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)

"Izkor" means "remember" in Hebrew and this film looks in depth at this imperative that is imposed on the children of Israel. In Israel during the month of April feast days and celebrations take place one after another. Schoolchildren of all ages prepare to pay tribute to their country's past. The collective memory becomes a terribly efficient tool for the training of young minds.By going to rediscover the myths and symbols that have contributed to the making of his own identity, as well as that of every Israeli, Eyal Sivan brings into play his own personal experience. Through a meticulous observation of the educational system, from kindergarten to the army, we discover how history is transformed into memory, how it sets an atmosphere and influences Israelis' behavior and lifestyles. Izkor is a documentary, a visual representation of this psychological phenomenon taken across the entire country.

It is usually the fictional film that is credited with the greatest ability for depicting the travails of a believer trying to extract, in vain, the meagerest reaction from a distant, mute, and deaf God. Elvis Sabin Ngaïbino's documentary evokes a hint of the darkness and violence of feeling in Bergman’s great films about the silence of God, but, here, the backdrop of a secular Europe where religion persists more as a cultural relic is replaced by a traditional African space, where the faith of the colonizer has merged with various guises of local mysticism into a strange and particularly enduring hybrid. This is the context in which Reine and Rodrigue, parents to three children, struggle on a day-to-day basis not only to make a living but to cope with and hide the disease that is eating away at them both: HIV. In this ordeal, the fiery, almost militant Catholicism they preach and profess is both a form of support – spiritually as well as financially – and the very burden suggested in the title, insofar as their illness remains associated in the minds of most with impurity and sin. Ngaïbino's camera looks at the daily struggle of his two protagonists with a kind of sacred terror, while never ignoring the moments of tenderness between them -- here actually is to be found the divine grace that they both so earnestly seek. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

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)

Renowned documentarian Jean-Gabriel Périot bases his newest ‘Facing Darkness’ on the raw video footage shot over the course of a few years, starting with April 1992, by four Bosnian filmmakers. That very same month sees the beginning of the Siege of Sarajevo. What we see on the screen are images recorded in the heat of the conflict – images that oscillate between samples of journalism under imminent danger and documentary-like fragments exhibiting an incipient analytical stance. In fact, these are vivid, fresh testimonies, impossible to "take in" without realising the horror that such an atrocity was possible. Thirty years later, Périot finds these people, hands them an iPad, and asks them to give us some context. The times have changed, yet the emotion on meeting these long-buried images remains as strong. With the aid of this very simple device, the film traces the obstructed history of a space, all thanks to those who dared to etch it in time, with an eye always open to the possibilities of the future. (Victor Morozov)