”Exile Shanghai” is an odyssey telling the life stories of six German, Austrian, and Russian Jews, who found refuge in Shanghai from the persecution they experienced in their respective countries - from Sephardim in the mid-19th century, to Russian emigrants escaping pogroms, to Europeans fleeing the Third Reich’s Extermination Policy. It depicts a lost community full of contradictions, in between the luxurious colonial life, the social and gastronomic delights of Vienna and Berlin, the existence of a queer scene next to the misery of the new ghettos, and the enormous changes that would follow - war, Japanese occupation, revolution. Ulrike Ottinger mainly chooses to edit memories of these people with images of Shanghai today, thus triggering our imagination: we can see in our mental screen what is not there anymore. (Vanina Vignal)

One of the most exciting films made by the feminist group “Les Insoumuses” (a compound term which would roughly translate as “The Disobedient Muses”), “Maso and Miso Go Boating” is a ludic essay, full of verve, and a bitter humour of rare beauty. Some sort of cinematographic ready-made, sarcastically commenting on an episode of the cultural TV broadcast “Apostrophes,” moderated by the famous journalist Bernard Pivot in the 1970s, the main guest of which was Françoise Giroud, secretary of state for women’s issues, this naughty and ironical film doesn’t spare any of the improper remarks made by the one who, due to her ministerial position at that time, was supposed to fight for French women’s rights. Only that Giroud’s interventions are, almost every moment, totally inappropriate for the public office holder that she is. During the show, in the context of declaring the year 1975 as the “International Women’s Year,” Pivot broadcasts a series of misogynistic declarations of men in positions of power, while the [female] politician is invited to comment on them. Yet Giroud, in her attempt to adopt a moderate approach, and to not overly offend an audience otherwise used to gloss over such macho perorations, finds all sorts of ridiculous explanations for each of them. As a consequence, Delphine Seyrig, Ioana Wieder, Carole Roussopoulos, and Nadja Ringart have at their disposal a very rich material to express their indignation, their disapproval, or their disgust, stopping and replaying some of Giroud’s declarations, commenting on them off-screen or via inserts, or mocking them through songs with multiple meanings. To such a superficial attitude and such bizarre positions like those of Giroud’s, one can only answer in similar registers, meant to expose her hypocrisy and her incompetence. (by Andrei Rus)

Once Trump got elected as the president of the United States, the term `hillbilly` gained significant visibility: used to describe a certain category of rural population, economically deficient, uneducated, conservative, and intolerant, which supposedly formed the largest part of Trump’s electorate, the notion actually worked as a cover for a much more complex and uncomfortable reality. It is in this reality that Diane Sara Bouzgarrou and Thomas Jenkoe’s documentary immerses us, adjusting itself with remarkable ingenuity to the mentality and the sensibility of these American Dream agonizers, a strategy which pre-empts a condescending or ironical gaze. The guiding voice of the film is that of Brian Ritchie, a middle-aged man from Kentucky who looks with lucidity and brash lyricism both at the past, at his parents’ generation - the pioneers of industrial coal mining, who left the landscape disfigured and the soil barren -, as well as forward, at this children, who are suffocating in spite of the immensity of the places where they live, and dream of another way of life. Torn between fervor and self-criticism, Richie declares himself the last hillbilly, but the living tissue of the film contradicts him: as long as these vast fields, these rocks, these forests will continue to exist, so will the people whose dignity will dwell within their bounds. (Liri Alienor Chapelan)

Irak, Kurdistan, Syria, Lebanon - this is how Gianfranco Rosi’s itinerary looks like for three years, years in the course of which the skeletal structure of "Notturno" was sketched during the director’s peregrinations. The Middle East is a space of contrasts, and what Rosi does is to bring these contrasts face to face, and to efface the moral or territorial borders between the world on screen and the viewer. The filmmaker observes the military troops marching through mood in the same way he observes the children as they recall the atrocities they lived through as prisoners of the soldiers in front of the therapist. War and tyranny, the images seem to remind us, are a fatal mixture which dwells even in the darkest of corners, giving birth to unimaginable monsters in all the things it encounters along the way. And cruelty, in the end, is just an army formed of all these monsters brought together in one place. Rosi’s film is a chronicle of a world torn between the nocturne of the postdiluvian disaster, and the light slipping into the little gestures which invoke salvation - a prayer in the night, an indistinct whisper, the sun-whipped face of a child with big, sad eyes. (by Andreea Chiper)