AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARIES FROM NEIGHBOURING FESTIVALS

In the remote villages of Gora, in the harsh mountains in southern Kosovo, lives a Slavic-speaking Muslim minority: the Gorani people. The film investigates this rich legacy of this population, through the everyday rituals of Gorani males – as the women are forbidden to be filmed. Each of their gestures, as they work, talk, dance, play music, pray, and sing, adds a pertinent and persistent reminder of how transient human existence can be.

Vintage footage of alien landscapes and mystical mental states, shot by the first Serbian man to climb Mount Everest, is woven with puzzling excerpts from his diary, composing an experimental meditation on a journey to eternal glory, and back to the banality of everyday life; a journey that changed him in ways he never intended.

A surprising audiovisual allegory on communication, following cable technicians in different countries, as they visit their customers. Each client they call on provides a glimpse into their own individual universe. An insightful comment that reveals the obvious, through subtle, sharp irony: despite the abundance of our tools to communicate, we still inhabit a modern-day Tower of Babel, an ordered discordance of personalities and perspectives.

The architecture of an emblematic congress space built in 1970s Belgrade still communicates a past idea of the future, while the materials reveal its current state: the vast complex network of corridors, atriums and halls now feel almost abandoned. A laborious, sensorial experimental work documenting the materiality of the workers movements as they function in unison and alone; a performative ritual that goes between the individual and the collective.

Romanian beggar Florin and Swedish single mother Josefin fall in love after meeting outside the grocery store. After eight months, they marry and start a new life together in a small Swedish town. Florin studies Swedish and looks for work, but as the pressure from his family to send home money mounts, the dream of a better life is put to a test. Combining harsh reality with fairy-tale elements, this touching story of love and social stigma shows what happens when two rather different worlds collide.

After ending a long-term relationship, a half-blind filmmaker born in 1986 and whose mother blames his illness on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, leaves behind his life in Romania and travels to find other people who might have been affected by it. He falls in love with a young Ukrainian woman and his life takes an unforeseen turn. A fascinating road-movie, through which we meet unique individuals that reveal the diversity of today’s Chernobyl generation and the world they live in.