Reviews

From the debris of the 2019 Iraqi protests, Maja Tschumi has created a beautiful, cinematic monument for its heroes. Immortals is an unusual portrait of a country, a generation and a revolution, featuring two special young protagonists from a modern society where young people now dare to dream, hope and fight. It is also a film that delivers profound emotional impact. 

The population of Gran Canaria comprises many different groups. There are the four million holidaymakers who descend on the island each year, the long-term residents and, increasingly, refugees from the African continent, all of whom are portrayed by Danish director Mette Carla Albrechtsen. Meanwhile, a volcano threatens to erupt.

In her thriller-like dive into the secret community of baloeiros, the Brazilian men who illegally build giant hot-air balloons, Danish director Sissel Morell Dargis provides a rare female perspective on this macho world which, as its deeply committed members proclaim, offers an alternative to joining the drug cartels.

In this joyful, inquisitive documentary, Danish filmmaker Max Kestner, triggered by the worldwide uproar caused by the euthanasia of a healthy but superfluous giraffe in a Danish zoo, embarks on an existential, mostly scientific quest to answer his biggest question: what is life? And, as a related problem, how can he feel less lonely now his children have left home?

After being forced to flee their country after the Taliban takeover of 2021, four charismatic and influential Afghan women are the focus of this immersive, powerful and confrontational documentary. As they adjust to life in a new country away from their culture and the support of their homeland, they fight to place once more the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan at the forefront of world attention.

Being designated as a ‘foreign agent’ can have a terrible impact on journalists and activists in contemporary Russia as Putin looks to curb any kind of criticism or agitation against his special military operations in Ukraine. The provocative documentary Of Caravan and the Dogs, which world-premieres at FIFDH, astutely documents the personal danger, and severe punishment meted out to, those wanting to take a stand and defend the truth.

In Subject: Film-making, acclaimed German filmmaker Edgar Reitz, maker of the much-lauded Heimat trilogy and recipient of the Berlinale Camera 2024, reunites with the former pupils of a unique film class he taught at an all-girls school in 1968. Jumping back and forth in time, Reitz’s love of cinema proves remarkably enduring, having marked these enthusiastic students for life.

Blending new concert footage with archival material and interviews, Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer’s watchable and illuminating documentary tells the transformative journey of Canadian Merrill Nisker from children’s music teacher at the YMCA to dynamic punk performer named Peaches after her relocation to Germany. Filmed during the “Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour” in 2022, the film provides an intimate look at the inner workings of the tour and what drives the performer.

When parents die, their descendants are confronted with drawers, shelves and boxes full of things which have been collected and organised over a lifetime. In the case of director Costanza Quatriglio, her father was well-known Italian journalist Giuseppe Quatriglio, and his archives were of interest not only to her but also to the Central Library of the Sicilian Region.

In a film that adds new perspective to the war in Ukraine, four generations of women in one war-torn family, including director Svitlana Lishchynska, wrestle with their conflicting identities and mentalities formed in the Soviet Union, the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, the capital Kyiv and as refugees in the UK. Where, among all these places, is home?