Taking a look at Goran Dević’s filmography, we can identify several works about collectives, local communities or specific social groups. What’s to Be Done? also depicts such a community, namely the leaders and the employees of the company Gredelj. Dević started shooting this documentary as a research material for a fiction feature, after he read the news about the suicide of the vice...

“In Germany they were called ‘Gastarbeiter’, i.e. guest workers. They were supposed to work in the country for a few years, to save money for their families, and then return home. Workers underwent rigorous health inspections (too demeaning for tourists), and they put up with this in order to earn money to pay for their wedding, to be able to buy a tractor, or to send wages back to their hometown...

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...

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.

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.