Dear Albania

In 1946, Heidi is entrusted to a Swiss family by her father. He will never come back for her. Today, François Yang questions his mother about her past. What follows is a journey to China, a quest to reconstruct memory. Through contact with her brothers and sister, Heidi measures the extent of the drama experienced by her family that remained in China, persecuted by the Communist Party.

Long Tack Sam was an internationally renowned Chinese acrobat and magician. He overcame isolation, poverty, cultural and linguistic barriers, extreme racism and world wars to become one of the most successful vaudeville acts of his time. His showmanship was unrivalled, yet he refused to appear in movies because of the way Chinese were portrayed at the time. A celebration of the spirit of Long Tack Sam's magic and art, this richly textured first person road movie is an exhilarating testament to his legacy and a prismatic tour through the 20th Century. It all begins in a small village in China... https://www.nfb.ca/film/the_magical_life_of_long_tack_sam/

The film consists of video tapes made by the filmmaker’s father documenting daily scenes of family life, family celebrations, and holidays over the course of fifteen years. The tapes are a mixture of the personal and the political – the father was politically engaged in the revolutionary movement that brought Hugo Chávez to power. The family’s life becomes a backdrop for political and economic developments in Venezuela and their impact on the lives of ordinary citizens.

Disrupt, reject, destroy, avoid: At the interrupted rhythm of the broken photographs that a granddaughter has rescued from her grandfather’s hands, the last piece reconstructs the memory of an older man who has decided to leave behind his life impulses to surrender to sleep and calm. An essay on the act of joining our memories, the illusion of remembering and the freedom to forget.

Pauline Horovitz has been filming her father since 2009. In this new chapter with hints of a bittersweet documentary comedy, the hero, a former doctor “programmed” to work, takes advantage of his retirement to become an actor. Following the first steps of this liberating new life, the daughter-filmmaker watches her “creature” escape her…

When she realizes that her grandmother, the woman who raised her, is losing her sight, the director decides to explore the bond that unites them through the episodes of non-vision that these three generations share, the memories of the past, the misunderstandings and the new memories they seek to have in common.

A short documentary about a small village in the city of Ulcinj, that has 3 bridges.

Skutečná Albánie

A dramatic depiction of honor, family feuds and thousand-year-old traditions. In Albania, the tradition of avenging an injustice according to the motto "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" still lives on. This has led to people being trapped in their homes for fear of being murdered due to a family feud.

A luxury cruise boat motors up the Yangtze - navigating the mythic waterway known in China simply as "The River." The Yangtze is about to be transformed by the biggest hydroelectric dam in history. At the river's edge - a young woman says goodbye to her family as the floodwaters rise towards their small homestead. The Three Gorges Dam - contested symbol of the Chinese economic miracle - provides the epic backdrop for Up the Yangtze, a dramatic feature documentary on life inside modern China.

The pianist Miguel Ángel Lozano embarks on a personal and artistic journey with the purpose of reconstructing the life of his grandmother, Maria Forteza (1910-60), singer and pioneer of Spanish sound films.

Lenin kam nur bis Lüdenscheid - Meine kleine deutsche Revolution

Baix la garrofera

Filmmaker Mark Cousins goes to Albania for five days, and films what he sees. He discovers that the movie prints in the country's film archive are decaying. In investigating this, Cousins begins to encounter bigger questions about the history and memory of a place. Perhaps a country whose 20th Century, dominated by its authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha, was so traumatic, should allow its film heritage to fade away? Perhaps a national forgetting should be welcomed? Influenced by the films of Chris Marker, Cousins' film broadens to consider the architecture of dictators and the great icon paintings of Onufri. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote on it Here be Dragons. Albania was, for decades, one of the least well know countries in the world. Cousins' road movie meditation takes the advice of Goethe: "If you would understand the poet, you must go to the poet's land."

Jan's father is not his father at all. The directors knows this and takes this fact as the starting point for a very personal documentary film project about the search for his biological father(s).

A journey through a century of Ambrosoli family history.

Made by the highly influential Russian cameraman Roman Karmen, this documentary vividly features Albanian life immediately after the communists came to power in 1944. The film is especially memorable since it’s missing much of the heavy socialist realism that marked Albanian doc making. Shortly after he completed the film, Karmen set off for Berlin to shoot the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

The story of Viktor Stratoberdha (1921-1991) mirrors many of Albania’s tragedies. Stradoberdha’s humorous, buoyant style led him to be one of the country’s most promising filmmakers. But after being denounced in 1956, he was expelled from the Kinostudio and sent into internal exile. In 1967, Stratoberdha directed a local theater play in which the economic five year plan was placed in a coffin. He was then jailed for the next two decades. Urime Shokë Studentë! is one of the surviving documentaries of Viktor Stratoberdha’s all too short career.

The story of Christina Lau and her relationship with her parents as she recounts the happy and traumatic memories of her childhood and adolescence. She shares the ways in which the tragic demise of her father and mother have affected her and shaped who she is today. Her story is powerful, tragic, and demonstrates the importance of strong family ties when overcoming hardship. The documentary is directed by her eldest daughter, Robyn Mae, and includes stunning animations created by her youngest daughter, Tammy-Ann.

Maya is Ayaibex's daughter, an addict in recovery that feels a blame for damages that caused her daughter, Maya decides to remember her mother's childhood experiences in her world of addiction to seek the redemption of the weight that her mother has loaded for 20 years and get both to forgiveness.