Living in limbo
Living in exile is hard, as we can experience in Mohamed Jabaly’s award-winning Life Is Beautiful. Despite the hardships, this film is a feel-good story celebrating solidarity and friendship.
war
An unknown soldier
CONFLICT: Contrasting quiet Ukrainian life compositions with intercepted phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families.
The unflinching eye
Ending the gender apartheid
AFGHANISTAN:A film full of controversies, from hunger, child malnutrition, natural disasters, and the declining national economy to the totalitarianism of the Taliban regime.
Death – more or less real
REALITY: We perceive reality very differently. So let me suggest three areas where reality is real, strong and direct for all of us. But also about what a newly translated book by Pier Paolo Pasolini says about film’s contact with reality.
The meaning of war
UKRAINE: Abel Ferrara’s idiosyncratic take on the war in Ukraine melds poetic performances by Patti Smith with the experience of people at war.
Ethics for humanity to come
ETHICS: In the era of technology, the Western roots in Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions lose enchantment. Umberto Galimberti advocates for an ethics of aimless wandering, denouncing dominance and embracing a cosmopolitan, biocentric view that life on the earth is the measure of all things.
A mother’s life and passion: Anna Politkovskaya
RUSSIA: Anna Politkovskaya’s daughter: “My greatest wish is to experience Russia as a thriving, free and developed country, not desolate, poor and militarised.”
Grief in close-up
WAR: A loving reconstruction of a war hero’s human aura as a counterpoint to mere martyrdom and anonymous statistics.