A Letter F

With the young Friedrich Engel’s letters and drawings from the years between 1838 and 1842, a unique cinematic portrait is created. The viewer thus gets to know the young Engels personally, learning about the significant moments of his development from a bourgeois-liberal upbringing to the theoretical partner of Karl Marx. Later be awarded the Gold Dove at the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week.

In 1955, the team of the Polish Film Chronicle documented life in communist Vietnam for almost half a year. There was an opportunity to do so, as Poles were a part of the international commission supervising the implementation of the Geneva provisions.

Documentary about the Portuguese book censured by the portuguese dictatorship "Novas Cartas Portuguesas" , wrote by Maria Velho da Costa, Maria Isabel Barreno e Maria Teresa Horta in 1972. The trial of the 3 Marias was the first moment of the Portuguese feminist movement with an international visibility. It stirred up the stagnant waters of dictatorship and was a deafening cry sent out to the world. What was the impact of the work they were judged for? How different are our lives today? On the 50th anniversary of the book, the documentary Novissimas Cartas Portuguesas celebrates the book, courage and women. All women.

The film tells about difficult life situations in a rich, Kazakh family, where the main character Aliya is experiencing her husband's betrayal and a humiliating divorce process.

This is a story about a man who believes that he has two “selves” - external and internal. That is, an organism is a certain conglomerate of cells, each of which is a separate individual. This hybrid creature has a certain common personal “I” that uses the entire organism, and is the organism itself, which has its own will. According to the character, one can communicate with him, which is what he is trying to do. He wants to reach him and comes up with different ways of communication: injecting substances under the skin or intravenously, tattooing texts on the body, swallowing objects. The answer would come in the form of a rash or other physical manifestation that had to be interpreted. As a result, communication is carried out and the second “I” agrees to die.

A documentary about love letters from the time of the second world war.

Documentary debut about the activist and survivor of vicarious violence Andrea Lezama.

Former fighters of the Colombian FARC guerilla report in letters on their most formative experiences from their time in the armed underground. University students from three continents adapt these personal memories in a parallel collective process to develop a touching film whose visual joy of experimentation is impressive.

Based in Paris from 2016 to 2018 as artist-in-residence at Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paloma Polo committed to an investigation into a dimension of the history of political struggles shaping the Parisian north periphery. The Parisian Banlieue Rouge at large sheltered thousands of Spanish political exiles since the civil war and throughout Francoism. Hundreds of them lived a ghostly existence, many with counterfeited identifications and some completely clandestine, as they strived in the shadows for the organisation of a movement in Spain to democratically assail a brutally repressive and violent system.

As part of a workshop run by Nele Wohlatz at the University of the Arts Hamburg, this series of video letters was sent from April to August 2020 between the filmmakers’ respective hometowns of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Fukushima, Japan. Their contents extends from the artists’ somewhat restricted daily lives during COVID, to their dreams, anxieties, and explorations of their local environment. In Suzuki’s case, his hometown of Fukushima sustained severe damage in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which is a recurring subject in his wider work. “All of a sudden, I found myself participating in an attempt to make a video letter without leaving my room,” he writes. While the letters are mostly filmed in a single location, they in part take place in digital space, building up an impression of three-dimensional intimacy with their “writers.”

Since September 2021, Chow Hang-tung, Vice-Chairperson of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (the Alliance), has been held at Tai Lam Centre for Women, either serving a prison sentence or in custody on remand. Prolonged pretrial detention is a new normal under the National Security Law. On the eve of the 35th anniversary of June 4th, the Hong Kong national security police, for the first time after the enactment of Article 23, cited the National Security Law to arrest 8 people, accusing them of using "a certain upcoming sensitive date" to continuously post messages inciting hatred against the central and SAR governments. The arrested individuals include the imprisoned Chow Hang-tung. This barrister, still in prison, has received at least five international human rights awards during her period in custody. And how is her own human rights situation in prison? How does she think about the rule of law in Hong Kong?

A personal letter written in the “feminine voices”, desires, struggles, conflicts, and assertive in its senses, feelings, and emotions permeates our daily existence.

Under the forced isolation in 2020, Dina Karaman began to keep a video diary, filming from the window of her apartment in St. Petersburg. The deserted urban landscape opening up to the eyes, which seemed to her an eerie dream, pushed Dina to find out what other people dream about while going through the lockdown. Recordings of people recounting their dreams and audio notes contributed by strangers are woven in this piece into a motley web of fears, memories, and hopes.

The film tells the story of Robert Schuman, his life and creative work. He could have been a talented pianist. But he invented the device to prop up his fingers while practicing. The idea was to strengthen them and develop independence, but instead, two fingers on his right hand were permanently injured. As a result Schuman became a great composer and publisher of a music magazine. He fell in love with a talented pianist Clara Wiek - the daughter of his professor - and married her against his will. The film is a romantic story based on the composer's personal notes and his drawings on the margins of sheet music.

In the 1950s, my grandmother's sister moved to Germany with her husband. The photographs she was sending documented their new life in the West.

The film collects the memories of five different people about the events on the Maidan. Among them are the stories of the mother of Roman Huryk, who was killed on Maidan, Radio Liberty correspondent Andrii Dubchak, artist Oleksii Sai, human rights activist Sasha Matviichuk, and Andrii Prepodobnyi, a former police officer and now the regional representative of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights in Rivne region. ‘MAIDAN. Six letters of our freedom’ consists of six chapters. Each letter of the word ‘Maidan’ is the title of a chapter, which symbolises a topic related to the events of the Revolution of Dignity, the memories shared by the film's characters.

In the spring of 1992, war separates friends and members of a rock'n'roll band from Srebrenica. Drummer Faruk leaves Srebrenica, while guitarist Samir remains in the city. In letters, they dream of a reunion until July 1995.

A film about three children at odds with themselves and the world around them, at a time when more and more are being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Victor is seven. He hates ADHD, believing it’s something to do with his club feet. Martine is quick to become withdrawn, and struggles with uncontrollable rage when things do not go her way. For the most part, Marino keeps to himself, but easily becomes aggressive. Victor, Martine and Marino are in a special class in a normal school in Denmark. The class teachers and the children’s parents decide to take part in an alternative treatment project focusing on the individual child’s challenges and possibilities, rather than relying on medical diagnosis and medication. The film follows the whole process, and shows how the children make great strides over the course of a year, as the adults around them start to see each individual child in a new light

The main role in this documentary film belongs to Sarajevo, not just as a city but as a metaphor for our times, when we are learning to live together, side by side, respectful of all our differences.

The Flight of the Condor traces the global circulation of the melody “El Condor Pasa”: from the Andes mountains to global metropoles; from Lima to Paris to New York, and back; from panpipes to piano and from symphony orchestras to the disco; from indigenous to popular music; and from world music back to national heritage.