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Whose garbage is on the North Pole? Social responsibility of environmental damages

Wednesday, 01/25/2023

Steffen Krones’s The North Drift presents an experiment in which we get the chance to follow a plastic bottle’s way from Dresden up until the North Pole. In this participatory [1] documentary we follow the director himself, setting up his project: building GPS buoys with his scientist friend, Paul to examine how the ocean currents carry the trash and litter such as plastic bottles, plastic bags or even a Ralph Lauren cap – as seen in the movie.

The role of a documentary in showing the power of the independent press

Wednesday, 01/25/2023

1557. This is the number of journalists who have been killed worldwide since 1993. The UNESCO Observatory of Killed Journalists also reported that 55 journalists were killed in 2021.

Social Issues through a Personal Story (Fragile Memory)

Tuesday, 01/17/2023

Fragile Memory (2022) is a Ukrainian documentary by Igor Ivanko about his grandfather Leonid Burlaka, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Leonid is a former cinematographer, who used to work for some of the most prestigious movies made by Odessa Film Studio during its glory days.

Breaking the Taboos of Trauma (Bigger than Trauma)

Tuesday, 01/17/2023

Bigger than Trauma revolves around the breaking of taboos and the reversal of stigmatization on multiple mental and societal levels. Its central topic of surviving wartime rape brings about serious and lasting impacts on the survivors’ personal and social lives. They have to endure atrocious physical and mental traumas in themselves which often still define their relationships with their own bodies and the outer world, but it is generally followed by further traumatic experiences merely through having fallen victims to wartime rape – often by their fellow villagers and neighbors, as it is displayed in the torturous lives and consequentially complex sets of mental health problems of middle-aged female survivors.

The Power of Healing Through Community (Bigger than Trauma)

Thursday, 01/12/2023

Vedrana Pribačić’s film presents the healing journey of a group of women who, for decades, have been carrying the trauma of a dehumanizing yet overlooked set of events: rape, enslavement and torture that took place during the Yugoslav Wars in the 90s.

Life of Ambulance Workers through the Pandemic of Lost Desires (Mountains and Heaven in Between)

Thursday, 01/12/2023

Strikingly non-intrusive and employing the observational mode, Dymytro Hryshko’s Mountains and Heaven in Between (2022) traverses through a plenitude of vignette-like chapters faced by ambulance workers. The film is set in the quaint village of Kolochava, which lies amidst peaks of snow-covered Transcarpathian Mountains, in Western Ukraine.

Archive as a device in personal documentary (Fragile Memory)

Thursday, 01/12/2023

Documentary films represent reality rather than the fictional world, and the relationship between the filmmaker and topic is different. When a documentary filmmaker chooses a personal topic where the protagonist is oneself or a very close person to them, they are exposing their vulnerable moments to the eyes of public. It is also the situation in Ivanko Igor’s Fragile Memory (2022).

Dangerous Media in The Killing of a Journalist

Monday, 12/12/2022

The efficacy and potency of journalism is in question. Thomas Keenan points to the Bosnian war as epitomic of the contrary influence of media footage and reporting, which can act to desensitise and pacify those viewers it otherwise seeks to inspire.

Excavating a lost history of women (Nelly and Nadine)

Tuesday, 12/06/2022

Magnus Gertten’s Nelly and Nadine tells the unconventional story of two women who met in concentration camps during World War II. The film begins by explaining why Nelly's granddaughter, Sylvie, has not dared to open her grandmother's diaries, postcards, and rolls of film for years. This hesitation that we see at the very beginning, the fear derived from the irreversibility of crossing a threshold, is a mood shared by the director, the audience and the protagonist. Knowing that we are about to watch a film about WW2 and the concentration camps, we are as unprepared as Sylvie for the horrors that would spawn from this personal archive, so symbolically left to be dusted in the attic.

A New Hope: The Young Indigenous Generation (The Territory)

Tuesday, 12/06/2022

What comes to mind when one hears the words 'indigenous people'? One may think of 'primitive' or 'innate,' which are the counterparts to 'urbanized' or 'technological.' However, surprisingly enough, one can see tech-savvy indigenous people in Alex Pritz's first feature documentary, The Territory (2022).