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)

“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)

Tenants of one old building in the centre of Munich are featured in this film: most of them are foreigners who work in Germany as “guest workers” (Yugoslavs, Italians, Turks, Greeks etc.). In their mother tongue, each of them tells who he or she is, and briefly talks about their major worries, new hopes and plans for the future.

A construction site with foreign workforce – lunch break. A Greek man writes a request letter to the German authorities to allow his parents to stay in Germany, because of the Greek-Turkish clashes on Cyprus. Other bricklayers join in and a row takes place. The letter is torn, lunch break is over and the bricklayers go on laying bricks.

The film was shot in an old, decrepit Munich building where dozens of guest-workers’ families lived. The owner has avoided paying for the maintenance of the building under the legal standards and proclaimed the building a national cultural heritage. However, the rent he has been charging was as if the building were an object that offered standard comfort. The only German tenant speaks of his battle against the landlord’s manipulation.

In buildings where foreign workers lived in Germany, there were strict rules of conduct, defined by the House Rules and supervised by the building superintendents. Many rights regarding the freedom of movement, communication and behaviour were abused. Interviews with the tenants and with the ‘orderlies’ point out absurd situations and clashes caused by these restrictions.

After five years spent working in a BMW factory, a worker from Yugoslavia gets on a train at a Munich railway station and gets ready for his journey south. The main character recollects his impressions about the city and the country where he worked and speaks about the new things and habits he has acquired.

This documentary film essay analyses controversial police procedures in Germany in the autumn of 1974, when in a number of police interventions suspects were killed before being arrested or tried. It is based on the documented film archive records on real police actions and on recorded reports by witnesses.

Šabac Fair is a festival which lasts for three days and three nights. One buys and sells cattle, cars, clothes, wine and rakia in the chaotic atmosphere created by music bands, singers and trumpet players. You can see a circus with lions and elephants, illusionists and conmen. The employees mark lots to tradesmen and funfair shop owners, and observe order.

“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)

Botond Püsök’s film takes on a difficult task right from the start: that of inserting itself into a family unit consumed by guilt and trauma and which, no matter how solid it may seem, could nevertheless implode at any moment. The camera almost incessantly follows Andrea, - an actress, mother of two children, and the black sheep of the Transylvanian village she lives in. We soon come to discover the reason behind this hostility: the community has united in defense of Andrea’s ex-partner, the son of the local priest, who is now in prison for having abused her daughter from a previous marriage. When the man’s sentence is shortened, he tries to contact his son, born after the events, who now lives with his mother and his step-sister. The film’s main merit is that of making visible, even palpable, Andrea’s fear and anger, the confusion that engulfs her in the face of the village’s hostile microcosmos, where people accuse her of fabricating the whole story, as well as of a blind, irresponsible, and insensitive justice system that caters to the demands of contemptible father in regards to his son. But what ultimately shines through it all are the inner resources she musters in order to protect her family. (Liri Chapelan)

For their first feature film, the directorial duo Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora focus on the ruins of an industrial city from Northwest Canada, one of the many settlements in the case of which their initial role as a hub of greedy natural resource extraction could never change into the type of mutual help and responsible production which lies at the foundation of a community. And indeed, after the predictable depletion of soil resources, there are only two people left – the last residents of Anyox, whom the camera film as if they were artefacts, against a background of a degraded, albeit sublime nature. In this regard, “Anyox” is an archaeological endeavour, that aims to recompose the turbulent social history of these phantom-settlements, where the fights for the acknowledgement of workers’ rights, suppressed in their time, reveal the past and current fissures of the capitalist system. (Liri Chapelan)