Building Bridges is a film that pursues a possible relationship between Heloisa, the filmmaker, and her father, an engineer who had his moment of glory during the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship. Projections and maps become the first bridges to connect with the past. However, it is the inescapable present that really strikes Heloisa and Alvaro as they position themselves on opposite sides of the troubling political situation of Brazil.
"exposes the political and economic structures of contemporary Brazil" - IDFA
"Cinema should also be about the before, the after, and everything in between. That’s why we liked to keep the camera rolling at the end of a shot: the really interesting stuff often happens after the superficially 'important' has taken place." - Ruth Beckermann
We’re proud to present Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann’s extensive body of work on True Story for audiences both old and new to explore her contribution to documentary filmmaking.
From observing protest movements in the 1970s; grappling with Austria’s Nazi past; road movies travelling from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and New York to Las Vegas; to doc/fiction hybrid portraits, and a Viennese Jewish docu-soap, Ruth Beckermann’s films cement her reputation as one of Europe’s pre-eminent documentary filmmakers.
Looking Back is a documentary shorts programme rich in archive, in which filmmakers explore memories of forgotten places, past lives of family members, and navigate journeys from their own origins to the present day.
In Le Grand Viveur Pearl Sardella pieces together the life of an Italian mountain village, from super-8 footage discovered after the sudden death of resident amateur filmmaker Mario Lorenzini. In Saudade, Denize Galiao explores longing and nostalgia for her home and family in Brazil, 20 years after emigrating to Germany. Beautifully combining animation and archive, Hotel Astoria by Alina Cyranek and Falk Schuster explores memories of the hotel in Leipzig, former East Germany, where prostitutes, tourists and Stasi agents mingled over bowls of turtle soup.
Somewhere in inland Spain, a shepherd dreams of visiting Lake Titicaca, a retired musical duo recall their golden age, two young sisters search for Pokémons without any luck and an old man counts the empty houses of the village in order to fall asleep at night. The characters of this cartographic film tell the tale of a rural world whose ancestral culture is vanishing in time.
"a highly sensorial symphony that accentuates the stillness and the melancholy of the landscape" - The Guardian
Angela Christlieb's film guides us through the improvised spaces of Janka Industries, an underground cellar vault and creative microcosm of Vienna’s subculture. Voodoo Jürgens and Bands such as Petra und der Wolf and Tankris practice and perform here in the midst of a bizarre hodge-podge of electronic scrap. A music film and an ultimate underground homage that cinematically captures the magic of the site.
"there is magic in the chaos" - The Guardian
