4 – 10 April 2024 RIFFRAFF Tickets now available!

As a lawyer and activist, the indomitable protagonist Aaju Peter is at the center of a struggle for the recognition of indigenous peoples, in a world where colonialism is still present. Transferred from Greenland to Denmark in her childhood, she lost her native language and culture and experienced another form of colonization in Canada. The film follows her on her personal journey, back to the places of trauma, and shows her persistent commitment to justice and a better future for generations to come. A story of resistance and discovery that raises questions about identity, belonging and recognition. (This Human World)

Ana was born in São Miguel, an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean ruled by religion and traditions. Growing up as the middle child of a family of three with her mother and grandmother, Ana realized that girls and boys were given different tasks at home. Through her friendship with Luis, her queer best friend who loves dresses as much as pants, Ana questions the world that is promised to her. When her friend Cloé arrives from Canada, bringing with her the glowing days of youth, Ana embarks on a journey that will take her beyond the horizon. Filled with new desires, the light of Wolf & Dog will reveal to Ana the right sea for her to sail. (Portugal Film Festival)

A poor but prideful teenager, Ulzii, lives in the yurt area of Ulaanbaatar with his family. He is a physics genius and is determined to win a science competition to earn a scholarship. When his mother finds a job in the countryside, she leaves him and his younger siblings to face a harsh winter by themselves. Ulzii will have to take a risky job to look after them all and keep his home heated. (First Hand Films)

Between light and darkness stands Olfa, a Tunisian woman and the mother of four daughters.
One day, her two older daughters disappear. To fill in their absence, the filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actresses and invents a unique cinema experience that will lift the veil on Olfa and her daughters’ life stories.
An intimate journey of hope, rebellion, violence, transmission and sisterhood that will question the very foundations of our societies. (Cannes)

The daily newspaper Etilaat Roz, based in Kabul, investigated corruption and abuse of office. For this, the independent medium was awarded a prize by Transparency International in 2020. After the hasty withdrawal of US armed forces in mid-August 2021, the US army frantically organised final evacuation flights, president Ghani fled the country and the Taliban took power. As a staff member, Abbas Rezaie observes editor Zaki Daryabi and his team at close quarters during the critical weeks of upheaval: Is it possible to continue working under these circumstances? How can the sources and staff be protected? Who can be put on the evacuation list? Zaki Daryabi has to make difficult decisions. A dramatic chamber play that reflects world history in a very confined space.
(DokFest München, Silvia Bauer und Daniel Sponsel)

Kit’s family had already experienced its fair share of tumult when the 24-year-old was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Kit’s mum, a community nurse who spends much of her time caring for dying patients, was traumatised by the thought that her son will be one of them. Meanwhile his dad, Lawrence, threw himself into a series of obscure diversion tactics – from growing cannabis in his spare room, to relinquishing his lifelong atheism and secretly attending a local synagogue. What Kit captures with his camera traverses the fine line between humour and grief, detailing his family’s acceptance of his fate, and celebrating the relationships that keep us going, particularly in life's darker moments. (Sheffield Doc Fest)

Filmmakers Alfredo García and Paulina Costa were babies when both of their fathers were taken by the forces of Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile. Together their fathers were held in a small cell within Villa Grimaldi, one of the most notorious torture centers of that era. During their imprisonment, their fathers forged an unbreakable friendship, but only one of them survived to return to his family. Now, 45 years later, the filmmakers and their families reconstruct the last days before their fathers were taken and what lay in store for them while in captivity. With actors re-enacting these experiences on set, this film within a film unfolds and generations of the two families witness the past play out before their eyes. An extraordinary piece of cinema that combines fiction and non-fiction formats to explore the generational trauma left behind by a bloodthirsty dictatorship. It’s been almost half a century, but the wounds are still open: this work brings more light to the violence of the past to forge a fair present and dream for a better future. (Thessaloniki Film Festival)

The 21-year-old non-binary performance artist Gena uses duct tape, trash and make-up to make outrageous creations for her performances and social media accounts. In incredibly high heels, she moves like an alien through the streets and metro stations of Moscow, protesting against the imminent war in Ukraine and violence against the LGBTQI+ community. In a country where being openly different is quickly regarded as clandestine “gay propaganda”, this is life-threatening. In Queendom, winner of the NEXT:WAVE Award on CPH:Dox, we follow Gena from her hometown of Magadan - a city in the far east of Russia, infamous for its gulag past to Moscow, and witness the difficulties she faces every day. We see her in drag, or as a student at a beauty academy, and listen in as she calls her grandparents, who raised her. These poignant conversations speak of both incomprehension and unconditional love. (IDFA)

Zu Gast ist Elisabeth Stern, die mit den Klima-Seniorin-nen die Schweiz vor den Europäischen Gerichtshof gebracht hat – ein Paradebeispiel für ein «Strategisches Rechtsverfahren». Sie erklärt, warum gerade ältere Frauen zu Gegnerinnen der laschen Klimapolitik der Schweiz werden. Georg Klingler (Greenpeace) hat die Kampagne begleitet und gibt Einblick in deren Strategie: Was brauchen solche Prozesse, um öffentlich zu mobilisieren und rechtlich wirksam zu werden? Joshua Wicke (Kurator Theaterhaus Gessnerallee) veranschaulicht anhand von Beispielen aus Theater, Performance und bildender Kunst, wie das Recht in Szene gesetzt werden kann, um eine Politik von unten zu fördern.

Images © Matthias Lüscher / Greenpeace & Kathrin Grissemann / Ex-Press

Myanmar is one of those countries that repeatedly appear in the international headlines, only to be ousted again for months on end. Ten young Burmese filmmakers, who must remain anonymous because to reveal their names would risk their lives, have dared to create this shocking cinematic appeal. This hybrid documentary shows the aftermath of the military coup in Myanmar on February 1, 2021, the ensuing nationwide protests and civil disobedience. Mobile phone footage shot by citizen journalists documents the brutal and arbitrary response of the military towards demonstrators. One young woman, for example, is shot dead for wearing a red T-shirt – red being considered the colour of the protests. In between demonstrations, we also see the opposition members at home. Their faces are never recognisable, but their fear, their determination, their grief, their anger and the huge void that their friend’s death has left behind in their everyday lives, become all the more palpable.
The members of this anonymous Myanmar film collective want neither to give up nor to be forced into the role of victims. This is exactly why this film was made. It is a document of resistance using the tools of cinema. (Berlinale)

Everyday life in Syria is not only marked by years of war but also by internalised misogyny and violence against women both within the family and in the workplace. It is not discussed, and harassment seems to be a commonplace expression of authority. Many women are pathologised and admitted to psychiatric wards, and even extreme abuse is rarely reported. In Damascus, a collective of young female actors comes together to research the topic. They plan to use the moving anonymous statements of countless women to create a stage play that will break taboos. But Eliana, Inana, Farah, Grace and Souhir face resistance – from their families and even during discussions within the group itself. When their feminist project suddenly encounters unexpected hurdles, their enthusiasm is put to its toughest test yet.
Syrian duo Talal Derki and Heba Khaled directed their film from the distance of their Berlin exile and together with Ali Wajeeh. In the film’s voice-over commentary, Heba Khaled puts the images and the oppression of Syrian women into context and draws comparisons with her own story as well as that of the actor Sabah Al Salem. (Berlinale)

When Rene (86) buys flowers, he always thinks about what color his wife would have chosen if she were alive. This elderly Danish man, being interviewed about his life with a group of his contemporaries, spent more years of his life with his wife than he has alone. In Echo of You, filmmaker Zara Zerny tenderly portrays nine elderly Danish people. They talk about their love lives, growing old, grief, and their perspectives on life and death. The eloquent, candid and sometimes poetic speakers are filmed at home, seated in a chair or in bed. Zerny intercuts these static shots with artistic, sometimes dreamy or abstract representations of their testimonies. Old home videos are also projected onto the interviewees, reflecting a different, bygone existence. The interviews create a group portrait of a unique generation that will not be with us for much longer. With their passing, their stories will perish, along with the furnishings and objects they have valued for decades, ranging from wooden ceilings, voile curtains and pendulum clocks to double rows of framed photos of generations of their relatives and forebears. (IDFA)

Mojtaba, Amzeh and Zar are refugees who have all endured prison and ideological interrogation in Iran. Filmmaker Mehran Tamadon – who lives in France – inquires if one of them would be willing to take part in an experiment in which he or she is interrogated by someone playing the role of an agent of the Islamic Republic. An internationally renowned actor in exile accepts the challenge.
Tamadon has long shown a keen interest in understanding “the other side” – a side diametrically opposed to his own humanist values. He is motivated by the hope – which even he sometimes perceives as naïve – that by establishing a relationship he will be able to break down the ideological wall which surrounds his interlocutors. Since his passport was confiscated following his film Iranian (Forum, 2014), this means that he can only question the regime in his homeland from afar. This enforced distance provides the starting point for an unusual role play in which his interrogator raises questions about the filmmaker’s own motivations and goals. The project’s very limitations soon become one of the main topics at the heart of this fascinating and unsettling film. (Berlinale)

Ein kniffliges Quiz zu Menschenrechtsthemen in Verbindung mit Film und Musik. Kommt mit Freund:innen und beweist euer Können!

Our heroes scrutinise, break free and go underground. Profound thoughts about conventional systems come to the surface and open space for alternative perspectives. RETHINKING BLACK NARRATIVES offers intimate insights into the relationship between people and their environment, breaks with convention and explores the interplay between identity and loss. Terra Mater poetically explores the connection between technology, people, and nature. We Are Griots offers a glimpse into a love story, riddled with traditional contradictions. Driven by physical and psychological endeavours, a fight for water breaks out in Harmattan. In Tezeta, our heroine embarks on a journey into the past in search of her mother. In Ousmane, a warm-hearted family man struggles with the loss of his roots. (Black Film Festival)

HARMATTAN OVe 17' | Muyiwa Awosika | Nigeria 2023 | Fiction
TEZETA OVe 22' I Sarah Imsand I Switzerland 2020 I Fiction
OUSMANE OVe 25' | Jorge Camarotti | Canada 2021 | Fiction
WE ARE GRIOTS OVe 17' | Demba Konate | France 2022 | Fiction
TERRA MATER – MOTHER LAND OVe 10' | Kantarama Gahigiri | Rwanda, Switzerland 2023 | Experimental fiction film

In 2018, anthracite mining comes to an end in Germany. Generations of miners have known nothing but shift work underground and coal dust on their skin and under their fingernails. Now this era is ending and a new one is dawning. The film accompanies five miners as they cross the threshold into the unknown. A grand documentary narrative filmed in Cinemascope. (DokFest München)

Solheil is 15 when his Jewish-Iranian family moves to Wedding, one of Berlin’s multicultural, predominantly Muslim, neighborhoods. Eager to fit in, Soheil hides his Judaism. At night, he joins his gang of friends in graffiti adventures; during the day, he flirts with cool girl Selma. His pretence is disrupted when the gang decide to rob the local Jew-lery, as they call it, run by none other than Soheil’s parents. It’s then that Soheil is forced to embrace who he is and where he comes from. (jiff)

12-year-old Nikita and his family have been staying in an underground station in Kharkiv for weeks. The place promises protection from Russian attacks, but there is not much distraction down here. The glaring lights and provisionally furnished carriages create a surreal to dreary atmosphere, pets roam the aisles, an aging musician plays songs on his guitar. Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík condense the first months of the war in Ukraine into an oppressive but not hopeless narrative, because the station is also a place of encounters. Niki soon meets Vika, who is his age and who coaxes the lethargic boy out of his shell. Together they roam the underworld, but while Vika is permitted to go to the surface at least once in a while, Niki’s radius of movement ends at the stairs on which sunlight falls occasionally. And yet an outside exists which the two directors make visible by Super 8 shots scattered in between. They show a damaged Kharkiv: destroyed vehicles, a charred bed, provisionally protected monuments. “Photophobia” is a hybrid, introspective film that manages to find something like tender romance in an unreal situation. (Dok Leipzig, Carolin Weidner)

What if from one day to the next, you’re no longer seen, but instead are stared at? The leading characters in this multi-layered film have ended up in a new world where suddenly nothing seems to align. In their new lives in the Netherlands, they unintentionally provoke reactions on a daily basis. Even after many years, they still hear the same questions over and over again: where are you from, do you speak Dutch, do you tan in the sun? This experience is all too familiar to director Niki Padidar, who left Iran when she was 7. In All You See, she enters into painful and humorous conversation with three others who are immigrants. There’s Khadija, originally from Somalia, who has been a “newcomer” for 27 years, Sophia, who has just come over from the UK, and Hanna from Ukraine, who watches cartoons and films to learn how to blend in and not constantly seem like a tourist.
In Padidar’s carefully designed film, these conversations are interspersed with her visual exploration of what it means to be subjected to the projections of others, and the alienation it evokes. How long can a newcomer be considered new? (IDFA)

Black dust, shrill metallic noises, dark tunnels, muscular bodies – all that is the past. At the end of 2018, extraction of coal throughout Germany came to an end. That same year, the voices of the emerging climate protest movement Fridays for Future grew louder. Against the backdrop of these media and socio-political events, the film follows five miners on their tragic, humorous and heartwarming search for a new role in life. (swissfilms)

A poor but prideful teenager, Ulzii, lives in the yurt area of Ulaanbaatar with his family. He is a physics genius and is determined to win a science competition to earn a scholarship. When his mother finds a job in the countryside, she leaves him and his younger siblings to face a harsh winter by themselves. Ulzii will have to take a risky job to look after them all and keep his home heated. (First Hand Films)

Residents of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais are waging a David-and-Goliath battle against the mining company Vale. Iron ore mining produces waste that is stored in river basins retained by huge, poorly constructed dams. The people who live nearby are in great danger.
The last catastrophic dam failure occurred in 2019, when a torrent of red mud engulfed countless villages, killing 270 people and causing a vast environmental disaster. Yet so far domestic nor international politics have done anything to stand in the way of the multinational, multi-billion-dollar company: plans for a brand new mine are already underway. The camera follows environmental activist and parliamentary committee member Maria Teresa Corujo in her tireless, unequal fight against the scandalously indifferent mining giant, and follows a group of residents who were forced to leave their village but now return in protest. Aesthetic, abstract shots of mining and river flows punctuate scenes of sometimes highly emotional meetings and evictions. (IDFA)

The actor Hiam Abbass, who lives in France, is one of the greatest movie stars from the Middle East. She played leading roles in the award-winning films of Israeli director Eran Riklis, acted in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and recently in the U.S. hit series “Succession.” She served on the juries of the big Festivals in Cannes and Berlin, presented her own directing debut in Venice. But she is also a mother, daughter and sister in a large Palestinian family full of resourceful women. In this real role she steps in front of the camera in her daughter Lina Soualem’s work and travels back to her hometown of Deir Hanna in northern Israel – an Arab village in the Jewish state.
“Don’t open the gate to past sorrows,” the director quotes a kind of family dogma. It refers, among other things, to the family’s traumatic expulsion from Tiberias, the city on the Sea of Galilee, in the 1948 Palestine War. But with her confrontation of the family history, Soualem also opens gates to past joys and allegedly discarded identities. Between home videos, historical archive footage, photos and letters, Abbass is a touching and approachable screen presence as she returns to her roots. The long shadow of her origins also falls on a woman of the world. (Dok Leipig, Jan-Philipp Kohlmann)

Between light and darkness stands Olfa, a Tunisian woman and the mother of four daughters.
One day, her two older daughters disappear. To fill in their absence, the filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actresses and invents a unique cinema experience that will lift the veil on Olfa and her daughters’ life stories.
An intimate journey of hope, rebellion, violence, transmission and sisterhood that will question the very foundations of our societies. (Cannes)

Solheil is 15 when his Jewish-Iranian family moves to Wedding, one of Berlin’s multicultural, predominantly Muslim, neighborhoods. Eager to fit in, Soheil hides his Judaism. At night, he joins his gang of friends in graffiti adventures; during the day, he flirts with cool girl Selma. His pretence is disrupted when the gang decide to rob the local Jew-lery, as they call it, run by none other than Soheil’s parents. It’s then that Soheil is forced to embrace who he is and where he comes from. (jiff)

Dominic Ongwen was nine years old when the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan terrorist group, abducted him and killed his parents. Joseph Kony’s guerrillas tortured and brainwashed him and forced him to kill. Thirty years later, Ongwen turned himself in to the authorities. Now he has become the first former child soldier to be charged with crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The charges range from murder and rape to torture and slavery. But can the adult man be separated from his traumatic past in order to convict him? Can someone be both victim and perpetrator? This is the central question for Krispus Ayena, who is appointed to defend Ongwen in the most high-profile case of his career.
(Human Rights Film Festival Berlin)

Knowledge is power, and in China the state now knows more about the population than people know about themselves. Surveillance never has just one face, but is a fine-meshed mix of facial recognition, big data analysis and a points system where you can gain and lose points based on your behaviour – a system almost worthy of a dystopian parody, if it wasn’t already a reality. Amidst this spider web of monitoring, the protagonists each fight a battle for justice. Chen’s husband is a human rights activist lawyer who has been imprisoned since 2020 for his legal work. Ever since, her life has been monitored around the clock. We also meet one of the only independent journalists who has had the courage to investigate the shocking developments in the world’s largest country. ‘Total Trust’ is the first major film that intimately portrays courageous people living in China’s increasingly monitored society. An eye-opening and deeply disturbing tale of technology, abuse of power and (self-)censorship, which the Covid pandemic only caused to accelerate at rocket speed. (CPH:DOX)