COVID-19 pandemic re-actualized the issue of housing for the majority of the world's population. In 2020, rental strikes took place in the United States and Italy. At the same time the phrase 'cancel rent' consolidated the efforts of thousands of activists who demanded landlords to cancel their quarantine rent.

The films of this program tell about the struggle for the right to housing in several countries. And that gentrification is not about the development of business, infrastructure, and social life. It is rather about the displacement and eviction of people from their homes. The consequences developers and authorities tend to ignore.

Curated by Lena Syrbu

THIS IS MY LAND…

Salvador Miranda

Netherlands | 2019, 8 min

This is my land… is an experimental 2-channel film examining the trial of a woman whose home is threatened by a new development project. Her ideas of home, community and utopia are examined alongside those of the Developer, who acts as a witness in the trial. The film explores the use of language and rhetoric, as well as competing visions of progress and development.

BEFORE OUR TIME COMES

Chloé Terren

France | 2019, 22 min

Raphaël takes care of his grandmother's flat as she stays in a nursing home. He tells her what happens to the neighbors, what he sees through the window. But an urbanization project is underway and the towers are strangely getting empty... Raphaël, who doesn’t dare to tell the truth, began to lie.

VERONICA

Talita Caselato

Brazil | 2020, 14 min

Dynamic portrait of the metropolis of São Paulo and of the activist Veronica Oliveira in her gentrifying neighbourhood. From a historical perspective, cleaning is often associated with slavery. Her Faxina Boa project fights for a positive, respectful approach to the profession.

THE HOUSES WE WERE

Arianna Lodeserto

Italy | 2018, 18 min

The first 50 years of the Low-Income Housing Institute created a veritable city within a city to deal with what has been and still remains the main and persistent problem of Rome: housing. But what is this city made of? Who gets left out?
The archives respond. The archives reassert.

We look for and collect histories of our families in the stories of our parents and grandparents, family photos, archival documents. Some of us even manage to capture our way home.

A selection of films made by people whose families decided to migrate a long time ago. Today these directors tell about their parents' homes, reflect on their identities and ties with already distant home places.

Curated by Lena Syrbu

GALINAS FLORAL DRESSES

Maria Beierbach

Switzerland, Kazakhstan | 2020, 34 min

Born in Kazakhstan, the director experienced the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a child and emigrated with her family to Germany. Stepnogorsk, the small town of her childhood, which is not more than 120km from the Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan, remains her homeland. Mascha visits this place annually because Galina lives there. For social and political reasons, Galina also emigrated to the so-called "City of Hope" in the early 1970’s, which was notorious for its prosperity and the best working conditions at the uranium factory. Through conversations and archive material, the filmmaker learnt more about this mysterious place and this woman who is her grandmother. Through observations, she takes part in the happiness and suffering of the residents of Stepnogorsk, where time seems to stand still. Nothing changes, only Galina grows older and more forgetful. She lives alone, looks after herself and her dacha, the so-called allotment garden of theEast, which is her love and her life. They can only survive together. Galina's motto in life: "Take things as they come and prepare yourself well for death".

EATING SOIL

Laura Weissenberger

Austria, Colombia | 2021, 26 min

Eating soil is an essay film that deals with the stories of Colombian women originating from director Laura Weissenberger’s memories and projections on her home country. It is exploring Colombian narrative culture based on the stories of a fictional family, which metaphorically represent a society rather than individual fates. Structured like a memory itself, the viewer encounters topics involving migration, hopes, regrets and approaches to life.

COMRADE TITO, I INHERIT

Olga Kosanović

Serbia, Germany | 2021, 27 min

A mountain slope, an orchard, a house. Idyllic pictures in southern Serbia. Three generations under the roof of the house that is being prepared for its transmission.
An approach to history that becomes part of one’s own. Home is complicated, inheriting may be a burden and Tito becomes a symbol for something that has been - a filmic examination of what remains.

WHERE HE WAS BORN

Laura Fong Prosper

Germany, China | 2020, 26 min

Documentary that follows the search of my roots and the finding of lost relatives in the house where my grandfather was born near Zhongshan, China.
In this film I touch subjects of life, death and identity. Being always a foreigner, even in my hometown, I never felt connected to any place or culture. I was always everything and nothing at the same time. Now, after this experience, I am starting to finally understand who I am and where I come from.

(OTHER) FOUNDATIONS

Aline Motta

Brazil | 2019, 16 min

(Other) Foundations (2017-2019) is the last installment of a trilogy that began in 2017 with "Bridges over the Abyss", followed by "If the sea had balconies". The film talks about the consequences of the journey that the artist undertook in search of her roots and questions the sense of belonging to a place that might not acknowledge its seemly evident kinship. It brings together Lagos in Nigeria, Cachoeira in Bahia and her home state Rio de Janeiro in Brazil through the waters and bridges that connect the three cities and their common ancestral background.

AT HOME BUT NOT AT HOME

Suneil Sanzgiri

India, USA | 2019, 11 min

Sanzgiri's father was 18 when India ousted the last remaining Portuguese colonizers from Goa in 1961. Combining 16mm with drone footage, desktop screenshots, and Skype interviews with his father, Sanzgiri utilizes various modes of seeing at a distance to question identity, the construction of memory and anti-colonial solidarity across continents.

The search for a better life is almost always related to labour and employment. But most migrants have to work for employers who seem to have no idea of decent working conditions.

Instability, insecurity, precariousness in the stories of people whose lives and labour have been influenced by borders and their limits.

Curated by Lena Syrbu

Homicide, Death, Animal Abuse

OTHER THAN THAT, I'M FINE | ONUN HARİCİNDE, İYİYİM

Eren Aksu

Germany, Turkey | 2020, 14 min

Joining a recent wave of immigration from Turkey to Germany, Aslı is new in Berlin. She auditions for the voice of the audio guide for an archaeological museum, facing her with objects from her home country, including a monumental Zeus Altar. Her encounters during the rest of the day further reveal the absurdity of out of placeness.

ETERNAL GUEST | EWIG GAST

Maximilian Karakatsanis

Germany | 2020, 9 min

My grandfather was one of the very first labour migrants of the recruitment agreement between Germany and Greece. A short poetic documentary about longing, family and being a so-called guest worker.

THE BRICKS | LOS LADRILLOS

Tito Montero

Spain | 2020, 19 min

On his first trip to the States, Tito Montero follows Eduardo Galeano’s footsteps through the streets of Chicago to trace a possible route to Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument, symbol of the global struggle for labor rights and origin of the annual celebration, every May 1st, of the International Workers' Day. The words of the filmmaker and his family working history mix with those of the Uruguayan writer and other literary references to compose a personal and collective journey through space and time.

LILI ALONE | DUO LI

Zou Jing

China | 2021, 22 min

Lili, a young mother, lives with her gambler husband in a remote part of Sichuan. Lonely and poor, she heads for the city in a bid to earn enough money to save her dying father.

OSLO

Shady Srour

Israel, Germany, Palestine | 2019, 16 min

Ziad, a Palestinian day labourer, is denied entry into Israel for work that day. The East Jerusalem border guards offer no explanation. Not wanting to return home empty-handed after promising his daughter meat for dinner, he needs to get creative. The journey back is long, and what he encounters in the dry mountains challenges his dignity.

Filmmaking is always collective and involves dozens or even hundreds of people. Instead, directing is mostly individual, 'auteur'. However, for film collectives, the filmmaking process is no longer an individual experience. It becomes more horizontal, inclusive and open to experiments.

For some film collectives from this program, filmmaking merges with activist practices. The directors reflect on anthropo(capitalo)cene, speciesism, climate change, and extractive capitalism. They politicize migration, criticize colonialism and patriarchy, speak on behalf of marginalized and racialized people of colour.

SIMILAR IMAGE

Lera Malchenko, Oleksandr Hants (fantastic little splash)

Ukraine | 2020, 9 min

On the beach or in the forest, when you close your eyes, you hear the sound of water, wind, rustle leaves, insects. You can still hear the motorboat, ringtone, highway, drone buzzing, plant.
When you just listen, the sounds mix; gently comes that all this nature is not the first or the second, it is the canvas, including you. But as soon as you open your eyes, you notice order everywhere. Human ordered the world more and more rapidly, until he found himself in the forest — unpredictable and magical * • It seems if you go deeper, you will have to expose yourself to danger and disappear * it also seems that this disappearance is not about absence, but about another form of presence.: *

LITTLE LOWER THAN THE ANGELS

Neozoon Art Collective

Germany | 2019, 14 min

The Found Footage Film explores the relationship between religion and speciesism. The main focus is on the numerous Youtube representatives of creationism and the idea that man is the undisputed pinnacle of creation. The experimental film collage moves between old and new worlds of images of religious clients and questions the reasonableness of anthropocentric beliefs.

GATED COMMUNE

Camel Collective

US | 2018, 9 min

Gated Commune is a video informed by Camel Collective's interest in the language of sustainable development, global metabolic processes, and the planning of the built environment. Footage is drawn from an archive of still and moving images harvested from online sources, and the voiceover consists of a hypothetical account of two future tendencies in architecture and the social behaviors that the built environment generates and reinforces.

THE KILLING OF ČÁHCERÁVGA

Miracle Workers Collective

Finland | 2020, 29 min

Miracle Workers Collective’s film work The Killing of Čáhcerávga (2020) is a collision of five different short films that, together, tell a disjointed, communal narrative. Employing a call-and-response strategy, the film expresses a politicised dialogue around indigeneity, movement, and migration in contemporary Europe. The collective share an interest in exploring the potentiality in disciplinary disobedience. Travelling through dreamscapes, lonely snowy plains, absurdist capitalist underwaters, greenhouse gardens, and desert landscapes, the film stretches into a practice of impossible spatial rules, strange dialogue practices, and inconclusive, unresolved scenic endings.

DAY IN THE LIFE

Karrabing Film Collective

Australia | 2020, 32 min

One of the Karrabing's most stirring and direct films, Day in the Life depicts obstacles encountered across four points of their day. A multilayered hip-hop soundscape sees helpless statements by white media make way for the Karrabing's ultimately empowering words of resistance. "Day in the Life" is the seventh major Karrabing Film Collective work. Across five chapters - Breakfast, Playtime, Lunch Break, Cocktail Hour, and Dinner and an audioscape directed by its younger members, DIL is a visual and sonic landscape that dramatizes and satirizes the settler forms of governance and extractive capitalism that Karrabing members encounter over the course of a day.