Reviews

How to film on the massive scale of a melting glacier? Rafa Molés and Pepe Andreu, directors of the feature doc La Pietà, selected for Thessaloniki Doc Fest International Competition, approach the subject both from up on high and from right up close, considering both the present and the past, but only sporadically connect with the geological and human perspectives.

The haunting, terrifying and chillingly visceral stories told by a series of young women in Paula Cury Melo’s moving and deeply provocative Scarlet Girls (Niñas escarlata) paints a harrowing picture of what it means to be a woman in the Dominican Republic, still one of the few countries where abortion remains criminalised without exception. It is a perfectly formed, elegantly artistic and gently angry film that demands attention.

Excellent film, wrong genre. Whispers in May blurs the boundaries of the hybrid documentary subgenre to such an extent that its documentary status becomes unclear. This doesn’t mean its story is any less engaging or its young leads any less mesmerising. It is a very enjoyable watch – it’s just that it would better be labelled ‘fiction.'

Managing to be both gently beautiful and desperately moving, Suki Chan’s Conscious explores what happens when consciousness and memory begin to disintegrate, with the haunting presence of dementia and mental decline intertwined within a series of distinctive yet similar stories. While the subject matter is familiar, the presentation here is never traditional.

Inspired by the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin and other feminist thinkers, Irene Margrethe Kaltenborn’s The Mother Age is a sumptuously filmed ode to the beauty and power of nature, in which the director all the time seeks alternative ways to relate to, and learn, from the natural world. The film acknowledges our human limitations when it comes to understanding that world, and how we must be willing to learn in order to find what we are looking for.

The title might hint at a deeply racy documentary, but in fact Markku Heikkinen’s rather delicate and compassionate, yet remarkably frank, film tells an open, touching love story about how a couple aims to learn the rules of a new kind of relationship. The film receives its international premiere in NORDIC:DOX Competition.

Fifty years after the first squatters arrived at the abandoned military barracks close to the heart of Copenhagen, the now-legendary, über-libertarian district of Christiania is still thriving. Karl Friis Forchhammer has been around the area his whole life and provides us with the full history of how a small group of people managed, through ups and downs, to build their own community. What the eponymously-titled doc implicitly underlines is that the world is a better place for having Christiania in it.

Shot compassionately and astutely over a 10-year period, One In a Million charts the course of a young life as an 11-year girl escapes Syria to make the long journey to Germany with her family, frightened but also excited about her new future. Thoughtful and engaging, and made with a real sense of heart, it is a story of family and exile, and of hope and change.

Wandering through the forest, foraging for fungi, indigenous mycologists Juli and Lis are literally following in their ancestors’ footsteps while also contributing to scientific knowledge and sustaining their communities. Beautifully filmed, the documentary portrays the mycelium as a living, breathing and talking entity connected to all of the forest – and to all of us.

In her delicately handled, insightful, loving and highly moving debut film (the first Kazakh documentary feature ever to be screened at the Berlinale), director Kristina Mikhailova travels slowly down the Aksay River, sitting down with young women to reflect on their powerful, vulnerable, terrible, hopeful lives, despite living within the Kazakh patriarchy. (The film was awarded February 21 the Ecumenical Jury Forum prize.)