1.5°C: Pyropolitics and the New World
Lukas Marxt’s mesmeric, surreal documentation of the LA wildfires rejects dialogue and analysis for an immersive, visceral experience of collective labour in a world ablaze.
Leipzig
Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing
Emotional vulnerability is granted as much space as reverence in ‘Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing’, Erik Shirai’s absorbing, handsomely packaged doc window onto a declining Japanese tradition.
Words of Negroes
Workers in an outdated sugar cane factory in Guadeloupe read from the transcripts of an 1842 trial against a slave owner in Sylvaine Dampierre’s powerful act of reclaiming history, Words of Negroes. Stunningly shot by Renaud Personnaz in crisp, vivid images, the film is a documentary only in as much as it’s a work of...
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May God Be With You
The act of exile is never a single-generation event; its ever-mutating ramifications shift down the family tree, undergoing a change as each generation grapples with questions of identity and belonging. Given that the person who flees their country often rejects shared introspection, preferring to contain memories rather than admit to the host of emotions that...
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Fati’s Choice
A Ghanaian woman makes an anti-migration decision her friends and family disagree with.
The Great Basin
Few people outside eastern Nevada will have even heard of White Pine County, a rural area on the border with Utah that’s home to just over 10,000 inhabitants. If it has any especially distinguishing characteristics outside ones stereotypically associated with rural counties in this part of America, The Great Basin doesn’t reveal, and while Chivas...
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A Bay
The city of Rio de Janeiro lies on the western shore of Guanabara Bay, the location of Murilo Salles's hymn to working class toil, A Bay (Uma baía). Salles excelled as cinematographer in such Brazilian film classics as Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and has directed both fiction and documentaries, winning a Silver Dove...
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