The Cheating Underworld

Moving Day This is a story about how a family with many children moves into a new apartment in a newly constructed apartment building. The film “Moving Day” won a Silver Dragon Award at the 7th Krakow Film Festival. The jury’s decision stated: “For the warm and soulful relationship between the director and subjects of the film, expressed in a laconic form.”

Surreptitious Strange things lurk in a high school.

Pavel and Lyalya (A Jeru... “Like the right and left hand Your soul is close to my soul We are sealed shut, blissfully and warmly, Like the right and left wing…” The life and art of Pavel Kogan and Lyudmila Stanukinas, two famous Leningrad documentary filmmakers, can best be expressed by the Tsvetaeva stanza cited above. They are the main characters of this film, which their student Viktor Kossakovsky shot during Pavel Kogan’s final months. For Lyudmila Stanukinas, Lyalya, as those close to her called her, her husband was her only reason for existence. She was with him until the end and held onto his extinguishing life as much as she could.

S.O.S. Survive or Sacrif... Two sisters living separate lives on different continents are reunited on a Mediterranean Island. The two barely have time to bond and revive family ties as Kate, the elder, meets a group of locals and agrees to an exciting ride on a hot air balloon. But disaster strikes and as the result of a freak accident, the balloon is carried far out to sea. Their cell phones out of range, and the balloon running out of gas, Kate and her friends are battling for their lives. While, back on land, the younger sister, Liz, has become an unwanted "material witness" to a crime. Matters then take a dramatic twist, one that will mark their lives forever.

Test for Adults This film is the second installment (of five) of Igor Shadkhan and Svetlana Voloshina’s project Test for Adults (the first 16-year television observation of children and their parents in the USSR, 1978-1994). There are six television short stories, each dedicated to one of the children who are 10 years old at the time of shooting: Artyom, Julia, Pavel, Alyosha, Sveta, and Alexey. The authors are interested in the psychological portrait of children. The intimate nature of the interview and the delicacy of the interviewer allows them to touch upon difficult topics – loneliness in the hospital, the child’s experiences of parental divorce, the existential fears of children, leadership, attitudes, etc.

Expiation A father in search of how to help his sick daughter.

flatness surface mutatio... The film, collected from various views and shrunken feelings, is our common space for collectivity and queer kinship. We are all there, scrambling out of the cinema form and once again slipping away to there. The collage method of gluing us together: a mutating, holding, non-solidifying form of people. We refuse to panic. It is difficult for us to maintain a critical distance from the intimate, extracted, and repackaged in relation to other material. Film as a message, film as a community, film as a form of interaction at a distance. We are led by Zhuzha, devices, and touch, which we were so lacking in quarantine.

Cinmaton XXXV... Reel 35 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Opossum Resilience Opossum Resilience is inspired on a series of encounters and interviews with a Zapotec female land defender. This place-based fabulation grounded in the valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, bastardizes Mesoamerican myths around four figures: a Hill, an Agave, an Opossum and Lady Reed. Lady Reed is a mythical Mixtec character who helps the opossum to cut the agave leaves in order to get its sugary alcoholic sap. Opossum Resilience overlaps the time of creation with a contemporary socio-environmental conflict around the imposition of a mining project in an Indigenous Territory. It summons the powers of festivity and inhebriation; and imagines an opossum providing an activist with the mythical powers to play dead and then revive.

Touching Feeling Aykan Safoğlu takes his artistic friendship with Nihad Nino Pušija as the point of departure for Touching Feeling. Their friendship began in 2014 in the nGbK, an artists’ association in Berlin, where Pušija has been active since the 1990s as an artist, curator, activist, and photographer. Pušija has been recording the world around him for years with his camera: queer life in Kreuzberg, the life of the Romani in the former Yugoslavia and in German refugee shelters; everyday occurrences, but also scenes of flight and migration. Pušija’s photographs form the basis for the film; mark by mark, Safoğlu uncovers them on the black screen. The scratches on the picture’s surface turn into contours and fragments: prompting Safoğlu’s reflection on his role as observer, the defiant beauty of everyday life, and the terrible rupture that war and destruction left in their trail in the 1990s across the Balkans.