Fights Worth Fighting

Saturday's One World will explore, among other things, the forms of oppression faced by populations under the influence of totalitarian regimes and wartime conflicts. The lauded Georgian-American fiction film Tatami follows an Iranian judoka and her coach as they prepare to win their country’s first gold medal at the World Championships. But things begin to fall apart when Iran’s Islamic regime meddles in the sport and orders the martial artist to withdraw from the competition. This film is one of the ten in the Searching for Freedom category.

The French-Belgian documentary The Black Garden follows three generations of Armenians who return to the Nagorno-Karabakh village of Talish three years after having been forced to flee during the 2016 war. While they try to live their lives as normally as possible, they nevertheless prepare for another seemingly inevitable Armenia-Azerbaijan war.

In the film The Brink of Dreams girls from a conservative Egyptian village start a theatre troupe as a way to express their individual identities, build a supportive community and seek self-fulfilment with kindred spirits outside of their traditional gender roles as wife and mother. Over the years, the girls become women and pressure from their partners and families causes the troupe to break apart. But all is not lost as new girls take their place on the stage and continue to challenge harmful gender stereotypes. 

Finally, in the Czech Competition category, the documentary Urban Disobedience Toolkit reflects on the relationship between the individual and public space. Oftentimes, it seems that public spaces are not made for the residents anymore. Instead, they cater to big institutions and people with money. Through artistic performances and creative interventions bordering on vandalism, artist Vladimír Turner works to symbolically transform public spaces into what they should be and give the power back to the people it was taken from.