List of films A-Z
All That Glitters
Tomáš Kudrna / Czech Republic / 2010 / 99 min.
At first glance, time seems to have stood still in the west Kyrgyz village of Barskon. Veterans of the Second World War enjoy the greatest respect and many of the people here look back with nostalgia at the socialist era, when everyone had work, healthcare was free and "we all had it just as good". The gulags seem to be the only thing the locals have somehow forgotten about? One of the protagonists in the film is the slightly mysterious truck driver Nurbek, who has been working with his wife for 10 years in the local gold mine known as Kumtor. This is the place where the director Tomáš Kudrna faithfully documents the peculiar form of capitalism and democracy that prevails in a country that looks like an open-air Soviet museum. We see the petty disputes between the locals and also look at the events of 1998, when two tonnes of cyanide leaked into the river from the Kumtor mine and poisoned hundreds of villagers. Kudrna's distinctive and visually refined "film diary" of a long-term stay in Barskon was the first ever Czech documentary to receive support from the Sundance Documentary Fund.
Anna, Seven Years on the Frontline
Masha Novikova / Netherlands / 2008 / 78 min.
((2))Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist with the Novaya Gazeta newspaper who was not afraid to openly criticise her government's approach to the war in Chechnya, was murdered on 7 October 2007. With four shots, an unknown killer ended the life of a woman who for many represented the hope that crimes committed would not be overlooked and forgotten. This absorbing documentary tells the story of the journalist's life. Director Masha Novikova had filmed Politkovskaya regularly since 2000 along with her colleagues and friends. Thanks to some extraordinary footage, the viewer becomes a witness to the Chechen tragedy and is confronted with scarcely believable stories of the killings and disappearance of inconvenient people. Besides Politkovskaya, other people who appear in the film include Lidia Yusupova, a lawyer from Grozny who has spent many years searching for missing people from Chechnya, and Svetlana Gannushkina, who won the One World Homo Homini award in 2006. Like Anna Politkovskaya, both these women risk their own lives in the fight for justice in contemporary Russia.
Enemies of the People
Rob Lemkin, Thet Sambath / UK, Cambodia / 2009 / 94 min.
((3))For more than 10 years, Cambodian journalist Thet Sambath spent his free weekends working in remote rural provinces. The results of this painstaking project are the dozens of interviews with people who directly participated in the slaughter under the Khmer Rouge. How and why were more than two million people killed in this country in such a short period of time? Sambath not only attempts to find the answer to this question from former soldiers who blindly followed orders, but also talks to Nuon Chea, Pol Pot's right-hand man. It took years for him to gain the trust of this old man, who today still refuses to admit personal responsibility for the crimes committed. Sambath is aided in winning Chea's confidence by the fact that he does not tell him about his father and brother, who were killed by the Khmer Rouge. Besides testimony that describes the killing of Cambodian civilians with chilling objectivity, this film (made by the journalist with British director Rob Lemkin) also contains unique archive footage and interesting information about one of the bloodiest regimes in history.
Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi
Ian Olds / USA / 2009 / 84 min.
((4))This intense film by Ian Olds takes us right to the frontline of war reporting. Ajmal Naqshbandi is a young journalist and translator regarded as Afghanistan's best fixer. His work includes facilitating interviews with Taliban fighters. Just how dangerous this work actually is becomes clear when he and an Italian reporter are taken captive - and Ajmal is executed a few days later. Christian Parenti, a US journalist who had used him as a fixer, looks into the reasons why only the Italian was released, at the same time providing an insight into everyday life in the war-torn state. Chilling footage of the abduction and improvised interviews with Taliban members - who suspect every journalist of espionage - clearly document just what war reporters go through in Afghanistan. The tragic fate of Ajmal illustrates what sort of value is placed on a human life in that country.
Girls on the Air
Valentina Monti / Italy / 2009 / 59 min.
((5))25-year-old Humaira definitely does not conform to the typical idea of an Afghan girl. After studying journalism, she set up the independent station Radio Sahar in 2003. It is the only station managed by women in the entire country and it devotes its main programming to women's issues and opinions, which had previously been completely ignored. Together with her colleagues, the self-confident Humaira hears the stories of girls forced into marriage at a young age, as well as from victims of domestic violence and ordinary women who are not afraid to speak their mind in a country that is still partially controlled by tribal leaders. In this way, they give courage to other women, who would previously have considered the possibility of things like getting divorced to have been completely unrealistic. This documentary by Italian director Valentina Monti presents the relaxed atmosphere that prevails among Radio Sahar's group of resolute editors, who are well aware of how important it is in a country full of illiterate people to spread free information via the airwaves.
Good Fortune
Landon Van Soest / USA, Kenya / 2009 / 73 min.
((6))Landon van Soest's documentary looks at the plight of tens of thousands of Kenya's inhabitants who are afraid of losing their homes - regardless of whether these homes are in the slums of the poor Kibera quarter in the capital Nairobi, or the aluminium shacks of herdsmen in the Yala Swamp in the west of the country. Government-supported development projects have entered their lives, and these are playing into the hands of the rich and powerful. Residential housing in Kibera, which was originally intended for the poor, is occupied by government clerks or people who can afford to buy their own dwellings. Agricultural areas in west Kenya are dominated by rich "white men" from the USA, who want to grow rice, but don't consider the original inhabitants when they build dams and irrigate land. The stories of Silva, a midwife from Kibera, and Jackson, a farmer and teacher from Yala Swamp, lay bare the battles individuals have to wage against the political machine. Neither of them wants to give up, because their very survival is at stake. Fortune, however, does not smile on everyone?
Green Days
Hana Makhmalbaf / Iran / 2009 / 72 min.
((7))The protagonist of Green Days is a young Iranian theatre director called Ava, who suffers from depression. At a time when she is trying hard through therapy to understand herself and the world around her, her hometown of Teheran is submerged in green. During pre-election demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of supporters of the presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi take to the streets, and the green colour of their flags symbolises their long-awaited hope that Mousavi will triumph in the election over the dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ava also finds herself caught up in the wave of euphoria, and through spontaneous interviews with Mousavi's followers, the film takes a very open look at an opposition movement imbued with optimism. Just a few days after the rigged elections, however, these pictures are replaced by footage from small cameras and mobile phones recording the brutality of the Iranian police, which had already claimed hundreds of victims and which is indicative of the insecurity of the regime and its determination to use every means at its disposal to stay in power. This film deals with a highly topical theme, and it documents events that are among the worst examples of the alarming suppression of democratic principles in recent years.
Iron Crows
Bong-Nam Park / Korea / 2009 / 59 min.
((8))Eating means surviving. This seemingly trivial fact is something that is on workers' minds every day in the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong. Grim poverty has brought them to a ship scrap yard from other parts of Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. Every day, barefooted labourers risk fatal injury while dismantling iron wrecks in terrible conditions. Around 20 such injuries occur every year. There are even children helping to carry pieces of ships weighing several tonnes in long columns. In this film, we meet the elderly Rufik, the young man Belal and the 12-year-old Ekramul. All of them support their family on a wage amounting to two dollars per day. Rufik makes a little extra money by carrying wood for heating. Ekramul is saving for clothes and Belal prays that he will be able to visit his wife and newborn daughter after half a year. Iron Crows is a brilliantly filmed documentary full of monumental footage from the port, as well as extremely intimate scenes revealing pure human desperation.
Kimjongilia
N. C. Heikin / Korea / 2009 / 75 min.
((9))Without a doubt, North Korea is the most isolated country in the world. For sixty years now, the totalitarian regime has been locking its inhabitants up in concentration camps for the slightest transgressions. All it takes is to crumple a newspaper displaying a picture of the country's founding father Kim Il-sung or his son, the current ruler Kim Jong-il. Thanks to the handful of prisoners who have risked death to escape these camps (some of whom also appear in this documentary), the world has learned of the horrors of life in communist North Korea. Their alarming and powerful accounts of millions of people succumbing to famine in the 1990s, North Korean girls hiding in China, who have been forced into prostitution, and the dependence of the local economy on prison labour are an eloquent contrast to the propagandistic television programmes that reinforce the mass cult of Kim Jong-il. By using archive materials and graphically interesting passages in the film, the director N. C. Heikin also lucidly recounts the history of the Korean peninsula.
Last Train Home
Lixin Fan / Canada, China / 2009 / 85 min.
((10))When the Zhangs abandoned their home, along with their parents and oneyear- old child, 16 years ago, they believed it was the best for all concerned. For many years, they worked to earn money for their family as labourers in textile factories, only returning home for a few days annually to celebrate New Year. At that time every year China is crippled by transport chaos, especially on its rail network. Overcrowded carriages take up to 130 million migrant workers home to their nearest and dearest, though once they get there they often find they have become strangers to their own children. The Zhangs want nothing more than to provide their child with a solid education to help her have a better life than they have had. But without realising it, they end up bringing about the opposite. The family's fate mirrors the experience of millions of others who pay a great price for China's headlong economic development. Lixin Fan's debut won the main featurelength documentary award at Amsterdam's IDFA festival.
Me, My Gipsy Family and Woody Allen
Laura Halilovic / Italy / 2009 / 50 min.
((11))It is rare for any fledgling director to succeed in making such a high-quality, lively feature documentary debut as the 19-year-old Roma Laura Halilovic has. With a small handheld camera, she documents the past and above all the present of her family, who came to Italy from Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of the 1970s. Unlike Laura, many of her relatives, including her idiosyncratic grandmother, still travel around in caravans. It is obvious from the hateful reactions of the local population and the attitude of state authorities, however, that this nomadic way of life has already had its day in Europe, not to mention Berlusconi's Italy. This cheerful and surprisingly inventive film with excellent music offers an unconventional view of the Roma people - from the very heart of this community itself. Humorously, the author also finds herself getting involved in the action when her family tries to force her to marry, which she refuses to do. Her dream is to become a filmmaker. She definitely has the talent to succeed in this field. If only Woody Allen would answer her letters?
Moving to Mars: A Million Miles from Burma
Mat Whitecross / UK / 2009 / 84 min.
((18))The latest documentary by Mat Whitecross, who directed the award-winning The Road to Guantanamo, takes us to a refugee camp on the Burma-Thai border, where up to 40,000 Karen Burmese have fled persecution from the military junta in Burma. The family of the civil engineer Thaw Htoo, whose house was burned down by Burmese soldiers, has been living here for 15 years. Thanks to the work of humanitarian organisations, the families of Thaw Htoo and farmer Jo Kae have been given a new home in the British city of Sheffield. Although the parents are nervous, for the children, moving from a camp in the jungle to the heart of industrial England seems like an amazing adventure. Gradually, however, it becomes apparent that finding work and friends in a strange land, overcoming the language barrier and getting by in school is a difficult challenge for all the family. Using frequently cheerful portraits of individual members of both families, this deeply human, cinema vérité style film faithfully reveals the experience of people striving to adapt to a completely new environment.
Orphans of Burma's Cyclone
Evan Williams, Siobhan Sinnerton, Jeremy Williams / Burma, UK / 2009 / 45 min.
((12))Coming to terms with a genocide that has cruelly robbed you of your nearest and dearest is far from easy, especially if the murderers also happen to be your neighbours. Eight hundred thousand people died in ethnic clashes between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. The country's government later set up special tribunals called Gacaca, under which the victims of the genocide have the opportunity to try the perpetrators. Anne Aghion's documentary shows several Gacaca courts in which defendants and plaintiffs face one another. In one case, a Hutu woman married to a Tutsi man is devastated by the fact that he has beaten their children to death before her very eyes. Frequently, the cases are complicated, with defendants reluctant even to accept charges and plaintiffs faced with the prospect of judging somebody who has robbed them of the will to live. How can they live side by side? How can they come to terms with the fact that their village is home to both victims and murderers? This harrowingly direct film documents a stalemate, which only time and forgiveness can resolve.
Petition
Zhao Liang / France / 2009 / 124 min.
((13))From the outside, it looks like an economic miracle and a global superpower. Internally, it labours under a rotten atmosphere of unprincipled Party leaders, all-encompassing corruption and the trampling of human rights. Today's China has two faces where justice cannot be found. Petition is a film that takes a look at the fate of men and women angered by the situation in regional areas. Qi spent 12 years trying to get justice after the death of her husband, who died and was quickly cremated after his treatment was neglected in a company hospital. She refused to simply accept this, so she drew up a petition and went to the authorities. Like her, people with grievances come to Beijing from all over China, and petition the central authority for their case to be explained. Some disappear; others are forced to eke out a living in a nearby "petitioners' village," which is a savage slum where people live in blankets and plastic bags. All of this takes place against the backdrop of preparations for the Summer Olympics.
Russian Lessons
Andrei Nekrasov, Olga Konskaya / Norway, Russia / 2010 / 110 min.
((14))Just after the first shots were fired in the Russia-Georgia War in August 2008, the Russian documentary-makers Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov went to the very heart of the conflict at the border with South Ossetia. Each of the directors comes from a different side of the fence: Nekrasov from Georgia, Konskaya from Russia. The two filmmakers question eye-witnesses to the events of August 2008 and try to put together a picture of the conflict. The testimony of those who witnessed the war is supplemented with references to the media's manipulation of facts. In order to explain the underlying causes of the feud, the directors also look at the conflict at the beginning of the 1990s in Abkhazia, another autonomous Georgian territory. In this unconventional and very personal film the two directors try to present audiences with their own view of who bears responsibility for the war and its various aspects despite the difficulty of making such judgements.
The Arrivals
Claudine Bories, Patrice Chagnard / France / 2009 / 111 min.
((16))France is one of the main destinations for refugees in Europe. Every year, up to 50,000 émigrés from all over the world apply for asylum in the country. Their first official port of call is a municipal reception centre for refugees which assigns them rooms in Parisian lodgings and takes them through the asylum application process. Two social workers called Colette and Caroline work at the centre. Each of them deals in their own way with the stressful situations they come across in their work. The excitable Caroline smokes a lot and sometimes cries. The chaotic and selfless Colette gets into disputes with management because of her clients. Remaining emotionally detached and maintaining a professional approach is not always easy. In this documentary, the two directors succeed in giving a very authentic depiction of a mutually intense and frustrating situation, in which desperate foreigners look for help from state officials, whose options and reserves of patience are nonetheless limited. This film won the main Golden Dove award at last year's DOK Leipzig festival.
The Sun Behind the Clouds
Ritu Sarin, Tenzing Sonam / India / 2009 / 79 min.
((15))Last year saw the 50th anniversary of the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Throughout the last five decades, the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has pushed his nation to accept a non-violent middle way based on dialogue with the government of China as a means to achieving autonomy. Nevertheless, Beijing has completely ignored those efforts, while the Dalai Lama's diplomacy around the world has so far led nowhere. Now radical Tibetans have run out of patience, leading both to bloody riots in Lhasa in March 2008 and demonstrations at the Dalia Lama's residence in India's Dharamsala, where protestors burned Chinese flags and demanded complete independence. This film by Tibetan filmmakers Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam features both the Dalai Lama himself and a number of Tibetan intellectuals. Making use of unique archive footage, it documents China's policy of occupation and raises questions about Tibet's future.
Women in Shroud
Farid Haerinejad, Mohammad Reza Kazemi / Iran, Netherlands / 2009 / 73 min.
((17))Death by stoning is a punishment that can be meted out to women, and sometimes even men, who have committed adultery, prostitution or killed in self defence. Lawyer Shadi Sadr, journalist Asieh Amini and other women's rights activists try to help those who have been sentenced to this inhumane, degrading and excruciating form of execution. Their work is difficult, however - it is almost impossible to gather evidence, because the Iranian government strives to cover up everything because of the criticism levelled at it by international human rights organisations. Farid Haerinejad and Mohammad Reza Kazemi's documentary tells the story of some women who have evaded death by stoning thanks to the assistance of Shadi and her non-profit organisation. Changing established practices is not easy, but Iranian women are not giving up the fight, even though the public defence of women's rights also represents a huge risk to themselves. The film won the Peace Award for Justice at this year's Berlinale International Film Festival.