On November 25, 1973, the first of four car-free Sundays transformed West Germany's deserted highways into spaces for walking, cycling, and horse-drawn carriages, while towns and cities took on a festive atmosphere. Introduced during the oil crisis to conserve fuel after the Arab oil embargo and production cuts following the Yom Kippur War, the measure became an unforgettable collective experience. Beyond the immediate energy shortage, the crisis marked a turning point, ending the postwar economic boom and encouraging greater awareness of energy use, consumerism, and environmental issues.
About Stefan Stricker, who calls himself Juwelia and has been running a gallery on Sanderstraße in Berlin Neukölln for many years. Every weekend he invites guests to shamelessly recount from his life and to sing poetic songs written with his friend from Hollywood Jose Promis. Juwelia has been poor and sexy all her life, has always struggled for recognition, but only partially.
What does it mean to be Black in America in the 21st century? The recently formed Black American film group TNEG™ has set out to elucidate this very question. Hearing from the likes of fine artist Kara Walker and musical artist Flying Lotus, the film is based on a deceptively simple approach -- asking a refined list of black 'specialists' as well as 'uncommon folks' questions about what they think, and more importantly as lead director Arthur Jafa states, 'What they KNOW' -- the film is an unprecedented 'stream of the black consciousness' and a strikingly original and rarefied look at black intellectual and emotional life. What's so unorthodox about this simple approach is that the interviews were recorded separately from the images in the film. What results is a breathtaking, kaleidoscopic look of American black life from the dawn of three original filmmakers.
Since the enactment of the Anti-Boryokudan Act and Yakuza exclusion ordinances, the number of Yakuza members reduced to less than 60,000. In the past 3 years, about 20,000 members have left from Yakuza organizations. However, just numbers can’t tell you the reality. What are they thinking, how are they living now? The camera zooms in on the Yakuza world. Are there basic human rights for them?
Can a loving relationship of eight years go down the drain because of a single moment of carelessness? Virginie and Laurent have always treasured fidelity, but Laurent's opinions and appetites are starting to shift with the times.
After delivery of a parcel, on leaving a restaurant, hotel or train, or following an exchange with the customer service department of your telephone operator, the same request: to rate. On a scale from 0 to 10, embellished with colors, or by awarding pretty, playful little stars. A simple, mechanical and painless action for the rater. But behind this harmless gesture lies a brutal management system, operated directly by the customer, without their knowledge. Even more worrying: without knowing it, we are all being rated, to feed the algorithms of opaque companies that claim to be able to predict the future. The film questions this invasion of rating systems, and the consequences of this practice for our individual realities and collective freedoms.
Zou tells the story of a man with a missing leg who moves forward more intensely than an able-bodied man. The amputated leg, a phantom limb that he can still move in his mind, is the pivotal point of this story. At the same time a trace of the war that made him lose most of his family members and forced him to flee his country, at the same time a brake on his exodus that made walking painful and more laborious than any of his fellow travelers, it is also the fulcrum for his integration into a new territory.
In southern Italy, stateless migrants pick the tomatoes the rest of the world will taste. But what about these workers’ European dreams? Will they be ground to a pulp? Our canned tomatoes are picked by migrant workers who have come to southern Italy to realise their dream of Europe. However, they never get beyond the tomato fields. This documentary shows how the tomato broaches a broader issue. Will the pickers keep believing in their dream, or fight against a Europe where others reap the sweet rewards of their disillusion?
Macadam Cowboy
Inceste, le dire et l'entendre
"Africa Light" - as white local citizens call Namibia. The name suggests romance, the beauty of nature and promises a life without any problems in a country where the difference between rich and poor could hardly be greater. Namibia does not give that impression of it. If you look at its surface it seems like Africa in its most innocent and civilized form. It is a country that is so inviting to dream by its spectacular landscape, stunning scenery and fascinating wildlife. It has a very strong tourism structure and the government gets a lot of money with its magical attraction. But despite its grandiose splendor it is an endless gray zone as well. It oscillates between tradition and modernity, between the cattle in the country and the slums in the city. It shuttles from colonial times, land property reform to minimum wage for everyone. It fluctuates between socialism and cold calculated market economy.
A patchwork of millions of lives, urban spaces are not only streets and concrete. They are where our dreams and deepest worries unfold. Chronicle of a City drifts and strolls through time and chance encounters, moving between fantasy and reality, echoing the intimate and ghostly voices of our metropolises, reminding us that we inhabit The City as much as it inhabits us. This roaming essay is a visual and sonic meditation that invites us to see urban life as a web of sensations that move through us and draw us closer to one another, even in the midst of solitude.
A green lawn like an unused carpet, encircled by a neat forest edge, in the background the steaming cooling towers of a coal power station – impressionistic camera images from Lusatia. They summarise in one pan how a used-up utilitarian landscape is trying to recultivate itself. Can ancient identity and language be re-discovered amid this strange artificiality? The director travelled through this region in search of her origins. She was born here, in Lusatia. This is her home and that of the smallest of all Slavic peoples: the Sorbs.
Plastic Odyssey
Den gamle mand og skoven
Nine fictitious documentaries and films reflect the mood of late 1970s Germany, particularly the two-month period in 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped by the RAF (Red Army Faction). The kidnap had been made to orchestrate the release of the original leaders of the RAF, aka the Baader-Meinhof.
Vinicius is a young cellist who lives in the far east of the metropolitan region of São Paulo and is a member of the State Youth Orchestra. He talks about the contrasts he experiences every day as a musician in Latin America's largest city, the prestige of playing at the Sala São Paulo, one of the best in the world, and the human degradation that surrounds it, individual and collective artistic expression in an orchestra, the sublime of the concert and the harsh reality of life on the ground, about the continuous search for erudition, the role of his teachers in his career and the friendships and lessons he has learned along the way
Porn
Au coeur du patrimoine
From Belgium, Jialai Wang maintains contact via smartphone and camera with her mother and grandmother in China. When her grandmother’s health deteriorates, Jialai returns to Shanghai, but when she arrives, her grandmother has already died, and she is left alone with her mother. A devout Buddhist, her mother seems to pay more attention to her daily prayers, Maoist past and dog Dongdong than she does to her daughter. She herself had been abandoned as a child by her own mother, when she divorced Jialai’s grandfather and moved to the city.