It looks like the past is stubborn and refuses to leave us alone. Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflâncă team up again in a new adventure aimed at recovering a history which was swept under the rug by years of intense denial. From the beginning of WWII, the Romanian Army’s Roșiori Regiment kept some notes on military operations. From a mere collection of observations and personal impressions, the diary becomes a precise chronicle of several micro-moments of the great War, of the capturing and the murdering of Jews on this piece of land crossed by the Prut river, as the notes are stripped of the charm that turns a diary into one of the most beautiful truth-recording mechanisms, be it individual or historical truth. These accounts, however, do transcend their banality, and the writings take on a new aura of meaning when there are juxtaposed with photographs of soldiers, the sunny landscape, and the future victims of the local Holocaust. The atrocity is even more present if we relate to it through purely descriptive phrases and album photos. Behind the lines of soldiers, layers of an indifferent landscape. On the water surface, rays of sunshine. ”Weather report: beautiful weather.” (Andreea Chiper)

Filmmaker Laure Portier documents her younger brother’s development, beginning with his tumultuous teenage years and culminating with the introspective process which determines him to reconsider his entire life. Carried by large temporal leaps, the film thus moves through various spaces – from the childhood home to Peruvian carols – following this self-taught adventurer in close combat with the years of his youth, as he pursues his own path. An initial feeling of silent desperation which threatens to engulf the entire film as the protagonist drifts away deeper and deeper (at some point, for instance, he ends up living on the streets in Spain), gradually gives way to brighter images bearing promises and hope. In this way, “I Am Free” becomes the story of an escape, of a trajectory which leads this young man to the edge of a society which makes itself felt in all its oppressive moralism. Portier unravels the thread of this fluctuating relationship by translating it cinematically – what a great initiative to offer her brother his own camera in order to film himself from a distance – to the point where it becomes the living testimony of this centrifugal drive. A confirmation of cinema’s solidarity mission – a guide and a form of support for the vulnerable -, which eventually represents an act of gratitude for those who have managed to take life into their own hands. (Victor Morozov)

In “Ukraine Without Jews,” Vasily Grossman sketches an ode to the victims of the massacre led by the German army in September 1941 in Ukraine, with the silent complicity of local authorities and civilians. Serghei Loznitsa quotes Grossman in his movie and he does it with a specific aim: to fill a historic void and to fight against oblivion. And his movie serves exactly the same purpose: “Babi Yar. Context” is a powerful memento and at the same time an almost organic anamnesis process, where anonymous figures rising in waves from the depths of time give us an overwhelming feeling of immediate presence, a presence which transcends immateriality through the power of images to preserve suffering, fear, and a lost world on the texture of film. “Babi Yar. Context” is not an easy movie to watch, but it is more than necessary since it addresses a shattering truth pertaining to Holocaust in all its forms, namely that, despite everything, despite the attempt to eradicate an entire existence, a culture, and a spirit, genocide leaves indelible marks, even 80 years later. What Loznitsa does goes beyond mere contextualization: by adding layers of meaning and uncovering forgotten, dust-covered histories, he forces us to confront the unknown ghosts of history, potential reflections from the past, who have come to seek justice at last. (Andreea Chiper)

Diem Ha Le’s feature debut is a missive from a territory which catches the eye of the Western viewer much too rarely, except for the short-lived upsurge of cinematic manifestos produced during the Vietnam War. The term “missive,” however, doesn’t fully do justice to the director’s furious energy, to her outrage at a situation where a nation is left to its own devices, abandoned at the difficult crossroads between the official communist ideology and the unstoppable influence of capitalism, especially in its cultural form, which insinuates itself in communities that are unprepared to evaluate it in a sufficiently nuanced way. The context of the country, torn between tradition and several contradictory forms of modernity, is encapsulated in the protagonist’s destiny – Di, a 12-year-old girl from a village in northern Vietnam, where poverty and alcoholism are rampant, but also where the desire to live a different life than the previous generations simmers in young people’s hearts. An ancestral tradition – the kidnapping of the bride-to-be by her man on the night of the Lunar New Year celebrations in order to force the families to accept the marriage – seems to seal Di’s fate, but the protagonist and the filmmaker form a tacit alliance filled with contradictions and conflicts, which nevertheless leads to the girl’s gradual self-affirmation, under the camera’s alternatingly encouraging and reproving eye. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

No matter how ethically problematic, one efficient way to find the truth is to begin with a lie. And when someone searches to capture the imperceptible and fugitive truth of a human being aided by a device which is forced to remain on the visible surface of things, like in the case of the movie camera, a dose of fiction often proves essential. Guided by this principle, Alexei Lapin, a Russian filmmaker who lives and works in Western Europe, returns to his grandparents’ village, where he spent his childhood summers, in order to shoot his first feature. Lapin seems to adhere to Edgar Morin’s creed, expressed at the end of the experiment which was “Chronicle of a Summer”: in front of the camera people force themselves to be more honest than in their everyday life. Does this mean they’re faking it? “The Country” doesn’t solve this conundrum – instead, it revels in the undetermined space between authenticity and simulacrum, documentary and fiction, past and present. Under the pretext of organizing a casting for a period movie, the film crew introduce themselves in the peacefully-flowing life of the village, causing a bit of a commotion among the locals: young people and older people, amateur actors or complete beginners, students, unemployed people, or farmers all become part of the movie, if only through looking straight into the camera for a moment. In spite of its mechanism, the movie never turns into a complaisant meta-cinematographic exercise. On the contrary, it is an ode to the simple, yet not unmysterious or unimaginative life of the people who not only appear in it, but even subtly take over its reins as they use cinema the way they once used to use oral language, as a means to assert their place in the world and to perpetuate their folklore. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

Following the publication of “Gomorrah,” investigative journalist Roberto Saviano’s book, the Neapolitan mafia Camorra quickly gained increasing notoriety and became perceived as an intricate criminal organization, the violence of which surpasses even that of Sicilian mafia. The bloody image perpetuated by media sensationalism captured the imagination of the public, whose thirst for mafia stories was rapidly fueled by various fictional works like Matteo Garrone’s movie and the eponymous TV show which enjoyed huge international popularity. Yet there weren’t many people concerned about the collateral victims of this media outburst created around the marginalized and misunderstood community living on the periphery of the Italian society. The collective of filmmakers who co-author this film turn their attention to the Neapolitan neighbourhood Scampia, the heart of Camorra, in order to reveal to us another side of this vulnerable population. In a landscape which brings to mind the peripheries and the ghettos of Ferentari, we discover the heart-warming universe of the inhabitants, fragments of their hopes and dreams, the bingo nights, football enthusiasts, teenagers who learn to put on make-up, the street theatre evenings, and all the other touching details which make up the collective portrait of a community which, although isolated and abandoned by the authorities, is bursting with life. (Monica Stan)