The Balcony Movie
Can anyone be a movie hero? Can the world be locked in one film frame? Director Paweł Łoziński is watching people from his balcony as they are passing by, he accosts them, asks questions, talks about how they deal with life. Every story is unique, and life always surpasses imagination. Maybe it’s enough to stop for a moment to get a deeper insight?
"quietly revelatory....a cumulative portrait of the struggles and moods of the times while exemplifying the humanist curiosity and formalist rigor of the unseen director behind the camera." - Museum of the Moving Image
Neirud
Neirud died shrouded in mystery, leaving behind no trace of her past. Confronting family secrets, the filmmaker pieces together the life of her enigmatic aunt, who toured Brazil as a wrestler in an underground all-female circus troupe throughout the 60s and 80s. As she investigates Neirud's controversial ring persona, Gorilla Woman, the filmmaker uncovers a taboo-breaking love story, revealing the surprising nature of Neirud's role in her own family.
"Buried secrets bubble to the surface in Brazilian film-maker Fernanda Faya’s tender and searching documentary...rich with an edgy visual texture that echoes the thorniness of Neirud’s identity, one that eschews simplistic societal binaries" - Guardian
The Life of Sean Delear
A blazingly colourful and exuberantly transgressive personality who dazzled Los Angeles' underground musical and artistic scenes in the late-1990s and 2000s, Sean DeLear (1964-2017) suddenly emerged as a genuinely seminal cultural figure via the posthumous 2022 publication of their intimate and explicit teenage diaries from 1979. The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off, sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style.
"a sparkling, lively, cheerful, ironic and self-ironic documentary. A true hymn to life" - Cinema Austriaco
The Hamlet Syndrome
A few months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, five young women and men participate in a unique stage production that attempts to relate their war experiences to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For each of them, the stage is a platform to express their grief and trauma through the famous question, “to be or not to be,” a dilemma that applies to their own lives.
"This film brilliantly articulates Hamlet's dilemma for the Ukrainian youth. The film mediates their experiences of having to make hard choices when their options are very limited, because of a grinding war. A very elaborate filmic language forms a universal film“ - Locarno, *Winner*.- Semaine de la Critique, Grand Prix
Le Film de Mon Pere
Le Film de Mon Père is my first film. The one my father always dreamt I would make. And perhaps, that’s the issue. One day he bought a video camera and started filming himself daily. His goal: to offer me this autobiographical footage in order for me to make my first film. The diary of a lonely widower, living with my adopted brother and sister on the family property ‘La Belle Poule’. Before he dies, he would like to accomplish three things: to make my older brother Oskar autonomous; to reconcile with my sister Iwa; to build a house in the garden so that I can come back and live with them. I film my father, his desire to transmit, my sister avoiding him, my brother trying to find his own way. And me, in the middle of it all, making a film as an inevitable step to move on from my youth.
"Guarneri’s documentary is especially fascinating in how it acknowledges the limitations of the medium itself." - Guardian