Finding Home

Solongo Soninbayar Wednesday, 20 December 2023.
The media is an institution that plays a serious role in the perpetuation of prejudice and discrimination against gender-variant people. [1] Documentary films serve as powerful mediums for storytelling, shedding light on various aspects of our world. One such intriguing documentary is Fairy Garden, Gergő Somogyvári’s documentary film that unveils the touching story of Fanni, a 19-year-old...

Beautiful symphony about a difficult topic

Ingrid Pérez Thursday, 14 December 2023.
According to the article Labor Slavery, The 5 Countries Where This Situation Reigns published on the site El Comercio, labor exploitation occurs mainly in developing countries where labor rights are highly violated. [1] India occupies the first place in the list, that also contains China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan. The fact that India is one of the countries with the highest rates of...

The versatile contribution of the protagonist

Pinczés Réka Thursday, 14 December 2023.
Taking a look at Goran Dević’s filmography, we can identify several works about collectives, local communities or specific social groups. What’s to Be Done? also depicts such a community, namely the leaders and the employees of the company Gredelj. Dević started shooting this documentary as a research material for a fiction feature, after he read the news about the suicide of the vice...

The never returning guest workers

Ana Marija Vukovic Thursday, 14 December 2023.
“In Germany they were called ‘Gastarbeiter’, i.e. guest workers. They were supposed to work in the country for a few years, to save money for their families, and then return home. Workers underwent rigorous health inspections (too demeaning for tourists), and they put up with this in order to earn money to pay for their wedding, to be able to buy a tractor, or to send wages back to their hometown...

Whose garbage is on the North Pole? Social responsibility of environmental damages

Flóra Mesterházy Wednesday, 25 January 2023.
Steffen Krones’s The North Drift presents an experiment in which we get the chance to follow a plastic bottle’s way from Dresden up until the North Pole. In this participatory [1] documentary we follow the director himself, setting up his project: building GPS buoys with his scientist friend, Paul to examine how the ocean currents carry the trash and litter such as plastic bottles, plastic bags...

The role of a documentary in showing the power of the independent press

Tímea Dimashky-Korompai Wednesday, 25 January 2023.
1557. This is the number of journalists who have been killed worldwide since 1993. The UNESCO Observatory of Killed Journalists also reported that 55 journalists were killed in 2021.

Social Issues through a Personal Story (Fragile Memory)

Oraz Kereibayev Tuesday, 17 January 2023.
Fragile Memory (2022) is a Ukrainian documentary by Igor Ivanko about his grandfather Leonid Burlaka, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Leonid is a former cinematographer, who used to work for some of the most prestigious movies made by Odessa Film Studio during its glory days.

Breaking the Taboos of Trauma (Bigger than Trauma)

Sára Kende Tuesday, 17 January 2023.
Bigger than Trauma revolves around the breaking of taboos and the reversal of stigmatization on multiple mental and societal levels. Its central topic of surviving wartime rape brings about serious and lasting impacts on the survivors’ personal and social lives. They have to endure atrocious physical and mental traumas in themselves which often still define their relationships with their own...

The Power of Healing Through Community (Bigger than Trauma)

María Belén Soriano Zamora Thursday, 12 January 2023.
Vedrana Pribačić’s film presents the healing journey of a group of women who, for decades, have been carrying the trauma of a dehumanizing yet overlooked set of events: rape, enslavement and torture that took place during the Yugoslav Wars in the 90s.

Life of Ambulance Workers through the Pandemic of Lost Desires (Mountains and Heaven in Between)

Rahul Sharma Thursday, 12 January 2023.
Strikingly non-intrusive and employing the observational mode, Dymytro Hryshko’s Mountains and Heaven in Between (2022) traverses through a plenitude of vignette-like chapters faced by ambulance workers. The film is set in the quaint village of Kolochava, which lies amidst peaks of snow-covered Transcarpathian Mountains, in Western Ukraine.