Documentary

In the rural outskirts of Gaza City a small community of farmers, the Samouni extended family, is about to celebrate a wedding. It’s going to be the first celebration since the latest war. Amal, Fuad, their brothers and cousins have lost their parents, their houses and their olive trees. The neighborhood where they live is being rebuilt. As they replant trees and plow fields, they face their most difficult task: piecing together their own memory. Through these young survivors’ recollections, Samouni Road conveys a deep, multifaceted portrait of a family before, during and after the tragic event that changed its life forever.Read More »

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A crisscrosses through the USA, carving it up into a series of static shots of just under two minutes, one for each state, presented alphabetically, from Heron Bay, Alabama to Kelly, Wyoming.Read More »

A documentary that tracks five years and three generations of a Chicago family’s life in public housing. The murder of a family member has an immediate impact, but eventually changes them toward a more positive outlook on life in the end.Read More »

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Jude Chehab investigates her mother Hiba’s adherence to a closed-off, all-female religious sect in Syria. Chehab examines how their mother-daughter relationship and the dynamics of the entire family were upended by this devotion.Read More »

Synopsis:
Downtown Recife’s classic movie palaces from the 20th century are mostly gone. That city area is now an archaeological site of sorts that reveals aspects of life in society which have been lost. And that’s just part of the story.Read More »

A documentary filmmaker in Cairo is having difficulty finishing his film, so his friends send him footage from the cities they live in: Baghdad, Beirut, and Berlin.

Berlinale’s description
Downtown Cairo is an organism that still seems alive back in winter 2009/10, but is becoming increasingly alien even to those born there. Khalid is looking for a flat. He’s a filmmaker. He looks at his images over and over again, as if he were waiting from them to produce some sort of meaning. The stories of his protagonists seem to come from somewhere inside him, he seeks points of reference in the outside world. The more he looks for them, the more they seem to disappear; not abruptly though, but in lengthy moments full of tenderness, such as when he bids farewell to his girlfriend who is leaving him, to his ill mother, to friends who have come to the city to premiere their films.Read More »

In Police Department 1985 (1985), Heise observes the ins and outs of the Berlin People’s Police Department. Fassbinderesque mise-en-scènes of officers watching the USA v. GDR hockey game in a rec room adorned with gaudy floral wallpaper are contrasted with long tracking shots of Berlin-Mitte streets and the recordings of police statements: A woman describes her domestic abuse incident and a man, arrested for trespassing, explains that he just realized that these walls were meant to contain them, not to keep the “others” out.Read More »

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Don McCullin is known the world over for his incredible work as a photojournalist. His powerful and moving photography of devastation and suffering in Cyprus, The Congo, Vietnam and many others have won him worldwide acclaim as one of the greatest ever.

And now, for those who don’t know about his life’s work, or really anybody who wants to see what being one of the most prolific (and perhaps most haunted) photojournalists of our time means, the documentary ‘McCullin’ is here to fill you in.Read More »

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El perro negro takes a clichés braking view of the Spanish Civil War trough a mesmerizing found footage collage. The saga begins in 1929 with the talented amateur filmmaker, Joan Salvans, son of a wealthy Catalan industrialist, of Terrassa. The Salvans were the object of admiration as one of the most successful wool manufacturer of Catalonia, but also of hatred by the emerging anarchists and socialist trade unionists. On 24 July 1936, six days after the Civil War broke out; a militant anarchist group led by ‘Pedro el Cruel’ kills Joan Salvans, filmmaker, and his father Francesc Salvans.Read More »