A portrait of the actor Călin Nemeș, who bravely faced the soldiers sent to suppress the demonstrations during the 1989 Revolution, in Cluj. Disillusioned and alone, Nemeș committed suicide in 1993.

The village of Lindenfeld, founded by a group of ethnic Germans, was once a prosperous settlement. In 1994 there are only three people in the village, who live in isolation. All they have left is their hatred for each other and their hope in the tin God at the front of the village’s abandoned church.

Time passes slowly in a monastery where several generations of nuns live together. Although isolated, the echoes and the temptations of the madding crowd outside the convent’s walls nevertheless reach them.

In Sanskrit “maya” means illusion. A documentary – offering extraordinary access – about Gregorian Bivolaru and his yoga school, then at the height of its success.

The memory of a tragedy of passion – a double murder that took place in a shepherd’s village 50 years ago – is preserved in the form of a ballad. The villagers recall the events and the musicians talk about the birth of this song that lacks the victim’s point of view, because the assassin is the one who commissioned them to compose this ballad.

In an apartment building in the centre of Bucharest various personal histories coexist. The neighbours know everything about each other. In his or her own way, each of them is captive within the walls that face the inner courtyard.

This film is about people who emigrated to European countries during the war years of the 1990s. They have lived there for years. In 2002, they were in the ‘process of readmission’ – they were collected from work, schools and their homes and returned to Serbia. The focus of the film is on the situation of the Roma people as the most sacrificed elements of the returned population.

The documentary “Foragers” is the answer to an unmistakable filmmaker’s question: how to depict without epigonism what was already shown so many times before? Jumana Manna’s trick is as original as it is efficient: she picks out a plant – the za’atar – disputed by Palestinian and Israeli citizens, and turns it into an exquisite metonymy. The aromatic plant comes to function as a substitute for a geopolitical canvas, skipping over the exposition of the West Bank conflict with quite a lot of humour. “Foragers” works admirably as an investigative film (regarding an abusive Israeli law which deprives the Palestinian people of a symbolic plant) and as a thriller (the sequences where the “robbers” and the “cops” chase each other through fields of weeds – a scene worthy of burlesque films, where the stake happens to be precisely national identity). An important lesson, which reminds us that in cinema it is often matters of nuance that make the difference: angle, tone, playing with registers. Let us bet on the gaze that devised ”Foragers.” (Victor Morozov)

The short film “Urban Solutions” starts from the golden age of Europe’s domination over Brazil, then expands its observation to the paranoia that reigns nowadays among the nation’s privileged strata, who retreat behind the walls of their properties and oscillate between dependency on, and suspicion of those who serve them. The filmmakers intersperse extracts from a German artist’s notes on life in Brazil during the colonial era and, most importantly, the relationship between master and slave, with glimpses of the routines and the testimonies of those who ensure the safety and well-being of contemporary elites, suggesting, through rich observational footage as well as elaborate tableaux, that the roar of the slaves’ revolts has not entirely receded into the past. (Liri Chapelan)

In 1970s Bucharest, Zahra and Maria form a deep friendship while studying at university. As political turmoil brews in Iran, Zahra is forced to return home, leaving Maria behind. Over the next decade, they maintain their connection through a series of letters, chronicling their struggles as women fighting for a voice and their respective countries moving in divergent directions. Despite the distance and obstacles, their longing for each other remains strong.

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)

Veteran director Patricio Guzmán’s latest film follows the trajectory of the Chilean nation,starting from the outbreak of the popular uprisings in 2019, sparked by increasing subway dares up to the election of Gabriel Boric- a young politician – a young politician with a vital role in the changes that unfolded in the previous months – as president. In spite of the detailed depiction of the violent acts committed against protesters throughout the two years of crisis, the whole film is drenched in optimism, as Guzmán sees recent events as an unexpected yet welcome continuation of the aspirations for individual freedom and social justice nurtured during Allende’s brief rule, brutally interrupted by the 1973 coup. The rejection of the project of a new, particularly progressive constitution, which took place after the film had been released and is presented by one of the interviewees as the darkest scenario imaginable after the sacrifices of the demonstrators, nevertheless leaves untouched the pathos of Guzmán’s ode to all rebels with a cause. (Liri Chapelan)

In “The Eclipse” Nataša Urban studies the ever-captivating play of refractions between individual histories and capital-letter History, with an emphasis on the members of her Serbian- origin family. In the interval between two solar eclipses – the one from 1961 and the one from 1999 - a multinational state grows and develops, to then collapse in terror and pain. A crazy century for Serbia, flanked by multiple wars and fratricidal conspiracies, is brought back to life through personal stories that colour the past in the nuances of trauma and apparent normality – see the father’s attempts to continue pursuing his passion for hiking throughout the 1990s, that are nevertheless interrupted when the forest itself becomes the scene of indescribable atrocities. By exhuming collective dramas on the trail of recent memory, a memory that was so abused under Slobodan Miloševic, Urban purposefully rattles the cage of nationalism, the spectre of which continues to lurk in the Balkans, this famous powder keg of Europe. (Victor Morozov)

You have before your eyes one of the most furious cinematic gestures of 2022: nothing but a Brazilian guerilla film that knows what it wants all too well – to reclaim public space from the hands of those who, under the auspices of Jair Bolsonaro’s authoritarian regime, turned it into an unlivable reality. “Dry Ground Burning” belongs to that variety of films – incandescent and niched in its intensity – for which the duty to stand in solidarity with the defeated and the forgotten in the big shots’ society is more than empty rhetoric: it is the unwritten contract these cinematic gestures pass on to the viewer; it is the only way the latter can ascend to the level of the utopia they make possible. The film follows Chitara, recently released from jail, while she organizes a feminist insurrection by using the tricks of those at the top: the oil diverted from the big refineries and called to fuel a radical political party, put to the service of the dispossessed. Documentary and fiction are its weapons, amateur performers – full-time characters. A film like a Molotov cocktail that, in the context of the recent Brazilian elections, promises to resonate even more deeply. (Victor Morozov)

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)

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)