Goran Dević's documentary could be termed an investigative art film, benefitting from a strong activist approach and revealing the human cost of government corruption and contempt for the ordinary worker.  Following a Croatian rolling stock company, the film observes a decade-long story of union members fighting to protect their jobs and for the right of a decent living in the face of unbridled capitalism. The main protagonist is syndicate leader Željko, and the film beings in 2012, after his deputy commits suicide. A great number of workers, including Željko, are laid off, and they are looking for strategies that will give them the best advantage in negotiating with the state, after the 120-year-old factory is on the verge of bankruptcy. Dević’s film talks about labour and abuse, trade unionists and incompetent administrators, dignity and obedience, and traces the universal story of workers' rights, corruption and governments' contempt for ordinary people that has been unfolding for an entire decade. (Carmen Lascoiu)

Incident is the most recent work from filmmaker Bill Morrison, whose decaying film strips as hypnotic visual symphonies made him a key figure of contemporary cinema. Here, the filmmaker inverses his usual modus operandi. Instead of looking beyond the content, towards the very physical matter of the images, Morrison goes now back to what is contained within the frame,  this time pushing to the breaking point digital footage from various types of surveillance cameras that capture one of the many fatal police errors that echo the way "law and order" is enforced in the United States. Choosing not to appeal to the rhetoric of any of the ideological or political factions that actively comment on such tragic incidents, Morrison presents with sobriety the different technological viewpoints that are inevitably also human. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

‘Human Not Human’ is the second film from young filmmaker Natan Castay, an essay both personal and philosophically dense, based on Castay’s own recent unemployment causing him to join the army of “digital proletarians” who execute the seemingly absurd tasks that fuel the gigantic machinery of AI – the very same machinery that will soon take over their jobs, as much as the jobs of numerous other workers in all domains and corners of the world. Technology as a witness, technology as master; technology as a tool, technology as an objective, and, of course, film as a technological product – these are the themes that both films in this pairing are preoccupied with. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

‘Anxious in Beirut’ examines the capital city of Lebanon in the context of various political abuses directed at its citizens, a setting where the generation after the Civil War is trying to tell its story. Director Zakaria Jaber captures, much in the manner of a diary, the oppressive atmosphere surrounding the tragedies of his hometown. Beirut is on its knees, having become a place of anxiety and insecurity for the director’s family and friends, and by extension for all the inhabitants of the city. In recent history, this land has witnessed revolution, demonstrations, manifestations, activist movements, explosions, a pandemic, and corruption of the political system; the director's view on this amalgam of misfortunes becomes an extension of his generation’s, a generation waiting, in suspension, for a miracle. In his desire to understand the relationship between an inner and an outer world, the filmmaker presents a story of contrasts, between the general and the personal, the public and the private, the old and the young, death and emigration, the free and the captive, the resilient and the desperate, drawing on a detailed perspective on certain historical events that we, as Europeans, know perhaps only superficially. Ultimately, the filmmaker's endeavor seeks to bring us to a point of awareness: when the young generation's catchphrase is “a plane or a coffin", how can one not be anxious in Beirut? (Carmen Lascoiu)

In ‘Rejeito,’ Brazilian filmmaker Pedro de Filippis melds together on-site, direct activism, an urgent cause and the cinematic reflection on the subject, this latter element usually arriving only later. Following a state councilor waging a frontal battle against official corruption, the film blossoms into a tonic and moving portrait of a community bent on resisting, defending its dignity and, above all, staying alive. The stakes are huge: faced with the chaotic economic development of a region at the mercy of a multinational mining company, these people are struggling less to keep their own homes from the prospects of unjustified expropriation – but to save millions of Brazilians from a dam that is growing weaker and threatens to collapse and destroy everything in its path. Nor would it be the first time: it has happened before. Given its political preoccupation, de Filippis’ film urges a better grounding in the reality and history of one's own community. Clearly opposed to the anti-social turn of the rapacious capitalist model, Rejeito takes the form of a testimony to the need for action and solidarity. (Victor Morozov)

A herd of cows is slowly moving along. A grandfather is putting the community's fear of the infamous Bayraktar drones  into words. A hulking car is circling the foothills of the mountains, across the hostile plains of the Caucasus. Filmmaker Daniel Kötter is working his way through the tangled threads of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. And he is doing it by cultivating a game of distances that is what makes cinema worth it: here, in close proximity, sitting with the locals at the same table, hidden in the corners of their apartments ; there, at a remove, lost in the vastness of the steppe. Evoking the films of one certain Abbas Kiarostami, Landshaft knows that it's all about the angle you look from – and that the camera lens is capable to both reveal in a provocative manner and to disorient us decidedly. After all, by intervening obliquely in the midst of a political and military conflict, Kötter is primarily on the side of the people caught in the middle: those we rarely listen to. But there's more to it than that: for, as the title may infer, in its interest for almost monumental shots of the surroundings, filmed over and over again, always the very same and still so different as they bend to the whims of the weather, Kötter’s film aspires to reveal an intimate poetics of the landscape. (Victor Morozov)