The first film produced by FAV is a sociopolitical musical featuring Valeriu Sterian and the Sound Company, from which we extracted four of the ten songs of the “album” (Escu, The future political prisoners want to know, We will be what we have been, and A plea without a bridle.)

Chronicle of a Visit Foretold is part of a series of three music videos made by Andrieș at FAV and talks sarcastically about the visit of King Michael I, which was blocked by president Iliescu.

“The Chalice. Of Sons and Daughters” is the result of an ample process of documentation, which carries over to the screen in a powerful way: we meet the protagonists of the film, Peli, his wife Nina and his sister Băra, steadfast in their worries over several years. The cinematic gesture operated here by Cătălina Tesăr and Dana Bunescu is not merely anthropological – it inevitably becomes a compensatory one: a way of drawing attention to a rural community (the ‘cortorari’ Roma), the members of which appear recurrently, covered both in stigma and mystery, on the beautifully paved streets in the centre of the country. Film as a medium proves to be, in this case, some sort of supplement to academic observation – it brings with it the act of recording, colour, performance. A complex ethnic tradition thus reveals itself to us, to the extent that inheritance anxiety and the strictness of the marriage ritual regulate, for better or worse, the life of these young people. In a world that moves incessantly – we see Peli dressed as a clown on the streets of Italy –, the ‘cortorari’ Roma persist in an unwritten law, which conditions and simultaneously becomes an occasion for individual reflection. The directorial gaze doesn’t judge, but invites an act of empathy with those around us. (Victor Morozov)

Perhaps the most difficult position in a conflict – since it is secluded, dismal and inglorious –, is that of an exile in a foreign country where the echoes of the horrors taking place at home arrive muffled, devitalized, as if unreal. In “Republic of Silence,” a film made from footage recorded over the course of 12 years, the conflict in question is the interminable Syrian civil war that filmmaker Diana El Jeiroudi, now living in Europe as a refugee, experiences as a perpetual negotiation between an immediate reality and a distant nightmare, alienation and identification, the state of witness and that of participant. The simplicity of the images composing the segment featuring El Jeiroudi’s filmed diary – the camera is often static, placed next to a doorway or in the corner of a room, where the limits of the frame tend to point to what the camera doesn’t capture from the everyday life unfolding around it – are in stark contrast with the kaleidoscopic footage shot in Syria, where each frame trembles under the threat of imminent violence.(Liri Chapelan)

Riotsville is a fictional city erected by the American army in the 1960s to serve as training ground for the increasingly militarized police, in the attempt to build a counter-narrative to the popular revolts and discontentment of those years. People were protesting against the Vietnam War and were demanding equal rights for people of colour, but the answer given by the authorities proved both sinister and ridiculous. In an almost kaleidoscopic manner, the film uses previously unexplored archival footage to recreate and shed light on a national consciousness more and more obsessed with maintaining order and obeying the law, by any means. Yes, the resemblance to the current reality is built on purpose, and this mental back-and-forth that the viewer operates almost unconsciously explores the relationship between authority and individual, power and resistance, state and citizen. (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)

“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)

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)

Filmmaker Joseph Mangat insinuates himself into the work schedule of some Filipino factory labourers with finesse and flexibility. Not just any factory, though – because this is precisely the trick with this film: the cleverness with which it accompanies its theme right into the midst of some pressing and unexpected consequences. The place in question is interesting not only due to the end product of the work (some kitschy statuettes representing various bright-coloured biblical figures), but also due to its subjects (a bunch of queer characters, assimilated without fuss in this environment.) What results is an unexpected Molotov cocktail, where ambient advertising mysticism, up-to-date identity politics, as well as the barely contained Marxist fervour of the workers, join hands in a truly radical cinematic gesture. ”Divine Factory” proves to be a revelation through the supple simplicity of its mechanism, which refuses neither camp lyricism, nor rigour – in short, a film that knows how to let itself be crossed by the contradictory currents of the present. (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)

Two directorial gazes intersect in “Eastern Front”: that of Vitali Mansky, a well-known documentarian of the former Soviet space, and that of Yevhen Titarenko, a volunteer enrolled in the fight for the liberation of the Ukrainian territory. In between, the film writes the turbulent chronicle of the first months of war, moving from immersion to detachment in the attempt to convey an image of atrocity. In a surreal sequence, a few soldiers walk through a post-apocalyptic landscape, where a herd of cows is left to die in the muddy fields: with a mixture of horror and skepticism, the people take note of the appalling sight and then move on: “That’s life...” A harsh reality asserts itself in “Eastern Front” shot by shot, as the protagonists approach the artillery barrage: they advance towards the enemy defense line with cynicism and self-deprecating humour, leaving us, the viewers, to figure out what normality – as well as humanity - are all about in this war.  (Victor Morozov)