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.

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...

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.

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.

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).

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.

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...

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).

The films of Ruth Beckermann urge and document the repossession of one’s time and space, a political way of introspection, a resistance against oblivion, and they offer an insight into rites, customs and performances. Ruth Beckermann, one of the freest filmmakers of our era turned 70 on November 27, 2022.