It seems, happily, we are to have a new narrative feature or documentary (or both) every year from Ukraine’s Sergei Loznitsa. Shortly after his 2012 sophomore narrative film In the Fog, Loznitsa had announced plans to commence filming on Babi Yar, which details the brutal eponymous massacre which took place in 1941 Ukraine. Due to the severe civil and political unrest in the region, Loznitsa was forced to move on to other projects. But following the premiere of 2018’s Donbass as the Un Certain Regard opening film (one of the year’s best films and still in need of US distribution), the director announced plans to revisit Babi Yar, eyeing a summer 2019 shoot.

Traffic rushes by as if nothing has happened. But beside the road, the rubble is smoldering, and firefighting helicopters are circling overhead. Ten minutes in, this is the first specific image we see of the devastating explosion that took place on 4 August 2020 at the Port of Beirut. Until this point, its presence in the film has been indirect—a man smoking beside a broken window, the distant sounds of ships’ horns and sirens.
Octopus is a thoughtful testimony to the aftermath of the explosion. First there is the stillness. Tightly framed shots show residents staring silently in houses with shattered windows. Shots of empty streets, with crumbling walls and cars dented by the shockwave, form an elegy accompanied by an ambient score.
In the second half, stillness cautiously makes way for a new beginning. Playing children fill the streets, and there are sounds of reconstruction; the city starts to regenerate and human resilience emerges.

Lebanese artist-filmmaker Zaatari conducts both an investigation and a stirring tribute to an act of resistance (or forbearance) that marked his childhood memories: the refusal of an Israeli pilot to bomb a boys' high school in south Lebanon in 1982.

On Three Posters is gebaseerd op found footage van videobrieven opgenomen door leden van de Libanese Communistische Partij, voorafgaand aan het uitvoeren van hun zelfmoordmissies.
Kort voor zijn dood in 1985 oefende Jamal Salti, die tegen de Israëlische bezetting van Zuid-Libanon (1982-2000) streed, zijn videogetuigenis in drie takes die maar minimaal van elkaar verschillen. Dit materiaal vormt het vertrekpunt voor gedachten over het spanningsveld tussen fundamenteel menselijke trekken en de heroïsche verbeelding van martelaarschap.
Rabih Mroué’s analyse spitst zich toe op een moment van aarzeling in een van de ongebruikte opnamen. Ook doet hij uit de doeken hoe, sinds de eerste presentatie van dit werk (als Three Posters samen met Elias Khoury in het jaar 2000), de ontvangst ervan is veranderd in de context van het geopolitieke landschap van na 11 september.

“Syriërs filmen hun eigen dood”, zo begint The Pixelated Revolution, een studie van het gebruik van mobiele telefoons tijdens de demonstraties in de eerste maanden van de revolutie in Syrië. Rabih Mroué plaatst een selectie van gevonden videomateriaal van botsingen en confrontaties, door opstandelingen gefilmd en op het internet gezet, in een nieuw kader en een nieuwe context om de breekbaarheid van het menselijk lichaam en populaire technologie in de werkelijkheid van een oorlog uit te lichten.
Zijn lezing is een bespiegeling over hoe Syriërs hun beelden “nu en hier” vastleggen, over de relatie tussen deze daad van fotografische documentatie en de dood, en over hoe wij die video’s als “nu, maar daar” bekijken.

It’s October 2019, and four progressive women are documenting the uprising in Beirut. They are journalist Hanine, Iraqi camerawoman Lujain, and Noel and Michelle, two artist sisters whose often-ironic songs have made them a voice for their generation. The prevailing mood is one of hope and change. But a few months later, Covid-19 has locked down the city, and all optimism seems to have evaporated.
This non-chronological account of a tumultuous period in recent Lebanese history loops back and forth between uprising and lockdown, with the four women calling each other and the film’s director Mai Masri on video. They express their opinions about current events and place them into historical perspective, but also offer glimpses into their personal lives.
The devastating blow of the explosion at the Port of Beirut, just ten months after the uprising, was still to come. Will the young women be able to hold onto their dream of a new Lebanon?

在电影导演提亚·图拔吉克只有七岁的时候，前南斯拉夫的内战就已经打到了她的家乡萨拉热窝。战争留下的伤痛在她的艺术作品中发挥了重要作用。在这部电影中，图拔吉克请荷兰退伍老兵弗兰克和哈姆与她共度了一个谈话之夜——在逐渐变暗的，空荡荡的剧院里，图拔吉克希望得到一些痛苦问题的答案，同时，她也试图在这两个受访者身上发现一些可以给她带来希望的东西。
一个女人、一个男人，一台摄像机——通过这个简单的设置，电影将所有的注意力集中在两场会面中的语言、手势和行为上，并经常用到特写镜头。尽管两位老兵他们都渴望得到某种解脱，对话的双方似乎来自两个无法结合的不同的世界。哈姆带着巨大的负罪感，而弗兰克则完全没有感情。图拔吉克试图解释：她的家人和朋友，尽管还活着，但没有一个人真正地从战争中幸存下来。他们能理解彼此的悲伤吗？
本片获IDFA最佳长片奖和IDFA最佳荷兰电影奖提名。

In Homework (1989), Abbas Kiarostami put questions to students at a public school: questions about homework, punishments, and dreams of the future. The result was a portrait of the generation that grew up during the Iran-Iraq war, trapped by uncertainty and a rigid upbringing.
Now, some 30 years later, directors Ashkan Nejati and Mehran Nematollahi repeat Kiarostami’s questions and come to the conclusion that the school system and society itself have changed dramatically. The gulf between rich and poor has grown far wider, and that has become evident in the schools. Parents, many of whom are illiterate, are unable to help their young ones, or otherwise too busy with their careers to supervise homework. Any sense of interest or guidance is absent.
Two now-adult subjects of Kiarostami’s film agree that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way responsibilities get dumped on the shoulders of teachers. The only thing that’s unchanged is the way the children reply in the approved manner—yes, of course they’ve done their homework.

1970年。共产主义波兰的罢工工人示威反对价格上涨。随着反叛活动愈演愈烈，紧张气氛和政府的暴力镇压也愈发强烈。托马斯·沃尔斯基利用定格动画再现电话时的场景，创作出一部精确而出色的电影。

How to succeed in an occupation for at least 54 years? Mograbi, director and narrator, builds the handbook of the perfect occupier based on testimonies from Israeli soldiers and archive footage. 5 million Palestinians live in the occupied territories under Israeli military rule, 2 million of them in the Gaza Strip, under total siege for the past several years. “The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has already lasted for 54 years.” This statement does not tell much about occupation. What does “occupation” imply? The first 54 years aims to provide an exclusive insight into the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people while it is still ongoing. Describing their orders, their missions and their actions, Israeli soldiers witnesses report on the mechanisms of oppression of Palestinians from 1967 to the present day. With these testimonies, they reveal the factory of the occupation machine.

Tal Elkayam’s first feature-length documentary is an unorthodox exploration of the bizarre reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: an associative compilation of found footage, composed entirely of excerpts from YouTube videos of the beach of Tel Aviv and the hills and valleys of the West Bank.
As bathers hurriedly seek shelter when the siren warns of missiles, soldiers on the other side clash with protesting Palestinians, and a bulldozer goes about its demolition work. An Israeli settler shows off his grapes, while elsewhere a Palestinian describes how his orchard was destroyed. Dogs harass a flock of sheep, dogs play on the beach. At times, protesters confront each other with Israeli and Palestinian flags.
In this energetic and apparently intuitive collage, two parallel realities full of staggering contrasts are juxtaposed, yet they are also inextricably linked. And not only because the poppies on the coast look just like the flowers growing in the hills.

当新闻中传出武汉爆发新冠疫情的第一批报道时，在国内其他地方，张秀华——正遭受着另一种疾病的折磨并为她自己的生命而战。医生们可能已经放弃了她，但是她的孩子和孙子们却没有，他们正在尽一切可能让她和他们在一起多呆一会儿。

这部作品以克制的黑白画面观察这个家庭、他们与母亲的处境、疫情造成的后果以及彼此之间的斗争。自尊心和对立的世界观最终使兄妹之间的关系变得紧张——但他们仍然没有从母亲那边让步。

对于家庭内部情况的呈现仍然是最重要的部分，但观众能不断地从新冠引发的危机和由此产生的限制中捕捉一些瞬间。通过这种方式，该片巧妙地将一场私人家庭危机与一场全球性紧急事件交织在一起，并在微观和宏观层面显示了它们对人类生活的相互影响。

2016年3月22日在布魯塞爾的梅爾貝克車站發生一起攻擊事件。薩賓是事件的倖存者，然而身體康復後，卻從此喪失相關的記憶，而他正開始尋找那些曾經在腦海中，卻已然消失的記憶碎片。

我出生在一个世俗主义和宗教观念分庭抗礼的伊朗家庭，父亲思想开放，母亲则是一名虔诚的伊斯兰教徒。他们的爱情见证了末代王朝的覆灭、伊斯兰革命的胜利，也经历了两伊战争的艰难岁月，一直持续至今。而这一切，都发生在我们位于德黑兰的家中。童年时期，我经常被迫在他们二者之间做出选择，每一天都要忍受来自一方的强迫和另一方的接纳。

A tragic love story between a prisoner and her captor. Flamboyant and full of life, Helena Citron is taken to Auschwitz as a young woman, and soon finds unlikely solace under the tutelage of Franz Wunsch, a high-ranking SS officer who falls in love with her and her magnetic singing voice. Risking a certain execution if caught, their forbidden relationship went on until her miraculous liberation. But when a letter arrives from Wunsch's wife, thirty years later, begging Helena to testify on Wunsch's behalf, she's faced with an impossible decision: will she help the man who brutalised so many lives, but saved hers, along with some of the people closest to her?

David Osit’s thought-provoking documentary is a real-life political saga following Musa Hadid, the Christian mayor of Ramallah, during his second term in office.

导演Luke Holland采访了近300位纳粹大屠杀的参与者和受害者。

Does a dead man have the right to become a father? Do parents, who lost their son, have the right to become grandparents after his death? In Israel, the desire for offspring has taken on an extra dimension. In His Image follows three mothers who lost a son during his military service and are now trying to have something of him live on in a posthumous grandchild, using semen taken immediately after his death.
Filmmaker Tami Ravid doesn’t ignore the ethical aspects of this phenomenon, but she follows the three families, each in their own phase of this emotional process, with compassion and without judgment. Haderet and her husband lost their son in 2004. After years of hesitation, his wife, now remarried, decided that she didn’t want to have a child by her deceased husband. But Haderet fought a lengthy legal battle to obtain her son’s sperm. Ludmila shows off her granddaughter, who was born 15 years after the death of her biological father. For Tzipi and the intended mother of her grandchild, Inbal, it’s a tense time, as Inbal tries to conceive via IVF.

聚焦漫画中说着“感觉真好蛙”的Pepe蛙，如何由一帧画面在网上爆火，成为全球知名、引起大量创作的魔性表情包，终至失控。而作者Matt Furie为夺回对角色的控制又做了什么。这是一个“奇怪而非常恐怖”的故事。