This question does not arise in theory. It arises in Prijedor, where a high rise building became the grave marker of the idea of a classless, multicultural society. In Thessaloniki, where the erasure of Europe’s oldest Jewish community appears not as an absence, but as building material. In Skopje, where a brand new ancient city is being constructed. In Varna, where a monument to proclaimed friendship becomes a stage for coded masculinity. In Cyprus, Novi Sad, Tbilisi and beyond.

The ongoing body of work by Studio Softić, developed since 2016 and largely filmed in regions marked as Europe’s periphery, does not assemble evidence. It assembles conditions. It asks not only what has been destroyed, but how destruction continues to operate as a structure and through which techniques it is sedimented. Spaces are read as operative systems.

A large part of the works is produced within the framework of the ifa travelling exhibition EVROVIZION – Crossing Stories and Spaces and will continue to be developed and shown in 13 countries until 2029. The series shifts attention away from representative centres toward those places where European self images are materially produced. From the margin as a supposedly deficient zone to the margin as the production site of the so called centre.

In ROOM TO NEGOTIATE, the object of negotiation remains absent. Overwritten. Occupied. Displaced. Recoded. Studio Softić’s works do not respond with synthesis but with openness. They create temporary constellations in which hidden structures and blocked meanings become visible and thus negotiable again. The exhibition marks an interim stage of this ongoing artistic investigation. A parallel programme of talks and screenings continues the inquiry.

With the support of:

Through archival fragments and images of abandoned spaces, she approaches a silence that overshadowed her family for years. In places marked by absence, she reveals how decades of fear and repression have settled into walls, objects and conversations.
The film mirrors the fragile structure of memory itself. By interweaving footage of political protests from the past to the present, private loss connects with ongoing struggles for freedom, making clear that remembrance is itself a form of resistance. (sas)

It deals with the historical erasure of the protests on International Women’s Day on 8 March 1979 in Iran and at the same time traces the continuity of feminist struggles from that moment to the present. Absence, preservation and transmission emerge as central concerns, bringing collective authorship and feminist archival practice to the fore as forms of resistance.

The project is based on the short film Year Zero, which documented women’s protests against the mandatory introduction of the hijab when the Islamic Republic was still on the rise.

Initiated by Katayoon Barzegar and expanded through collaboration with artists, researchers, and historians, the publication Monument Zero brings together essays, archival materials, and visual contributions that examine how scattered traces of resistance are remembered, documented, or made invisible.

At the dokumentarfilmwoche hamburg, Katayoon Barzegar and Behshad Tajammol will talk about their collaborative research process and the development of the archive that shaped the project. The event will also include excerpts from their new hybrid documentary film Murmurs in the Distance, which was made in collaboration with Pegah Pasalar.

> Iranian Women’s Liberation Movement: Year Zero

From 8 March onwards, demonstrations spread throughout Tehran and other cities. Four French feminists captured these days on 16mm film and photographed the events. This material was later used to make a documentary film, which was completed shortly after their forced departure. Decades later, the film reappeared online and spread with new subtitles and renewed relevance. What began as a short documentary of a historic moment keeps coming back in the context of ongoing resistance, bringing the unfulfilled demands of 1979 back into consciousness. (sas)

> Book Presentation: Monument Zero

In Hara Kazuo’s first feature length film, he accompanies members of the Green Lawn Movement, people with cerebral palsy, between everyday life and activist interventions. Acknowledging his own situatedness as a non disabled person forms the starting point of a film that unfolds the resulting conflict in a mixture of brazen intrusion and unconditional solidarity. Goodbye CP is a document of these individuals and at the same time their loud, raw, at times brutal, yet repeatedly tender ally. Unflinchingly, Hara stares at his protagonists and at those who stare at them, on the streets of Tokyo in the 1970s and in the cinema in Hamburg in 2026. (alb)

> Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

> The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

> Workshop discussion Hara Kazuo: Action Documentaries

> A Dedicated Life

> Following the festival: Minamata Mandala

While the Super 8 projector rattles away in the background, the age-old stylistic devices of silent film are used to transform the arduous search for accommodation into a heart-wrenching cinematic miniature. ‘Where are you really from?’ Black, Indigenous and people of colour are constantly asked. ‘I’m just a person looking for a home’ … (tg)

dokland hamburg

The dokumentarfilmwoche hamburg is one of the most important meeting places for the North German documentary film scene. In addition to an international film programme, our dokland hamburg section shows documentary films whose makers, locations or themes have a connection to the Hamburg metropolitan region. From over 50 film submissions each year, our collective usually selects six to eight films to be presented at the festival. The films in this section are marked with the blue dokland hamburg sticker next to it.

At the train station she unexpectedly meets her old friend Andrii, now a soldier, on his way back to his unit near the front after recovering from an injury. She accompanies him to his unit and follows a heated argument with comrades over his lost equipment. The breathless form of the film starkly reveals the elusive simultaneity of connection, tenderness and normality on the one hand, and the brutally deforming violence of war on the other. Can experiences of brutalization and suffering be contained at all? Can they be washed away? A sharp glimpse into realities in a country almost next door. (tg)

In conversation, they capture a historical state of suspension, between defiance and disillusionment, loss and perseverance. Three decades later, the film returns to these places. Schwarze Pumpe, Spremberg, Hoyerswerda: in the former GDR energy triangle, history and present overlap in a multilayered panorama of industry, landscape and memory, and the film’s investigation likewise interweaves its visual and temporal layers. Carried by a precise text spoken by Lilith Stangenberg, the material condenses into a polyphonic portrait of Lusatia. (sh/mr)

In the early 1990s, while both sides are arming themselves, Reihl-Kir travels tirelessly throughout the region, mediating between the Croats and the Serbian minority. His stance also puts him at odds with the increasingly aggressive nationalism of the Croatian institutions. He is convinced that if the talks break down, there will be war. On 1 July 1991, he was shot dead in the street. Using television archive footage and interviews with contemporary witnesses, Ivan Ramljak reconstructs the events shortly before the outbreak of war and, not least, establishes a connection to Croatia’s present day. (mg)

A precise order emerges from her movements and repetitive actions, in which small things become events. A wave in the carpet, which poses a tripping hazard, is carefully smoothed out. The camera is already in the room, a silent accomplice to the routines and gestures, attentively registering light and spaces. In a body that has slowed down, every movement becomes a conscious action. Thus unfolds a silent choreography of everyday life, in which repetition and precision give rise to a quiet tension of its own. (sh)

Curtis Miller takes us on a trip through the Midwestern United States, tracing a weather phenomenon and a piece of American history. In small towns repeatedly ravaged by destructive winds, images and local monuments, eyewitness accounts and devotional objects bear witness to deep inscriptions in the collective memory. With visual ingenuity and subtle humour, without diminishing the tragedy and grief, the film interweaves historical and contemporary images from Tornado Alley into a multi layered portrait of American public life, capturing both the fascination with and the myths surrounding tornadoes. “Nothing left but pictures.” (af)

With his camera, he visits his former partner Takeda Miyuki in Okinawa, where she is living in a relationship with Sugako, who is the same age, sharing care work for first one and later several children. Hara films their life together, including the everyday conflicts that he repeatedly helps to provoke through his own interventions. Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 is an all in documentary, immersive and intensely physical, in which a curious and tender audacity turns the film itself into the site of conflict. It unfolds between people bound together and divided by affection and desire, by children and by political utopias. (alb)

> Goodbye CP

> The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

> Workshop Discussion Hara Kazuo: Action Documentaries

> A Dedicated Life

> Following the festival: Minamata Mandala

In the north of Khuzestan province, she encounters a nomadic family in which the women preserve the ancient craft of carpet weaving and whose lives are inextricably intertwined with culture and nature. In conversation with her brother, who is operating the camera on location, she reflects from exile on questions of belonging, visual regimes, closeness and distance, and traditional role models in patriarchy. Carpets, smartphones and film interweave to become media of memory – threads of a multi-layered, self-reflective narrative. (mr)

Whether from the prison cell or the corridor telephone, calls can only be made from the inside to the outside. Entering the account number and PIN is laborious, and the credit on the telephone account is essential. The connection is repeatedly interrupted. These interruptions find their way into the MiniDV footage, which accompanies the communication process on the outside. Between practical questions, shared memories and watching crime shows together, Hinterlegte Nummern observes the attempt to create a shared reality despite all the technical fragility and situational impossibility. (mr)

A light filled apartment, the camera glides across the inventory, focused yet restless. The grandmother sits in front of the television, which reports on war. Then the film moves outside. Teenagers play on wasteland, the camera follows them, attentive to their movements, drifting and digressing. A landscape of uneasy details, someone lights a fire, someone plays with a pistol. Nature on the outskirts of the city, between old buildings, architecture decaying, an excavator tearing something down. In between, a beautiful shot. The highly militarized exclave of Kaliningrad could, if necessary, as a US general recently stated, be eliminated in “an unimaginably short time.” (mg)

Jan Soldat presents bodies and (tabooed) sexual practices as spaces for the expression of individual truth. At the center is the encounter between filmmaker, camera and counterpart: a constellation at eye level. Mutual trust forms the basis for the possibility of showing, speaking and listening. Observation and conversation are not modes of exhibition, but forms of shared approach. Speaking in front of and with the camera always points to the openness of the situation, to questions of responsibility and power relations: “It did matter that you were watching, but I wasn’t doing it for you.” Distance and proximity are carefully balanced in the moment of encounter, in the camera work and in the editingJan Soldat’s short films resemble one another in their formal rigor, their directness and attentiveness, their persistent and precise observation of protagonists and (living) spaces. And yet the cinematic situations could hardly be more different, because each individual decisively shapes the course of the encounter and thus the film itself. In this sense, each film is like a date, with all its fulfilled and unfulfilled expectations.

Jan Soldat assumes almost all roles within his productions himself, working consciously independently and without public film funding. His works screen worldwide at (porn) film festivals; most recently, in 2021, he was a guest at dokumentarfilmwoche with two films.

As microscopic as his cinematic approach may seem, these spotlights on individual sexuality reveal the lived realities of his protagonists and, both individually and collectively, create a resonant space of contemporary German Austrian life. Jan Soldat as a chronicler of the intimate, whose extensive archive will continue to shape humanity’s image of reality or realities for a long time to come. (ek/mr)

the group investigates how state actors repurpose techniques of forensic reconstruction and open source investigation in order to legitimize military attacks and violence. As part of contemporary warfare, fictional images, animated models, satellite imagery, and simulations become a central component of public communication strategies. This unfolds under highly asymmetrical conditions: the depicted sites are often inaccessible, destroyed, or actively being erased, while visual narratives about them are released before or in parallel with military attacks.

The event examines how such “illustrations” function as anticipatory evidence and how visual certainty is produced through speculative modeling, commercial assets, and narrative compression. Particular attention is given to the ways in which these images circulate in international media. In conversation with the research collective Viewfinder, we will engage with their current investigation, published in autumn 2025 by +972 Magazine, The Ferret, and SRF.

She scrolls through headlines, smokes, listens to music. Stoically, she kills time by writing. Scribbled in notebooks – her anger, her pain, her longing, her body, her fear, her lust, her disgust, war in her head. In her writing, she captures and fictionalises her life: snotty yet poetic, enigmatic yet immediate. Based on her texts, Isabel Pagliai weaves a sensual yet precise portrait of the young woman. In the interplay of light and darkness, language and sound, imagination and observation, poetry and emotion emerge on screen. Time passes, and reality appears fragmentarily within the fictionalised narrative. (ek)

Where water meets land and tonnes of goods are unloaded from vast container ships, truck drivers play cards, people sunbathe on the beach and children leap into the sea beneath cranes. In European ports, Tereza Smetanová explores this industrial terrain and its structures through expansive images and precise, poetic observation, while the port radio on Channel 16 lends fleeting moments of connection to a transit zone driven by consumption and relentless capitalism, where those who cannot pay are made to wait. Over. (af)

Tirelessly, he confronts relatives and survivors in order to uncover military atrocities, in particular the unresolved killing of two soldiers from his unit in New Guinea. His methods express a radical claim to truth, uncompromising and often ruthless. In Okuzaki, Hara finds the ideal protagonist for his confrontational, action inducing cinematic approach. The camera is not a neutral instrument of observation but intervenes, provokes and forces situations. The film thus becomes a rigorous document of a search for truth that negotiates guilt, responsibility and ethics, drawing the audience unconditionally into self interrogation. (bs)

> Goodybye CP

> Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

> Workshop Discussion Hara Kazuo: Action Documentaries

> A Dedicated Life

>Following the festival: Minamata Mandala

Evelyn Schwarz, the ‘mistress’ praised by her clients and owner of a BDSM studio, gives an engaging and self-confident insight into her business. Eroticism remains an illusion. Her staging requires office work, hygiene, decoration, styling and a pragmatic business sense. Karola Pfaffinger’s portrait of this working world is almost sociographic, for Evelyn Schwarz’s profession has enabled her to climb the social ladder, despite social contempt and taboo. Making a film about sex work, a profession in which illusions are sold, can only begin with disillusionment and end with the removal of taboos. (ab)

They swim, pray, sunbathe, wait – some day in, day out. The Mediterranean Sea lies before them, the city behind them. Adel, who learned to swim there. Qassem, who only comes because he can’t be at home during the day. Reda, who walks two hours to get there. Economic and political crises and wars have left their mark on their bodies; the Corniche is their refuge. Dima El-Horr encounters them with her camera and weaves their stories into an atmospheric inventory of Beirut in turmoil. She observes and asks questions, listens and interprets. Alongside conversations about the weather and love – the possibility of a new war that could threaten all their lives. (ek)

Amr, a trained baker, has been living in Paris for 17 years without a residence or work permit and with only rudimentary French. Pascale Bodet takes up his cause, accompanying him through daily life, the bureaucratic jungle, visits with friends and his integration language course. Their communication verges on the absurd: misunderstandings abound, and both stumble over the intricacies of official French. In the end, Amr passes the course, receives his papers and even state compensation for the delay in processing his case. But then immigration laws change, and he must attain the next language level. Beaucoup parler is both drama and comedy. (mg)

A group of Afghan migrants lives in a makeshift camp. The only sources of light are the campfire, mobile phones and the moon. An owl calls, a dog barks, the men prepare food and tell stories. Some sound like fairy tales, such as the one about the German princess Angela. They call friends far away who are either already inside or still on their way to the Schengen area. For how many years now? In truth, life here in the forest is better than in the EU. Business is good. A shadowy glimpse into an informal sector whose scale we know, yet prefer to ignore. (mg)

“I take the concept of the wisdom of life here entirely in its immanent sense, namely as the art of conducting life in the most pleasant and happy way possible.” But how does one attain such wisdom? How binding can practical advice for a fulfilled existence be? What relationship might exist between life and film? And what, ultimately, is the meaning of filmmaking?

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Duisburger Filmwoche, Patrick Holzapfel and Friederike Horstmann have selected two films from the festival’s history that are devoted precisely to this search for meaning and for cinema. Both films begin with the self and open outward in different directions: while Marian Kiss, in + – 0 Be Always Greater Than the Moment, turns her gaze outward and asks residents of Hamburg about their personal maxims, Jan Peters, in 34 Years Old, But I Still Haven’t Figured Out the Meaning of Life, consistently turns the camera on himself, developing a cinematic diary over many years. In miniature forms, both films explore what one seeks in life and in documentary cinema, where tangled ideas intermingle with profound insights and moments of realization. A program accompanied by fortune cookies and reflections on “Life, Universe and Everything,” driven by the unwavering desire to finally discover the meaning of life. (fh)

Her grandfather once gave her the eponymous piece of wisdom, and now she asks people in Hamburg about their maxims. This leads to fleeting encounters with, among others, a dominatrix, a beauty queen, an advertising copywriter, people big and small, old and young, who talk in a touching yet light-hearted way about what it means to live, believe and dream. Repeatedly, the focus is on new concepts of time that speak of a longing for a gentle escape from the circumstances. Why doesn’t everything run backwards? With delightful casualness, Marian Kiss paints a small portrait of the earth before it became round. (ph)

> Duisburger Filmwoche »Life, Universe and Everything«

> 34 Jahre, aber den Sinn des Lebens habe ich immer noch nicht rausgefunden

He chats away, talking about love and work, sometimes dancing or singing. He plays an ‘I’ born out of the ontological peculiarities of cinema. It is both an intoxicating TikTok parody avant la lettre and an essay on the perception of time. Inscribed within it is a small history of cinematic material. In the mode of a fleeting diary film, a self-portrait unfolds that moves as if the short snippets of images were the only proof that one really exists. The version shown in Duisburg in 2006 has grown by twenty years. ‘Why was it so fast, all these years have passed?’ the filmmaker sings at one point. (ph)

> Duisburger Filmwoche »Life, Universe and Everything«

> + – 0 Sei immer größer als der Augenblick

Not simply because the filmmaker is present, but because he is present and intervenes, setting reality in motion, into action. Hara’s “action documentaries” enact this with striking directness, in plain sight. They reveal filmmaking itself as the negotiation of a conflict that unfolds on screen, between filmmaker and protagonists as well as between viewers and the screen, and is carried back into the world.
After living and working for several years with people with disabilities, Hara made Goodbye CP (1972) together with the Green Lawn Movement, a group of activists with cerebral palsy. In the spirit of the student protests of the time, his first film radically provokes and fractures the ableist gaze. Hara makes visible, amplifies and even incites the distance between his protagonists and the world surrounding them. In doing so, he repeatedly crosses boundaries himself, reproducing or even generating forms of violence. This speaks to the conflictual complexity of attempting to escape and oppose the hierarchies embedded in society. Hara’s films never convey the self assurance of “getting it right.” Instead, they trace the search for a position, including its missteps and wrong turns.

Shortly thereafter, he made Extreme Private Eros: Love Song (1974), about which Hara writes in his book Camera Obtrusa: “So there was this love affair between a man and a woman; and then there was Okinawa, which had quite a bit of significance at the time. We thought of it as intense, as cutting edge.” From this constellation between himself and his former partner Takeda Miyuki emerges a film in which gender roles and desire, utopias and banalities are passionately, intrusively and strikingly close to reality played out along every axis of the gaze.

Completed 13 years later, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987) remains an almost legendary moment in militant cinema. The portrait of activist Okuzaki Kenzō in his search for the truth about several dead soldiers at the end of the Second World War escapes the usual formulas of the genre and escalates into a cinematic negotiation of violence as both artistic and political practice, a struggle between two competing desires to stage reality in front of and behind the camera.
Hara again encounters a self mythologizer in A Dedicated Life (1994). The writer Inoue Mitsuharu revels in constructing his own artistic persona, which the film gradually exposes as violent and fabricated.

The dokumentarfilmwoche hamburg seeks to place these films in dialogue with a present moment in which questions about the relevance and resistance of political filmmaking arise anew, or with renewed urgency. Hara’s “action documentaries” do not offer simple answers, but they help unfold the dimensions of these questions, at times pushing them to the often invoked threshold of pain. During the festival, all four films will be screened and discussed in Hara’s presence. An extended workshop conversation will address broader contexts and establish connections to his later works, which pursue the same political stance in markedly different aesthetic forms.
Following the festival, Hara’s latest film, the six hour Minamata Mandala (2020), will be screened on Sunday, June 3 at B Movie in Hamburg. (alb/bs)

> Goodbye CP

> Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

> The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

> A Dedicated Life

>Following the festival: Minamata Mandala

Rather than foregrounding his literary work, Hara is interested in the construction of Inoue’s persona, suspended between fabrication and self mythologizing. Over the course of three years, he accompanies Inoue through workshops, hinted affairs and a battle with cancer until his death. The film negotiates the tension between truth and fiction not in abstract terms, but through the figure of the novelist himself. Hara’s stylistic awareness is striking, as is his ability, together with editor Nabeshima Jun, to unfold a multilayered reflection on a complex and contradictory life using elements of narrative cinema. Compared to his earlier films, this portrait appears less drastic, almost tender. (bs)

> Goodbye CP

> Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

> The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

> Workshop discussion Hara Kazuo: Action Documentaries

>Following the festival: Minamata Mandala

Yet traces of distant struggles persist in unexpected details: in murals bearing the call “Viva Palestina,” in inherited place names, and in stories passed down from generation to generation. Children swim in the river, rituals structure the cycle of the seasons, and paths lead toward imagined places. While some memories return and others fade, the film draws the audience into a quiet dialogue: What remains, and what is at risk of disappearing? (fb)

Contemporary witnesses recall those days and three women who played formative roles in the resistance against the German occupation. Two of them, who lived openly as a couple, had founded a progressive school on the outskirts of town, which also supported the Resistance in the surrounding mountains. The third was a secretary at the town hall, where she issued fake identity cards for persecuted people. Using archive material and scenes featuring current schoolgirls from Dieulefit, the director, a full-time teacher, weaves the past with the present. The educational aim of the production by a non-profit association in Hamburg is clear: knowledge of the resistance must be passed on to future generations. (tg)

The real horror, the displacement and destruction of Palestinian life by Israeli rockets, cannot be grasped if she views Gaza only from a distance, a friend accuses Anat Even in Effondrement. The Israeli filmmaker attempts to escape her sense of powerlessness and drives along the border, tracing the outer lines of conflict in order to expose the inner ones. She struggles with herself, reflects in conversation with the friend, who ultimately breaks off the correspondence, and documents what she encounters: a kibbutz destroyed on October 7, the machinery of the war of retaliation, tractors still tilling the land, a gathering of radical settlers, birds frightened by the thunder of bombs that reverberates throughout the entire film. (ab)

The film interweaves archival footage, interviews and concert recordings into a dense portrait of saxophonist Ornette Coleman, pioneer of free jazz. At its center is the opening of the Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth, Coleman’s hometown. Clarke employs innovative editing techniques and video effects to translate Coleman’s theory of “harmolodics” into cinematic form. In doing so, she reveals how Coleman broke through social boundaries and musical conventions. The film presents him not only as a musician but as a visionary thinker whose influence continues to resonate within the avant garde. A visual and sonic experience that perfectly captures the spirit of improvisation. (fg)

in 1892, cholera raged in Hamburg, killing 10,000 Hamburg residents in agony within six weeks. In his 1987 book Death in Hamburg, British historian Richard J. Evans explains why it was Hamburg, of all places, that was hit by a pandemic of such devastating proportions at the end of the 19th century. Following in the footsteps of Evans’ study, Klaus Wildenhahn asks the historian associative questions. On another historical level, the film draws parallels between the city-state of that time with its slums and the Gängeviertel district, and England under Margaret Thatcher. (rg)

Documenting is never mere recording. It is always an inscription of one’s own perspective, a shaping and reframing through the conditions of production and the mediating medium, in filmmaking as in writing. Is the chosen form adequate to what has been experienced? Does the complexity of experience get lost in translation? What does fictionalization add?

We take the playwright Wolfram Lotz’s two most recent publications, Holy Scripture I and Dreams in Europe, as an opportunity to explore these fundamental questions of the documentary. A summary of the contents of these two works will, due to the limited space on this page and at the risk of rudely omitting the essential, be skipped here.

Back to the incidental: Wolfram Lotz’s gaze is often drawn to the everyday. He collects, he archives. In writing, he allows himself to be distracted by the seemingly trivial and thus exposes himself to the constant loss that comes with expressing oneself. Elevating the uninteresting, circling the essential by way of the marginal, portraying a hiccup in thought: “a bit of wind coughing through an alder tree, of course […] and Netflix.”

At times, it seems as though he is just as fond of witnessing the failure of an idea as its success. For this, Wolfram Lotz has primarily chosen the space of the theatre, where his texts are put to the test, there “where reality and fiction collide, […] where both lose their composure in a sacred collision.” And is filmmaking not much the same? Where fictional films are merely documented desires and documentary films fact based fictions. You see? No, we are not entirely sure either. That is precisely why we have invited Wolfram Lotz to join us for a Sunday morning conversation, balancing on the threshold between filmmaking and writing. (ab/ek)

This was linked to a revolutionary project that championed gender equality, grassroots democracy and ecology. As part of this revolution, the Rojava Film Commune was formed in 2015 to produce films, train film workers and, overall, reclaim cinema and film as a means of reshaping society. Part of the documentary film week team was on site in November 2025, spoke with members of the film commune and visited the Rojava International Film Festival.

At the beginning of January this year, negotiations between the transitional regime and the self-administration escalated. People were displaced, civilians massacred and infrastructure destroyed, with the aim of replacing the democratic, federal project with a centralised state with a uniform national and religious narrative.

If circumstances allow, we will be able to welcome Sevinaz Evdike from Qamişlo to Hamburg. She is a filmmaker and co-founder of the Rojava Film Collective. We will also be joined by Olmo Couto, a filmmaker and cameraman who was part of the Rojava Film Collective and whose film Serê Kaniyê we will be screening. Afterwards, we will talk about the situation in north-eastern Syria, the role film can play between memory culture, representation politics and the discussion of practical issues, and how cinema can create a public space for everyone in a social environment that is still largely patriarchal despite the feminist character of the revolution. (mg/bs/po)

> Serê Kaniyê

They are all involved in building a self-assured civil society in the town of Serê Kaniyê in the Syrian-Turkish border region. Surya fought with the YPJ, the Kurdish Women’s Defence Units. Although she is now, as she herself says, “old and tired”, she remains cheerful and steadfastly committed to the cause, for instance by teaching Arab and Kurdish women how to handle an AK-47. During the reign of terror of IS in the city of Raqqa, Diya protected several Yazidi women, making use of the dress code in the process. Dilan is an internationalist who works as a medic in Sere Kaniye. During the filming of the documentary, Turkey and its proxy militias attacked Sere Kaniye. (mg/bs/po)

> Discussion: Rojava: Cinema and Social Contract

where women once sought release from the bite of a mythical spider through trance like dances. Rare archival footage merges with archaic landscapes and intertwines with intimate letters exchanged between the anthropologist Annabella and Anna, one of the dancing women. In this way, the fragile bond between researcher and subject comes to light. Suspended between memory and the present, the film reveals how rituals and longings persist beyond folkloric backdrops and tourist stagings. A hypnotic cinematic journey, a weave of magic, history and personal destinies that are inseparably intertwined. (fb)

“Under what circumstances would you report your teacher?” a teacher asks her class in Berlin Moabit. “Where is the line between political education and indoctrination?” investigates Yulia Lokshina, who herself experienced a systemic shift when she moved from Russia to Germany in 1999. Satellite images, 3D models, testimonies of a protest captured with a handheld camera, a Russian teacher seeking asylum in Berlin. The places and visual worlds in Active Vocabulary initially seem only loosely connected, yet within the filmic constellation the outline of a symbolic classroom begins to emerge, deciphered as the foundation of a society. There, all elements converge into an inherently political question, that of educating human beings toward autonomy. (ab)

Even their variations of screeching begin to sound like language. For now, the birds remain on the ground, busy incubating eggs and raising their young. Then the time comes to lead the fledglings to their source of food. The table is richly set: Canada’s largest landfill near Montreal has enabled the ring billed gull, once nearly exterminated, to grow into one of the most populous bird species worldwide. Human intervention against these unwanted inhabitants of the garbage mountains begins with deterrence and control. Enter the falcon, deployed in the service of order. A camera mounted on the raptor’s hood documents the hunt. The film does not explain the relationship between humans and “nature.” It shows what we stand to inherit. (as)

Minamata Mandala, filmed over a period of 15 years, follows a wide range of people and life stories connected to the industrial environmental catastrophe in the Minamata region, a disaster that was only slowly and inadequately addressed. Between 1932 and 1968, the Chisso Corporation discharged wastewater containing methylmercury into the sea. For the local population this led to severe poisoning, causing neurological damage, mutations and death. Hara accompanies the patients’ decades long struggle for recognition and compensation, clarifies the complex circumstances and takes a clear stance, as in his earlier films. He stands on the side of the working, sick and disabled people who dare to rise up against an entire system. (alb/bs)

> Goodbye CP

> Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

> The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

> Workshop Discussion Hara Kazuo: Action Documentaries

> A Dedicated Life