This competitive section with a very meaningful name explores pressing issues that are not given the coverage they deserve. In this year’s eleven films, we take a look beneath the lid of media-neglected countries or events. After several years, we return to places such as Nagorno-Karabakh and Cuba. In Africa, we visit Ethiopia, Niger, and Egypt. And we bear witness to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza through protagonists who are not often heard.
Such is the case in the Ukrainian film Everything Needs to Live, whose heroine is the weightlifter Anna, who cares not only for the young athletes entrusted into her care but also for dozens of hastily abandoned pets. In another project, twenty-two short films shot in the ruins of Gaza present unique material. From Ground Zero may be described as consisting of a series of micro-documentaries and equally urgent live-action or animated single-act films that illustrate the miserable conditions and state of mind of Gaza’s inhabitants. The makers of these films are in some cases professionals, but in others they are people for whom the camera is a working tool for the first time. In comparison, theatre becomes a catalyst for self-expression for the Christian community in Egypt. In The Brink of Dreams a local women’s group uses street performance to raise awareness of women’s emancipation and rights.
The atmospheric essay film My Memory Is Full of Ghosts communicates the ambience of war-afflicted Syria. Its hypnotic rhythm is determined by the shots of the bombed city of Homs, which comes to life in the dozens of different personal stories. On the Border then provides a disturbing insight into the consequences of the noble efforts of the European Union, which in Niger contribute to the moral and economic destabilization of the country. Africa is also thematised in Made in Ethiopia, which reflects on the Chinese colonisation of Africa in terms of economic, social, and ecological consequences.
