and their relatives – as it pulls them out of their sad anonymity even if temporarily. Like an ever-useful reminder of documentary cinema’s essential purpose: solidarity, refuge, and power for those in need. (Victor Morozov)

In 2014-205, Lithuanian Mantas Kvedaravičius was filming the inhabitants of the Ukrainian city Mariupol, in a delicate fresco about the attempt to regain the sense of normality in times of conflict. As we all know, that semblance of balance was brutally shattered on February 24, 2022: at that time Mantas was far away, in Africa, filming his new project. That didn’t stop him from taking immediate action: he decided to go back, out of a noble belief in the documentarian’s mission – that of gathering images which will endure in the face of infamy and atrocity. At the beginning of April 2022 he was captured and killed in Mariupol: he left behind a film – finished by his collaborators – and, most importantly, a gaze. “Mariupolis 2” represents the rigorous counter-image of any triumphalist attitude flaunted around in mass-media or in Hollywood depictions: a dignified and necessary film on the nearly invisible gestures – sweeping up the shards in a churchyard, cooking a pot of soup in the open air – which allow us to preserve our humanity when all falls apart around us. A shattering viewing experience. (Victor Morozov)

1976 marks the beginning of Beirut’s calvary. With a child’s eyes the filmmaker follows for six months the daily destruction of the city’s walls. Every morning, between 6 and 10am she roams around Beirut while the militia from both sides rest from their night of fighting.

Three years after the beginning of the Civil War the filmmaker returns to her city for several months. Living between this country at war and a country in peace, she tries to readapt to daily life in Beirut. Public transport in the city no longer exists, but the filmmaker gets an old bus up-and-running, provoking a disconcerting return to normality in this city at war: people climb onto the bus, which they see as a place of security.

In July 1982 the Israeli army laid siege to Beirut. Four years earlier Jocelyne Saab saw her 150-year-old childhood home go up in flames. She asked herself: when did all this begin? Every place becomes a historical site and every name a memory.

“Love, Deutschmarks and Death” represents the odyssey of an uprooted people that is still searching for a place to call home. The history of Turkish immigrants in Germany, stretching between the beginning of the 1960s and the present day here takes the form of a graceful lament where the need to adjust oneself and to belong, homesickness, as well as social changes blend together to the jarring tunes of the likes of Cem Karaca, protest icon of the FRG, or Muhabbet, the famour rapper of the 2000s generation. In his film, director Cem Kaya follows a phenomenon that is as widespread as it is barely studied: without sugarcoating the drama of the so-called gastarbeiter, he observes how the uprooting process produced a new musical subgenre capable of politically reflecting the daily hardships of life among xenophobic strangers, as well as to comfort these workers in their unescapable drama. From a trivial auxiliary wing of exile, Turkish immigrant music becomes a veritable marker of the community, which enables the filigree filtering of collective trauma and the need for resilience – all in a rhythmical audiovisual form, which pulsates among improvised bazaars and megalomaniac construction sites.  (Victor Morozov)