‘Fairy Garden’ is hidden in the deep of the forest, on the outskirts of Budapest. This “garden” is home to two individuals excluded by society, but bound together by an atypical friendship: Fanni, a 19-year-old transgender woman, and Laci, a 60-year-old homeless man. The two make for an endearing kind of family, supporting each other just as if they were father and daughter. The protagonists in Fairy Garden come from very different backgrounds, but what they have in common is the ostracism they’ve experienced as a result of society shunning them. Gergö Somogyvári’s film speaks about finding a home, whether a shelter from the outside world or an emotional sanctuary for one’s inner world. It is a reflection on finding comfort in shared feelings of isolation. What Fanni and Laci demonstrate is that some of the most meaningful connections often emerge in totally unexpected ways. (Carmen Lascoiu)

Fairy Garden - Trailer from New Retina Productions on Vimeo.

Viera Čákanyová’s ‘Notes From the Eremocene’ is an experimental documentary portraying a possible future where the Eremocene encapsulates the idea of a new era shaped by the human impact on the environment and the profound changes in our collective consciousness. This realm is a fictional nexus formed by a group of scientists, philosophers and artists deeply concerned with the environment, a network where scientific discoveries, world archival material, artistic expression, and the artificial intelligence that generates this possible world all meet. Čákanyová’s documentary creates a jigsaw puzzle from the consequences of uncontrolled human activities, exploring the rapid decline of the environment and the worsening of weather events. The film seeks to illustrate the urgent need to understand that we are all interconnected in this planetary change. This documentary invites the viewer to reflect on each’s own individual and collective role in shaping the future of the planet. It lays out a sense of responsibility and launches a call to action, urging us to become stewards of our planet and to build a future that also includes balance with nature. (Carmen Lascoiu)

Boubacar Sangaré's film deftly manages to sit at the intersection of the universal and the particular, following the ordinary yet exceptional daily life of Rasmané, a 16-year-old boy making a living in a mining town in Southern Burkina Faso. While his work and that of his companions, many only slightly older than him, is exhausting and risky, performed with rudimentary tools and without any protective equipment, when Rasmané returns from the mine, he turns out to be a teenager like any other, afflicted by contradictory impulses, oscillating between childish naivety and a burning need to put on and flaunt the adult identity he is in the process of creating. All around him, the entire collective seems torn by similar contradictions, between preserving tradition and the lure of modernity, between wounded dignity and the absurd hope of enrichment, between fatalism and the promise of a future that is gold-plated, both literally and figuratively. Despite the rich imagery that surrounds the act and business of mining - first a symbol of industrialization, then of de-industrialization - and a certain crystalized idea of adolescence that Rasmané incarnates, Sangaré's protagonist remains opaque throughout the film, constantly reminding us that we cannot share his fate through a mere empathic transposition. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

The greatest of the realist writers have cultivated the incredible revelatory power of the apparently banal anecdote, but which, in fact, contains within all the coordinates of issues so broad that they invariably tip over into the abstract unless particularised. Luka Beradze's film is also based on a tragi-comic anecdote: during his 2012 election campaign, the then-president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, promised the country’s most disadvantaged citizens new teeth at the expense of his party. Many rural residents did not want to miss this unexpected opportunity. But the end of the story is as brutal as it is predictable: the presidential party lost the election, and the next step in replacing the extracted teeth has become yet another relic in the long series of empty electoral promises that plague all democratic systems. Beradze visits a village where a significant number of elders marched against the populist strategies of the former president so as to ascertain the violence with which political hypocrisy has been inscribed on the very bodies of the inhabitants. And yet, after witnessing the director’s subtle and vibrantly tender observation of the everyday life of this space, we are at least left with the seemingly paradoxical impression that this humiliation has restored the villagers' dignity and confidence in none other than themselves and their community. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

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“Imaginary Youth” follows three teenagers through their final years of high school, before, during, and after the Covid confinement. While pondering about leaving Romania after they finish school, Una - an actress, Habet - a trapper and Stefania - an environmental activist get caught in the midst of the Coronavirus crisis. Personal dramas and dilemmas unfold, as the three try to make sense of growing up and what’s happening around them. Who’s gonna make it?