For three years, Brazilian filmmaker Coraci Ruiz documents the gender transitioning of her teenage son, Noah. Employing archival footage, the film represents the intersection between the visions of three generations: the grandmother, the mother, and the teenager, who finds himself in a full-blown identity crisis. In an attempt to understand the child’s inner transformations, the filmmaker and her mother, two convinced feminists, reflect on the notion of gender through the prism of their own youth, relating to their own process of growing up and accepting their bodies. The film reveals itself as a poem of unconditional love and respect for the decisions of others, even when these aren’t fully understood. (Monica Stan)

Alina Gorlova’s film introduces us to the tumultuous destiny of the Suleyman family which, as it fled the Syrian Civil War, was forced to spread in different corners of Europe. The movie focuses mostly on the life of Andriy, who now lives with a part of his family in Ukraine, where he works as a Red Cross volunteer. His dream of living a normal life is alas abruptly ended by the local reality: Andriy now has to face a new war, this time in the host country. The movie follows Andriy in his peregrinations – from Ukraine to Germany, in Iraq, and once again in Syria, in perpetual wandering, as each country he passes through only deepens his feeling of alienation. Andriy thus represents an unfortunate link between various territories and war-torn communities. Non-narrative inserts are woven into the storyline of his journeys: fragments from military celebrations, parties, or humanitarian endeavours, which evoke a reality marked by contradictions, tensions, and instability. Structured into chapters which unfold as a countdown, the film seems to anticipate an imminent disaster. It unnoticeably transcends the personal stories of the protagonists and becomes some sort of global meta-analysis of war’s cyclical nature and absurdity, and the dislocation of the vulnerable. (Monica Stan)

Sometimes it takes a long time to understand that, maybe, one cannot cover the miles that separate them from home on a highway, nor through air or on water. The true dimensions of the experience of uprooting may lie not only in physical distance – they may instead float, volatile and incomprehensible, in the elusive substance of time. It is this same substance that the “Chronicles” of Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo draw upon, a back-and-forth journey along the wild thread of memory – in other words, a breath of the past and the present, the only one we can hold on to before it’s too late. Their movie is a composition for multiple voices, hummed from one shore of the Mediterranean to another, from one mosaic to another, haunting the dead images of a forsaken museum. As if trying to project on the screen the immateriality of time, the authors chose the risky challenge posed by a documentary which does justice to poetry and goes beyond it, sliding along the strings of emotion instead of feeding us raw, flat information. What else can the light gliding down a wet windshield and a love song in an unknown language tell us except that, eventually, the moments of silence and the disappearances are splendid pieces of throbbing life? (Andreea Chiper)

When cinema directors are looking for heroes for their movies, things usually happen in an organized and carefully prepared way. This is not the case of Pawel Lozinski, who chooses to leave the "casting" to chance, greeting passers-by from his balcony and asking them about the meaning of life and what is most beautiful about it. From these encounters a delightful chronicle is woven, where the director seems to offer as much as he asks from the people he interviews – the voice behind the camera reveals both curiosity, as well as a vague embarrassment, the play between closeness and distance is nothing more that the filmmaker’s hesitation who, despite appearances to the contrary, stepped out of his comfort zone as well and participates in the movie unfolding in front of him in equal measure. And his mechanism is ridiculously simple: Lozinski neither leaves the perimeter of his own balcony, nor does he hide or try to play tricks on anyone. He and his camera are a relentless point of observation which arouses either amazement or suspiciousness, as well as an occasional awkwardness which we can all relate to. Most times, though, it arouses that certain thrill which only cinema is capable of: by capturing the unpredictability of life, the unrepeatable moment which is forever recorded on the camera’s memory. “The Balcony Movie” is the perfect demonstration that banality is an inexhaustible source of emotion, whether we meet a child on a scooter, or hear an old lady talking, with tears in her eyes, about her long-gone husband. (Andreea Chiper)

In “Our Quiet Place,” director Elitza Gueorguieva tells the visual story of Aliona, her Belarusian alter ego. Up to a point, the two women share a similar background: they both come from former communist states and they both found refuge in a foreign country and a foreign language (French); what differs is that one of them left behind a democratic regime (Bulgaria), whereas the other one – an autocracy (Belarus.) While Aliona attempts to recompose, in the form of a novel, the personal history of her father, a physicist who fell in love with the sea and disappeared in Turkish waters in 1995, and to thus make peace with the ghost of someone who, for the past 25 years, has been neither alive nor dead, the director creates her own visual language by amplifying the tension between dream and reality, poetry and memory. “Our Quiet Place” is not, properly speaking, a film on migration – it is, rather, a film which talks about the past, about escaping, and about reconstruction or emancipation in a language which is not yours. And maybe this is precisely where the advantage lies – in the fact that you can start from zero. (Sorana Stănescu)

In light of the current military conflict in Ukraine, the warlike delirium of the protagonist of Tatiana Lushnikova’s debut, with which the film begins, is an all the more brutal introduction in the propaganda-and-pan-Slavism-ridden mentality of a Russian fighter. But far from aspiring to be a psychological or political analysis of this bellicose distortion of the “Russian spirit,” “Idyll” cleverly defies the expectations it creates through such an introduction. A three-year gap follows, after which the scenery changes: from a battlefield we move to a monastery and instead of a fanatic, we discover a lost, vulnerable man, and further down the line, a poetic soul who lucidly examines his own impulses, feelings, and weaknesses. The fragments of existence captured by an empathetic camera eventually portray Valera as some sort of a wise man of the rural community in which he lives, who watches the villagers’ agitation with affectionate resignation. This layered process of revelation surprises through its honesty and its lack of ideological parti pris. The filming and editing choices stem naturally from the rhythm of village life, under the routine of which we sense anxiety, helplessness, and alienation. Hate and violence don’t define Valera, they are only the extreme manifestations of feelings which pervade the entire community, from the village drunkard to the women working within the monastery; and the main virtue of the movie is that it makes us empathize completely, without prejudice or hesitation, with these people who lack perspective, but not the sensitivity needed for suffering because of it. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)