Art Never Sleeps

Battering, breading, frying – Berta has prepared thousands of schnitzels in her old cast-iron pan over the years. This 83-year-old landlady’s life on the family farm with adjoining guest house in the Upper Palatinate has been marked by constant hard work. A life that her granddaughters Monika and Hannah never wanted to lead. Now, the deeply indebted farm is on the brink of collapse. Despite having an academic background and contrary to her intentions, Monika, in her early thirties, decides to give up her modern life and save the family business. The two women join forces and give themselves a year to sort out the farm’s problems.

A platonic relationship between a young girl employed at a spa hotel and its former client develops through romantic letters full of old-fashioned respect, exchanged between the couple in the mid-50s.

In her autobiographical documentary, the young director uses cartoon impressions, photographic memories, and the various stages of baking a cake to draw the viewer into her own stream of consciousness, and using images full of kindness, tenderness, and playfulness, she deals with the sadness that began during a children's birthday party many years ago.

An intimate statement about the filmmaker’s need for self-expression through her own nudity and simultaneously an effort to reject the taboo of patriarchal society. Using diary entries, anger-filled personal reflections, and discussions with a mother painting her nude daughter, the film opens the topic of overcoming shame for one’s own physicality and female sexuality.

The director, who has always been viewed as the black sheep in her family, sets out to the Belarusian town of Vitebsk to talk with her parents about previous grievances and topics that were considered taboo. The effort to find a common language, which runs into stormy emotions and the inability to voice honest opinions, is captured through both personal moments and detailed shots of the protagonists’ faces.

A group of men share a small space in a prison metal workshop in Botosani, Romania. When they’re not working, they animatedly discuss religion and hypocrisy, lament during tea that they don’t have onions for sausage, or joke and sing.

In 2012, violent conflicts broke out between the Muslim Rohingya and the Buddhist majority in Rakhine State on the west coast of Myanmar. The government subsequently deported Muslims and imprisoned them in a camp on the outskirts of the city. The documentary looks at the lives of neighbours on both sides.

Varga

A sequence of bucolic black-and-white fragments of the southern Tuscan countryside opens a portrait of a peaceful daily routine, of reconciled old age spent in a sun-drenched idyll. Without a hint of emotion, Jochen, aged seventy, outlines the unsettled life of a retired drug smuggler, the life of a person with two stories – one as an outlaw, the second as the respectable head of a family.

The earth is scorched; trees are dying; species are becoming extinct; rivers are drying up. Human interventions have thrown the ecosystem off balance. The irreversible changes will have a devastating impact. A trip of a young urban couple to the country provides a base for a spontaneous poetic contemplation on dried-up landscape and mankind's environmental grief. Nature has ceased to be a relaxing place.

Although they look almost identical in black balaclavas, they have arrived at extremely right-wing views along very different paths. For six months Michał Edelman documented the activity of the National-Radical Camp brigade from Łódź ranging from propaganda events including an obligatory barbecue through attempts to disrupt the Gay Parade in Radomsko to the culmination on the Independence Day in 2019 when they marched along the streets of Warsaw. Are the nationalists really a group of friends with clear-cut views only?

Take them into the light

A documentary about the crowd of people that commingle throughout the 3.5km of the Minhocão, an overpass in the central region of São Paulo, built during Brazil's military dictatorship.

The life of Donald M. Morgan, one of Hollywood’s most prolific artists, is a unique, rags-to-riches story about a man who’s had a life-changing effect on the people around him, both personally and professionally. By sharing stories of his lengthy career, working with filmmakers like Robert Zemeckis, John Carpenter and Joseph Sargent, Morgan recounts pivotal moments in the art of filmmaking for over four decades, through interviews with fellow greats Owen Roizman (The Exorcist) and Jack N. Green (Unforgiven). But at the heart of the film is an emotional journey along the road to recovery in an industry that is ripe with dysfunction and addiction. Inspiring, heartbreaking, and funny, “Cinematographer” shares the story of one of the film industry's finest human beings.

Self-portrait as Doubt

Displaying the faces and voices of transgender youth, the documentary short shows the authenticity of queer and trans people living in Toronto, while simultaneously discussing the struggles for self-acceptance that people who do not conform to cisgender and heteronormative ideals of gender face. Andy Nguyen, trans director and film student, captures his trans friends in their natural state on 16mm film shot on a Bolex h16 camera. Accompanied by narration written and recited by Salem Rao, this film represents that trans people exist and this is what we look like. Regardless of the obvious everyday transphobia, trans people find community and uniqueness within each other and themselves.

A self-portrait short film on 16mm from a trans male perspective.

A celebratory documentary looking back at the 30 years since comedy legend Mr Bean landed on our screens. This documentary explores the magic behind this unlikely hero.

A frustrated Hollywood actress is doing an unusual “part-time job.”

Handbook of Movie Theaters’ History is a documentary about the history, the development in the present days and the future of movie theaters in the city of Turin, Italy. It mixes the documentary language with comedy and fiction, and is enriched by interviews to some of the most important voices of Turin cinematography. The film follows the evolution of movie theaters by enlightening its main milestones: the pre-cinema experiences in the late 19th Century, the colossals and the movie cathedrals of the silent era, the arthouse theaters, the National Museum of Cinema, the Torino Film Festival, the movie theaters system today and the main hypothesis about its future.