After Innocence

In this horrifyingly modern fairytale lurks an online Boogeyman and two 12-year-old girls who would kill for him. The entrance to the internet quickly leads to its darkest basement. How responsible are our children for what they find there?

In the period 1891-1927, Henriette Roland Holst goes through a dramatic development. As an aspiring poet from an affluent bourgeois milieu she throws herself, full with idealism and conviction, into the labour movement. Within the various socialistic parties however, a fierce battle on direction takes place, wherein Henriette has trouble finding her place. After returning disillusioned from a trip to the Soviet Union, she does not feel at home in any leftist party. Later she will recollect on this period in her biography "Het vuur brandde voort" (translation: "The fire rages on"). The film reconstructs this period with the use of old film material combined with texts by Henriette Roland Holst herself: fragments from letters, poems, speeches and books, sparingly supplemented with personal commentary by the filmmaker.

As a visually radical memoir, CAMERAPERSON draws on the remarkable footage that filmmaker Kirsten Johnson has shot and reframes it in ways that illuminate moments and situations that have personally affected her. What emerges is an elegant meditation on the relationship between truth and the camera frame, as Johnson transforms scenes that have been presented on Festival screens as one kind of truth into another kind of story—one about personal journey, craft, and direct human connection.

Gwendolyn is facing a year full of changes. Having left Austria for England in the 70s, she recently moved from her old house in Central London to a new high-rise building without her Ivorian husband Charlie, 20 years her junior, who wants to live on his own. A much bigger challenge though is her soon to come third salivary gland cancer surgery. Her body is weakened, part of her face currently paralysed, the situation is serious. But rather than engage in the prescribed rest, she defends herself against illness and aging and wants to become world champion once more. With her loyal trainer Pat, she prepares for the upcoming weightlifting season.

The guided tours in the Reichstag building are well attended; there’s lots of laughter at the simulated vote on a bill. At the Bundestag’s “Infomobile” in Dresden, a citizen complains that the government is out of touch with the people. SPD parliamentarians attend a workshop to practise strategies for dealing with right-wing populist topics. A crowd chants: close the borders! Journalists from the taz and Bild-Zeitung newspapers discuss the issues of the day. An editorial team from TV station MDR produces a report entitled “Attack on Democracy – the New Right.”

A person enters the frame dressed up as a bird. In a dressing room, John Malkovich sheds the costume of Casanova. A young woman's skirt is just as orange as the beak of a zebra finch singing in a cage. White lilies stand at the foot of a statue of the Virgin Mary, red roses in front of the window of an SM studio. There the quiet game of submission in exchange for money, in a museum an embrace, a poem whispered in the ear. Children playing in a forest in autumn. A forest in summer, framed by light. An orgasm and a dance.

Jamilia is the heroine of the classic Kyrgyz novel about a young woman who, having been forced to marry, fled with her lover. Fifty years later, Aminatou Echard meets several generations of Kyrgyz women, resulting in portraits reflecting both the novel’s candor and the strength of today’s Jamilias.

Bathed in the uncanny glow of late afternoon sun and set against a noisy highway, Interchange depicts the melancholy and isolation of a small working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Montreal.

Araf is an essayistic road movie and diary of a ghostly character, Nayia, who travels between Srebrenica, Sarajevo, and Mostar in Bosnia. She has been in exile since the war and returns for the 22nd memorial of the Srebrenica genocide. The film is guided by her diary notes of the journey, which merge with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus – Icarus being the name given to the winner of a bridge diving competition in her home country.

Shot in a single uncut sequence, Cinema Olanda Film connects an architectural location, a number of individuals, and past and present events through a momentary filmic reality.

The urge to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find gold in alluvial gravel is part of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, smelters, former city officials, and a curious cliff-side mirrored disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot on location in Dawson City, Yukon Territory.

The film approaches the biographies of two women whose personalities were forcibly hidden behind their roles as wives and homemakers. They remained invisible until they themselves became the aggressors.

Raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank while her mother was in prison, Walaa dreams of being a policewoman, wearing a uniform, avoiding marriage, and earning a salary. Despite discouragement from her family, Walaa applies - and gets in. But her own rebellious behavior and a complicated relationship with her mother are a challenge, as are the circumstances under which she lives. Following Walaa from 15 to 21, this first-ever look inside the Palestinian police academy brings us the story of a young woman navigating formidable obstacles, learning which rules to break and follow, and disproving the negative predictions from her surroundings and the world at large.

Claire Simon portrays an important time for any individual, from 16 to 18 years of age. Set in the Paris suburbs in high school (for those lucky enough to go), teenagers chat after and even during class, sitting in the hallway or outside on a bench, looking at the city below them.

In 1986, the Uruguayan Parliament passed a law granting amnesty for all crimes and human rights violations committed by the military and police during the dictatorship (1973-85). This law of impunity prevented the clarification demanded by the relatives of those who had disappeared and been murdered by the former regime. A public initiative arose calling for a referendum in which the law be subject to the vote of the people. Unas preguntas uses U-matic footage, mostly of interviews recorded on the streets of Uruguay between 1987 and 1989, to present a time capsule of the period.

Ruth Beckermann documents the process of uncovering former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim’s wartime past. It shows the swift succession of new allegations by the World Jewish Congress during his Austrian presidential campaign, the denial by the Austrian political class, the outbreak of anti-Semitism and patriotism, which finally led to his election.

The film follows the matrix of hierarchies and relationships involved in a transaction of seeds between the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen in Svalbard, an island in the Arctic Ocean, and the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.

What might be revealed in the process of inviting strangers to act out and respond to 1970s feminism forty years later? Between 2015 and 2017, hundreds of strangers in communities all over the US were invited to read aloud and respond to letters from the 70s sent to the editor of Ms. Magazine–the first mainstream feminist magazine in the US. The intimate, provocative, and sometimes heartbreaking conversations that emerge from these spontaneous performances make us think critically about the past, present, and future of feminism.

In this feature documentary, husband-and-wife team Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison (Being Caribou), along with their 2-year-old son and dog, retrace the literary footsteps of Canadian writer Farley Mowat. They canoe east from Calgary towards the Prairies (the geography of Farley's Born Naked and Owls in the Family) and then traverse the same paths that Mowat took more than 60 years earlier in Never Cry Wolf and People of the Deer. Their epic 5,000 km journey—trekking, sailing, portaging and paddling—ends in the Maritimes, at Mowat's Nova Scotia summer home.

Authors, teachers, social activists and feminists explore manifestations of contemporary women's spirituality in the Western world.