‘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)
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)
‘God Between Us’ is a film about freedom as much as about the very limits of it. Questioning her own extended family's relationship with the Protestant religion, filmmaker Rebecca Hirneise transforms the space opened by the camera lens into one of encounter and debate. The result can only be contradictory: the discussions venture far, into psychological depths and intimate motivations – or not. Basing itself on one's relationship with God, the film draws concentric circles around the idea of faith, from simple curiosity to obtuse fanaticism directed against the opinions of others. A painting much familiar to Austria’s religious population perfectly describes this diversity of opinion: on the one side we see a wide open gate to a road full of people having fun, culminating in a disastrous fire; and, on the other side, a shy, hidden entrance leading to fulfilment in heaven. The filmmaker tries to find a path between these two alternatives that also suits her own convictions – and, at the same time, seeks to challenge her family members to an introspective gesture so as to reveal more of who they really are. (Victor Morozov)
Trying to escape the war, a number of Ukrainian refugees end up being transported by the same car. This van becomes a transitory refuge, an intimate, fragile space of confessions and secrets. The candid conversations between the passengers and the driver on the topics of life, anxieties, dreams, and expectation assemble into a collective portrait, while the blend of closeness and distance creates emotion. Maciek Hamela’s film is also a testimony to the immense mobilization among Ukraine’s neighbouring countries, Poland, in this case, where everyone is trying to be as helpful as they can to those in need. The vehicle becomes a small utopia of solidarity that transcends borders, where the governing principle is "Together for something better". All you have to do is look into the rearview mirror. (Carmen Lascoiu)
The title of Kumjana Novakova's film, a second one about the war crimes committed in Bosnia, and which she prefers to call a "performative research" rather than a documentary, is misleading. Instead of talking about the silence of reason, it presents us with the exact opposite, and an even more terrifying opposite: reason, method, the capacity for systematisation used in the service of ethnic annihilation. The tortures inflicted on Muslim women and girls in the town of Foča, the constant sexual torture, the establishment of camps where they were kept at the disposal of Serbian soldiers and then sold as sex slaves to the Montenegrin partisans, go beyond, in scope and intentionality, the isolated case of rapes that have so long been considered the inevitable collateral damage of armed conflict. The events, which Novakova illustrates through an intense graphic processing of various archival footage recorded by amateurs in the spaces where these horrors were perpetrated, have come to set a precedent that such behaviour, which was approved by the highest military authorities, constitute war crimes, but the film more readily make us turn our eyes back to the individual human tragedies that refuse to become mere pages of history. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)
The war launched on Ukraine has, more than ever before, brought to public attention the concentrationist universe that contemporary Russia is for a large part of its population, to that segment who refuse to sell their freedom of thought and action for a few crumbs from the leaders' table or even just in exchange for a peaceful existence. The protagonist in Agniya Galdanova's film, a queer artist who goes by the name of Gena Marvin, is undoubtedly part of this unruly population – she is, in fact, among its most spectacular representatives. From the provincial town of her birth, built on the site of a former gulag, to the heart of Moscow, the 21-year-old woman displays her body with mad courage, clad in surrealist creations and during imagined apocalyptic situations. Each such public performance, she hopes, will send a shockwave through the social, moral, and even aesthetic landscape of Putinist Russia. The driving force behind Gena's actions is not the desire to provoke, but that to have her existence acknowledged, however contrary it may be to the sensibilities in power. In the artist's eyes, this is worth the risk of the harshest repression. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)
It is from the depths of the Cold War that comes this ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat’ by Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, a film in which jazz, geopolitics and emancipation struggles against colonialism are woven together into a dizzying score. The documentary's merit is that it doesn't give artificial primacy to any of the themes; on the contrary – it shows how, in that era of profound social transformations, they were all simultaneously in the limelight, as had it an insidious plan. This is how great artists like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone and Dizzy Gillespie could become pawns in the global promotion of the powers in Washington, and how, inevitably, their music could turn into an instrument of cultural propaganda. Sandwiched between the CIA and Nikita Khrushchev, the film focuses on the case of Patrice Lumumba: this charismatic young man quickly rises to the top of the newly independent Congolese state, only to begin – with an even greater speed – to annoy the world's great powers. His revolutionary ideas about the pan-African movement, as much as his fierce opposition to imperialist policies lead to an abrupt end to the political utopia. With this fabulous soundtrack, Grimonprez illuminates a scheme where everything is connected – just as he justly unearths everyone's share of responsibility in the grand picture of post-war history. (Victor Morozov)
