Preemptive Listening
‘Preemptive Listening’ is a work of non-fiction cinema which re-imagines sirens in order to forge a new understanding of present and long term emergency. The siren serves as a worldwide
cipher of potential trauma, an emblem warning of climate catastrophe, a mouthpiece for sonic governance and crisis management. Many sirens are relics from WW2 and the Cold War, repurposed to communicate the threats of extreme weather, a collective commemorative pause, or resurrected to test disaster preparedness.
"At a time when modern thinking and science are unable to provide adequate solutions to ongoing and escalating emergencies, the siren is seen as a prism of possibility for the emergence of new ways of perceiving and responding" - CPH:DOX, Winner New Visions Prize
My Father's Diaries
In August 1993, Bekir Hasanović trades a gold coin for a video camera, which he uses to document daily life in Srebrenica from that point onward. The footage he captures during the war, along with his makeshift crew, Dzon, Ben & Boys, presents an unexpected portrait of a disoriented population that holds on to reality with resilience and a healthy dose of humour.
Ado, Bekir’s son, uses these recordings and his father’s diaries to reconstruct his image. Together with his mother, Fatima, he seeks to understand how Bekir survived the Death March and the Srebrenica genocide
"We watch an amateur documentarian form himself amid the debris of a collapsing world. The camera becomes survival instrument, witness box, and shield against the unspeakable....an excavation of history through a personal lens" - Gazettely
*not available in France, Italy or Switzerland
Chagrin Valley
The sun always shines in Chagrin Valley, a pastel assisted living home for people with dementia in the USA. Within its carefully staged 1950s decor, a fragile community drifts through slow days marked by confusion, fleeting tensions and long awaited family visits. Florence and her companions dream of an elusive elsewhere, suspended between memory and illusion.
Behind the scenes, caregivers who are both tender and exhausted sustain the rhythms of this sanitised social theatre. Between shifts, they quietly share their own hopes for a different future, not so distant from that of the residents they care for.
Chagrin Valley is a tender and lucid inquiry into our relationship with old age, care, and the quiet persistence of hope: a glimpse into the substance of our collective dreams.
"Examining our relationship with old age, illness and the universal fear of dying, and gently probing into the matter of our individual and collective dreams, she interrogates the false promises of our contemporary society." - Visions du Reel, Winner, Jury Prize National Competition
The Trial
1985, Buenos Aires, Argentina. The trial of the Military Juntas of the last dictatorship (1976/83), accused of crimes against humanity. As in Nuremberg after World War II, the trial is entirely recorded in U-matic tapes. For 90 days, the testimonies of the horror were heard and a final sentence: Never Again. The defenders and the political and ideological positions of those who supported the dictatorship. In the voice of the victims, the stories of torture and pain. Life and death in the same room. An archive of the past and a film that raises a starting point.
"a profound work of preservation and remembrance....Footage from the 1985 Trial of the Juntas is expertly edited into a documentary providing unforgettable witness to the repression that ‘disappeared’ thousands" - Guardian
The Nights Still Smell of Gunpowder
Concerned with the fragmented memories of my childhood during the civil war in Mozambique, I return to my grandmother’s village to reveal the untold stories. My grand-mother has Alzheimer’s, and her memories are fading. In the same village lives a former rebel. Perpetrator and victim, day and night, truth and fiction merge. As my generation is facing new tensions, the ghosts of the war are tireless and wait in the darkness.
"A hypnotic film debut from Mozambique, where a young director visits his grandmother's village to measure the depths of her memories. Each moment is staged as a drama in itself in a dark and disquieting piece of cinema." - CPH:DOX