ANHELL69

The original plan was to shoot a feature film. A ghost story in which the dead coexist with the living and have sexual encounters with one another. A montage of castings, ghostly encounters, and extravagant party scenes. Toxic substances, excess, and the latent presence of death prevail. A hearse drives through the streets with the director’s living corpse inside. In this debut as a film director, Theo Montoya concocts a coming-of-age story in Medellín – a city that resembles a cemetery. A city without fathers, a conservative, violent city. Experiences of queer subcultures, fictions, and memories of a queer generation that finds no place in Medellín’s oppressive majority society. The result is a merciless manifesto of both hopelessness and rebellion.

KEIKO, ME WO SUMASETE

Based on the autobiography of Deaf professional boxer Keiko Ogasawara, Shô Miyake’s KEIKO, ME WO SUMASETE is an impressive character study of Keiko, a strong-minded boxer whose boundless fighting spirit and tenacity are put to the test when she faces professional and emotional challenges beside her fights in the boxing ring. Her coach’s health problems and waning eyesight increasingly overshadow her daily training routine. The situation comes to a head when the closure of her gym in Tokyo is imminent and her brother’s well-intended support is on the line. Shot on 16mm film in a historic district of downtown Tokyo, the film portrays with razor-sharp precision and the finest intuition the story of facing a crossroads in the impressive life of a young adult.

EL ROSTRO DE LA MEDUSA

Marina wakes up one morning. She does not recognise herself in the mirror. A completely unfamiliar face stares back at her. She takes refuge in her parents’ house and pores over photo albums, looking for similarities between herself and pictures of her family. To determine her identity, she faces insurmountable hurdles at the authorities; the search for an explanation with medical help comes to nothing and leaves her all the more perplexed. The more time passes, the more uncertain it seems who Marina is, when she no longer bears any resemblance to her family. A new life begins: one that revolves around the question of how our appearance relates to our self and our personality, what role people close to us play in this, and what transition and identity change can actually mean. EL ROSTRO DE LA MEDUSA is a comically absurd confrontation with this new understanding of human identity, including a tongue-in-cheek, grotesque comparison of mammals, reptiles, birds, and aquatic animals of all kinds.

ALL THE COLOURS OF THE WORLD ARE BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE

While Bambino and Bawa traverse Lagos for days photographing the many facets of the megapolis together, an unexpected intimacy unfurls between the two, a reconciliation of different worlds of experience. Concentrated, serene images and discreet use of colour accentuate the sensuality and closeness of the men all the more. As a tender love blossoms, a place riddled with contradictions, hostilities, and complex politics comes to light: the city of Lagos, with its millions of inhabitants, an unruly and violent setting, yet its interstices bear potentials for freedom. In his politically charged and deeply moving feature film debut, Babatunde Apalowo tells of love – and a love that can never be lived to the fullest.

WOS TUR I? ÜBER DIE NOTWENDIGKEIT DES ERZÄHLENS

Storytelling as a tireless, resistant, deeply feminist practice. Telling one’s own story, telling what all too often no one wants to hear. Maria Caesar has never stopped telling. About speaking and not speaking at the right moment. About fascism and resistance. As a feminist and communist resistance fighter, she dedicated herself to the anti-fascist struggle until her death in 2017. In a dense arrangement, Barbara Wilding and her editor Maria Otter combine archive recordings with conversations about the sustained impact of this narrative practice in the now. Departing from the question “Wos tur I?” – in English: What can I do now? – which she was confronted with in the 1930s in light of burgeoning fascism in Styria, Maria Caesar narrates herself in the film, across different times, moments, and contexts. As a contemporary witness over a Fanta and chips surrounded by young people, in a television interview, drinking wine spritzers with comrades, and in her different roles in personal and political surroundings. A picture unfolds of a fighter who leaves no doubt that the urgency of the ongoing struggle against fascism and the need to tell stories about the unspeakable will remain forever.

L’ÎLOT

On the outskirts of a working-class neighbourhood in Lausanne, mysterious things are said to be happening down by the river at night. Now it’s up to the two watchmen Ammar and Daniel to make their rounds by day and night and secure the area. Ammar is new to the job. On their walks, they immerse in amicable exchanges about belonging and new beginnings. Contemplations that vacillate between comedy and absurdity. While checking on things, they are eyed critically from the balconies of the surrounding apartment blocks. A game of observing and being observed unfolds. Between the mundanities of everyday life and magical realism, Tizian Büchi stages a fable about friendship, while subtly questioning our fantasy of safety in a surveillance society.

UN PETIT FRÈRE

In the early 1980s, Rose moves from Abidjan to Paris with her two sons Jean and Ernest. Between independence, wage work, heartbreak, and the task as a single parent to ensure attention and care for her children, clefts break open, which she disappears into time and again. UN PETIT FRÈRE tells a compassionate story of a family spanning two decades. Time jumps and changes of perspective across various stages of life elucidate the volatile relationship between the three protagonists. Their experiences are layered over each other, sketching a somewhat dissonant picture of their complex, shared world of experience. Touching narrative gestures trace the entanglements of growing up, living together, and drifting apart; being close and distant in a confined space between the metropolis of Paris and the port city of Rouen in Normandy, France. Subjective strategies to cope with and shape everyday life, to chart a future and strive for a sense of kinship and intimacy. A trio that reinvents forms of community in constant change.

NAJSREЌNIOT ČOVEK NA SVETOT

Asja and Zoran, both in their mid-40s, meet one another on a Saturday afternoon at a speed dating event in Sarajevo in a brutalist hotel from the 1980s. A jaunt to a retro-futuristic setting where a retro-futuristic event is taking place. In successive rounds, couples ask each other guided questions about favourite colours and tastes and preferred seasons. In choreographed narrative flows, curtains then fall between the participants, round by round, revealing painful ordeals from their past. Tensions between sympathy and guilt loom like chasms in Sarajevo, which was besieged for 1425 days between 1992 and 1996. Teona Strugar Mitevska tells a story based on true events, a story about chance encounters that revive bygone traumas. NAJSREЌNIOT ČOVEK NA SVETOT is about the impossibility of connections, about the amorphous perpetuation of war, about love and absurdity. A cinematic love poem to a city and its open wounds.

THE TUBA THIEVES

Between 2011 and 2013, certain instruments mysteriously disappear from Los Angeles music schools – tubas, of all things. The film follows Nyke Prince and Geovanny Marroquin, who play fictionalised versions of themselves, through the years of the robberies. In her debut feature film, Alison O’Daniel captures the impacts of these events from an unusual perspective: for it is not really about stolen tubas, rather the film searches for what it means to listen. The stories of the protagonists are interspersed with re-enactments of avant-garde concerts centred on “silence” – such as John Cage’s work 4’33”, which premiered in 1952. The narrative thread between different times and places is not just the relationship of deafness to music, but also a sense of how people, animals, plants, and the environment are affected and connected by sound, music, noise, and the presence of their alleged absence. In this hybrid cinematic work emerges a warm and exuberant portrait of a group of Deaf protagonists in Los Angeles.

MUTT

On a New York summer day, we accompany Feña darting to and fro between strange apartments and an empty gas tank, forgotten apartment keys and purses. Over the course of 24 hours in this charming mix of chaos and bustle, we sense Feña’s unyielding struggle between accepting closeness or keeping distance to other people and also oneself. In an unexpected reunion with an ex-partner, the sudden appearance of the younger sister, and planning a visit by the father from Chile, Feña must navigate relationship constellations ensnared in a limbo between the past and their bearing in the present. In Feña’s exploration of intimacies, Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s debut film MUTT confronts us with a deeply human experience of love, gender, and an in-between state of trans-ness and life as such.