«We try to be humble lighthouses in the often-chaotic sea of visual content and image saturation»
Biografilm: With its 20th edition kicking off this week, Modern Times Review spoke with Artistic Directors Chiara Liberti and Massimo Benvegnu on their roles, documentary inspirations, the festival’s place within a broader continental sphere, and more.
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Letters from the Silenced Country
BELARUS: A sombre and shocking glimpse inside the horror that opponents of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko experience.
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The Legend of the Desert
SAHARA: recordings of this trip to the Sahara from the 1990s in the family archives
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The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias
PHILOSOPHY: In the grand conclusion of his Pervert's Guide trilogy, Slavoj Žižek wants us to embrace the end of the world with a healthy dose of radical pessimism.
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No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman
CONFLICT: Halkawt Mustafa's No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman seizes the toxic grammar of post-9/11 war cinema and hands it to a female Peshmerga sniper, reclaiming dignity for the women, the land and the cinema that ISIS has erased.
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Concrete Land
PALESTINE: Asmahan Bkerat spent eight years with a landless Afro-Palestinian Bedouin family outside Amman, filming a life built around animals and song that Jordanian bureaucracy is slowly dismantling.
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Electing Ms Santa
POLITICS: Raisa Răzmeriță's debut documentary follows Elena, a Moldovan social activist known locally as Santa, as she moves from solving her village's problems to openly challenging its entrenched male leadership.
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How To Feed A Dictator
POWER: How to Feed a Dictator turns the private kitchens of five twentieth-century tyrants into a study of complicity and appetite.
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Good People
CORRUPTION: Survivors of North Macedonia's deadliest nightclub fire speak directly to camera in Milcho Manchevski's self-funded response to a corruption scandal he lived through himself.
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The Siege of Paradise
TOURISM: Follow the residents of Cinque Terre as they navigate a tourist economy that both sustains and slowly erodes the villages they call home.
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Earth’s Greatest Enemy
MILITARISM: Abby Martin and Mike Prysner spent five years costing out the U.S. military as a planetary object. Washington answered this month by asking for another $1.5 trillion and putting the word War back on the door.