“Hafreiat,” the debut feature of Spanish filmmaker Alex Sardà, is a documentary of great stylistic discretion and a passionate, albeit noninvasive form of militancy. The director completely retreats into the shadows in order to watch how – paradoxically – under the scorching sun of the Jordanian desert, Abu Dya, a former common-law Palestinian inmate, digs out the earth of a Spanish archeological site. The impossibility of individual rehabilitation intertwines with the Global North’s impossibility of making amends to the Global South, and neocolonialism disguised as a civilizing endeavour of researching a past sufficiently remote to be unproblematic doesn’t go unnoticed by the protagonist, who incites his colleagues to go on strike. The clarity of his ideas, expressed with the same fierce energy that seems to run into his knotted worker’s body, along with the subtle survey of his family life, and preparation to become a father for the second time, endows the film with the political magnitude of the great classic humanist cinema. (Liri Chapelan)

Abbas Rezaie, a member of the editorial staff of the Etilaat Roz, the most widely read independent newspaper in Afghanistan, foresees the upheaval that the Taliban’s rise to power will produce and equips himself with a camera with which he will shoot the gradual descent into chaos, the acts of heroism, the crises of conscience and the pits of despair of his fellow journalists, all of which act as a microcosmos of the entire nation’s state of mind. Flashingly, glimpses of everyday life grace the screen, such as the recurrent image of the sun-drenched façade of the newspaper headquarters, and for a moment, despite all the signs of the contrary, the promise of normalcy seems to be right around the corner. Rezaie’s film is an excellent example of raw, necessary, and urgent documentation, a function cinema can continue to assume - not just the images captured in the midst of action on a portable device and instantly broadcasted on social media, but the act of assembling a narrative, whose deceptively simple observational segments conceal an almost irrational courage and, in this case, a cry for help. (Liri Chapelan)

Named after the English title of W.G. Sebald’s collection of essays, which addresses the “representational amnesia” that seems to have struck cultural production in regards to the relentless bombings of German civilians during the Second World War, Sergei Loznitsa’s film is composed of carefully selected archival footage, restored and remastered with the aim to produce an experience of the sensations and the sights occasioned by such attacks that is as immersive as possible, as well as to describe the moments that preceded and followed them. Taking its distance from the rigorousness of the documentation process which characterized other historical found-footage films by the Ukrainian director, here the stake seems to be less to gather testimonies with the thoroughness of an inveterate collector doubled by an intransigent investigator, than to induce a trance that forms on the border between moral horror and aesthetic fascination. And indeed, the bombing scenes are fragments of a hypnotic visual symphony which resonates in a sinister way with the wars being currently fought from Mariupol to Aleppo. (Liri Chapelan)

A portrait of the Copts, the oldest Christian community in Egypt, their links to ancient Egypt and, in the face of rising Islamic fundamentalism, their traditions and ways of confronting this growing threat to their existence.

Humiliated by the 1967 defeat, the Egyptian people look for ways to rebuild their sense of identity. Religion seems to point the way for them: Jocelyne Saab portrays the success of the Muslim Brotherhood and the increasingly rigid cultural values taking over Cairo at the end of the 1980s.

The Iranian revolution leads to the Shah’s downfall and the installation of the Islamic Republic. Avoiding the more sensational elements of the news, this film questions Iranian society as a whole in an attempt to understand what this wave of change means for the Muslim world.

Documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter couldn’t have found a better subject to represent the famous “unity in diversity.” A tourist cliché, the Austrian director turns against itself, by highlighting the invisible threads that bind us on the planet – a multitude of nations and cultures – through the endless production of garbage. An utterly unflattering idea, which has the merit of putting us face to face with one of the most urgent stakes of the moment: it takes a few distant fixed shots to understand we are literally swimming through garbage. Travelling the world far and wide, from the Swiss Alps to luxury seaside African resorts, the film rummages through waste with the detachment of the device that once again places Geyrhalter at the fertile intersection between cinema, contemporary art installation, and Discovery Channel. Everyone is free to let themselves be carried by the film in a welcome upsurge of solidarity in our struggle to save what can still be saved, before it’s too late. (Victor Morozov)