Locarno 24

Iranian Nasreen wants to sing in a country where women have been banned from public performance since 2016. She is also the mother of two children within a loveless marriage. “Over seven years of filming Nasreen, I closely witnessed her journey to free her voice as a singer and a woman,” says director Leila Amini, sister of Nasreen. “From a vulnerable homemaker, she gradually transformed into a woman in control of her own destiny.”

Claudia Marschal’s feature documentary tells a story of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and of one man’s refusal to be silenced over the wrongs he had to suffer. It is also the story of a dad whose life is filled with regrets having not taken seriously his son’s pleas for help. At the heart of the film is a recorded deposition that victim/survivor Emmanuel Siess made to the French police. Director Claudia Marschal, Emmanuel’s cousin, talks to BDE.

Transportation of the vulnerable has been a necessity in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion of February 24 2022. So has the transportation of the dead, tragically, as the bodies of fallen soldiers are collected and returned to grieving loved ones. “It's something I never experienced before. It's something I had never seen before. I wanted to dig into this topic as a human being and also as a filmmaker, to explore it and also to tell about it,” director Juri Rechinsky tells BDE.

Ulla and Didi are loving and caring parents, even of a serial killer convicted of nearly 90 murders. In their feature doc, German directors Katharina Köster and Katrin Nemec profile the humble mother and father and their attempts to cope with the dreadful reality of their lives. “The relationship [with their son] is characterised by very strong emotions, between great love and affection, but also between contempt and not being able to forgive,” the directors tell BDE.