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2021
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Year
Popular Documentary Movies
Sous le Silence et la Terre
A participant in the Soirée de la relève in 2017, Gisela Restrepo returns to the RIDM with her first feature film, a work as political as it is personal. The filmmaker, named after her aunt who was reported missing in the 80s, revisits a family wound that never had the chance to heal. She makes the journey to Colombia, her parents’ homeland, searching for the remains of her aunt who fought in the civil war and whose story is shrouded in mystery. The journey sheds light on an emblematic woman, whom Gisela never had the chance to meet; meanwhile, the film shatters the silence that was forced on her family and on all those denied the possibility of burying their dead.
Flores de fuego
The image of a corpse abandoned in the street lives like a ghost within us. Film collage made with clippings, voices, drawings and moving images.
Nude at Heart
A background study of a dying amusement culture, filmed in slovenly dressing rooms in front of badly polished make-up mirrors. – That’s how far editor Mary Stephen follows director Yoichiro Okutani’s montage interpretation of his own footage about the Japanese strippers called Odoriko. But Stephen’s editor’s cut begins fully dressed: a tastefully lit stage overture in costume, starting from which she rearranges or rather sheds the material, reintegrating image and sound sequences originally discarded by Okutani, for example the titular statement of an Odoriko explaining her choice of profession: “It was about being nude at heart.”
World of Trophies
Queer South African filmmaker, Victoria Wigzell, sets out to make a documentary on the value of a trophy as cold, hard currency in winning and losing. She tracks the lifecycle of awards.
The Mouth is Still a Wild Door
I will recite all the names of the apples in a chain, enchain them, enchant them, bind them, bound them, chant them. The “feral house” of the poem is not a metaphor, it is the term for an abandoned house overtaken by foliage, a domicile lurking, covered, protected, masked, hidden, returned, and wild in a world that was not working. We will not be going back. The unmaking of the future has accelerated. Our entanglement is clearer than ever. Urgent memories of a world before our time, before our time keepers, appear with astonishing presence. They overtake what we thought was the future. It has no name yet, and is growing.
Adversarial Infrastructure
Adversarial Infrastructure is an investigation into the volumetric history of the Crimean annexation that employs deepfake technology as a research method. Dissecting the Crimean Bridge, the crystallised artefact of Russian colonial violence that spans through cyberspace no less than an offline landscape, this film aims to assemble the new image of logistical infrastructures as a type of hybrid warfare.
Offline
In a magically cosy autumn setting, Lissi Muschol interviews people about their everyday online behaviour. The surrounding nature empowers them to imagine a world free from stressful internet habits and addictions. They manage to slow down, reflect and make way for the idea of a courageous offline experiment.
Years Are Here
From the Three Great Wars to the founding of New China, from starting from scratch, to China's entry into the world's second largest economy. Looking back over the past seventy years. Relying on 500,000 minutes of precious documentary images, the original sound, and the meticulous ingenuity to build a time-space corridor to the history
Dangerous Bridge
In China, most of the young people in the countryside moved to the cities for better job opportunities. Only children and old people are left behind. They live around this river and this bridge. This dangerous bridge has not been repaired for 20 years. It seems that all the problems, the persons and the objects in the countryside have been forgotten.
Le drôle de drame de Marcel Carné
Through the life and career of Marcel Carné, using film excerpts and archives (including touching interviews with the director), François Aymé weaves a fascinating portrait of a hypersensitive man who had to deal with his homosexuality and who, despite his brilliance, was long relegated to the shadow of his actors and Prévert, who were credited with their greatest success.
Alone
Fearing for their lives, Afshin, Alain and Patricia fled their country, without their parents, when they were only children. They had to start all over here in Canada in the hope of a better life. Combining real shooting and animated cinema, "Alone" bears the imprint of hope: how does a child manage to rebuild himself in a new country, when he has left everything behind?
Nasir
Musician Nasir calls several family members by phone to discuss the decision to transition.
My MMXX
A compilation of a filmmaker's discard footage, subtly narrating his point of view of the year 2020.
What Are We Feeding Our Kids?
Is ultra-processed food causing obesity in children, and could it even be addictive? Dr Chris van Tulleken investigates as he undergoes an experiment that shocks the scientists.
Narciso
Narciso lives amongst mountains, he is in charge of water distribution in the aboriginal community of Hornaditas. His days go by between personal stories, working the land and his vision of contemporary world and nature
Figure-Ground
Figure-Ground is an unorthodox exploration of the bizarre reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: an associative compilation of found footage, composed entirely of excerpts from YouTube videos of the beach of Tel Aviv and the hills and valleys of the West Bank. As bathers hurriedly seek shelter when the siren warns of missiles, soldiers on the other side clash with protesting Palestinians, and a bulldozer goes about its demolition work. An Israeli settler shows off his grapes, while elsewhere a Palestinian describes how his orchard was destroyed. Dogs harass a flock of sheep, dogs play on the beach. At times, protesters confront each other with Israeli and Palestinian flags. In this energetic and apparently intuitive collage, two parallel realities full of staggering contrasts are juxtaposed, yet they are also inextricably linked. And not only because the poppies on the coast look just like the flowers growing in the hills.
The Moment of Transition
Until she was 16, filmmaker Chiara Marotta lived in a Christian community where everything revolved around prayer and reflection. Life was bound by regularity and rules that kept contact with the outside world to a minimum. The rebellious Marotta couldn’t stand it, but when she left, her grandmother, mother, and sister stayed behind.
Classic Reflections
An experimental short film playing with reflection through windows, mirrors, and other less reflective objects.
Skating Polly: Ugly Pop
Peyton Bighorse and Kelli Mayo are stepsisters from Oklahoma who founded their band, Skating Polly, in 2009 at the ages of 14 and 9 respectively. They call their style of music "Ugly Pop": building on the sounds of 70s Punk, early Grunge, and Folk, resulting in infectious melodies, but with real-life blemishes still showing. This fascinating in-depth documentary explores the early years of Skating Polly as Peyton and Kelli get their first taste of success, and try to stay true to themselves and their love of music. We see the two grow as people and musicians, and hear how they became the band they are today. Their earnestness throughout is refreshing and inspiring. Featuring Donita Sparks (L7), Kate Nash, SoKo, Lori Barbero (Babes in Toyland), Kat Bjelland (Babes in Toyland), and many more…
Adolf Muschg – The Other
In his exploration of the cultural dynamic between East and West, Adolf Muschg, the most significant Swiss writer since Frisch and Dürrenmatt, searched for the other in himself in order to understand otherness.
Cracks
Graffiti appears where the city or society cracks — so argue the St. Petersburg graffiti artist Max Ima and his friends, who are tired of hiding their faces. Together they form one of the best graffiti scenes in Russia, and they have something to say.
Corona
In the north of Norway the pandemic has not struck as hard as elsewhere in the world. But in order to keep the number of infected under control, the public have had to sacrifice a lot. The film wants to capture the consequences and contrasts the pandemic has brought on the people and their surroundings, both on a local and global scale. The material for the film has been collected over the past year spent in involuntary confinement in Troms.
Amateur
Amateur can be understood as a gesture of love and justice towards people and spaces that represent an idea of home for the author. From three stories, an old married couple, the memory of a suicide victim who spent his last days spending and giving away everything he had in the area and a huge shooting of Jacques Audiard’s last film, Amateur proposes an intimate portrait of a mountain village.
Eyewitness
"A documentary anatomy of mass murder for one monitor and 34 talking heads." These are the words the filmmakers use in the credits to describe their project, which thematises the execution of more than 260 Carpathian Germans, Hungarians and Slovaks by Czechoslovak army soldiers near Přerov in June 1945. The “massacre at Přerov” is made present through a minimalist dramatisation of the interrogation footage of direct participants, eyewitnesses, and others. It is as if the characters of ancient theatre were entering the Zoom “stage” and delivering a tragic message of fear, hatred and disinterest across the chasm of time.
Our Victorian Christmas
From the Christmas tree to the Christmas turkey, revealing how Christmas as it is known has its roots in the Victorian era. A look at the transformation of Christmas as it went from partying to a far more family-friendly celebration.
Usambara Violet
Some potted plants, odd hours of wakefulness, and the view from my window. A heliotropic film from the lockdown in Budapest.
From the 84 Days
In March 2020, 25 young musicians from the Bolivian Experimental Orchestra for Indigenous Instruments (OEIN) came to Germany to play concerts in Berlin and Dresden. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the concerts were cancelled. Then, as Bolivia closed its borders, the musicians found themselves stuck in the Music Academy in Rheinsberg/Brandenburg for almost three months. Together with their German colleagues in the ensembles PHØNIX16 and noiserkroiser, they face the crisis by developing several musical projects, a large part of which involves incorporating improvisation into contemporary music.
Flying waters
A song to the fading of memories. Cameraless techniques on 8mm film, 35mm negative film and slides.
The Lockdown Tapes
A short documentary about the impacts of the Coronavirus pandemic in the UK. Only by listening to the stories of front line doctors, students, civil servants, business owners and people who have lost their loved ones throughout this time, will we truly be able to understand what matters the most.
G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!
Over the last 25 years, the Montreal post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor has released seven albums and presented visually extraordinary shows around the world. At State’s End is their latest show, captured at the majestic Cinéma Impérial. It features six 16 mm projectors playing images in a loop to accompany the music from the band’s latest album. Part documentary, part experimental film, At State’s End! is a unique auditory and visual experience.
Ski Track
Tatiana Revina, who has brought up several generations of Olympic champions in cross-country skiing, has lost everything. She lives in a crumbling village house with her daughter and three grandchildren. Her grandson Mark wants to become a rapper and a blogger, and is disgusted with sports. Tatiana is trying to instill high benchmarks in him, but they see life way too differently. The summer is over soon, children will move to the city, leaving Tatiana alone, and will make a decision: how and why to live their lives.
Outbreak: How Australia Lost Control
Jeremy Fernandez has a forensic look at Australia's Delta outbreak. We trace back through the data and decision-making to see how the virus spread across Sydney and the nation.