Hungarian Premiere

Youth (Spring)

Born in Xi’an, in 1967, Wang Bing studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, and cinematography at Beijing Film Academy. He began his career as an independent filmmaker in 1999. His directorial debut came with Tiexi District: West of the Tracks, a nine-hour documentary in three parts: Rust, Remnants, and Rails. In addition to his feature documentaries, he is also active in video installation (Crude Oil), fiction film (Brutality Factory, The Ditch), and photography. Acclaimed by critics and recognized as a major Chinese artist, and film director, he has been honored with retrospectives in major museums, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Filmoteca Española, and Museo Reina Sofía. In 2012, his Three Sisters won the best film award of the Orizzonti section of the Venice International Film Festival. In 2013, 'Til Madness Do Us Part opened out of competition at the same festival. In 2016, Bitter Money won the best script award of the Orizzonti section in Venice. In 2018, his encounters with the survivors of the anti-rightist movement and labor camps, presented in a nine-hour long feature, Dead Souls, opened at the Cannes International Film Festival as a Special Screening. In 2023, Youth (Spring) was invited in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The same year, Man In Black, his portrait of the Chinese composer, musician and Maestro, Wang Xilin, filmed by Caroline Champetier, screened as a Special Screening of the Cannes Film Festival.

Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices)

Raphaël Grisey lives and works in Berlin. Grisey uses video, editorial, and photographic works to assemble narratives about politics of memory, migration, and architecture. The book Where is Rosa L. (2001–2006), and the film National Motives (2011), study the ghosts of various political regimes in the public spaces of Berlin and Budapest. Through diverse documentary, fictional, or essayist forms, Grisey’s films and installations deal with neocolonial spatial politics, and decolonial storytelling and practices in agriculture and urban space (Trappes, Ville Nouvelle, 2003; Cooperative, 2008; and Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive 2015– in collaboration with Bouba Touré). He collaborated with Florence Lazar on the films Prvi Deo and Red Star (2006), which deal with post-war former Yugoslavia’s justice. Other film projects were made in France, amid students’ strikes (The Indians, 2011); in China, amid Míngōng peasant-workers (The Exchange of Perspectives, 2011); in the social housing complex of Pedregulho in Brazil (Minhocão, 2011), in the Brazilian Positivist Church in Rio de Janeiro (Amor e Progresso, 2014), and around maroon quilombola communities in Minas Gerais (Remanescentes; A Mina dos Vagalumes, 2015). Since 2019, various forms of his research and collaboration with Bouba Touré, Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive, have been presented in several countries.

Bouba Touré was born in Mali in 1948 and died in France in January 2022. Bouba Touré was a photographic researcher. He studied at Vincennes University and was a projectionist at Cinema 14 Juillet and L’entrepôt, Paris. Photographer since the 1970s, he documented the lives and struggles of migrant workers and peasants in France and Mali. Bouba Touré co-founded the Co-op of Somankidi Coura in 1977. In 2015, he published the book Notre case est à Saint Denis. Since the 1980s, Touré has exhibited works and given talks in associative and foyer’s circles and more recently in art institutions. Touré and Grisey worked together over fifteen years on collaborative projects under the current name of Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive. This collaboration led to various workshops, film and theatre production for example with the theatre group Kaddu Yaraax in 2017 and 2019, as well as publications and texts, such as Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive (2017, Archives Book).

Love Is Not an Orange

Otilia Babara is a documentary filmmaker from Moldova, currently based in Brussels. She holds a degree in documentary filmmaking from the DocNomads European Master program (Belgium, Hungary, Portugal), and is a 2013 Berlinale Talents fellow. She directed and produced the short films Irene (2015), selected for several international film festivals, and Women on Canvas (2009), awarded at the Astra and Cronograf Film Festivals. She is drawn to those who usually go unnoticed. Her films expose big wounds hidden in small details. She's fascinated by the untold stories of women.

The Golden Thread

Nishtha Jain is an internationally-recognized filmmaker based in Mumbai. She is best known for Gulabi Gang (2012), Lakshmi and Me (2007), and City of Photos (2004). Her films examine lived experiences at the intersection of gender, caste, and class. They explore the political in the personal, and uncover the mechanisms of privilege. She’s worked across various platforms: documentary, narrative, virtual reality, and TV series. Her films have been widely screened at film festivals and art-house cinemas, and broadcast on TV. They have won over 25 international awards and have been reviewed by print media and academic journals.

Free Money

Sam Soko is an award-winning director, producer, and editor based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is co-founder of LBx Africa, a Kenyan production company that works to bring uniquely African perspectives to global audiences. LBx Africa produced the 2018 Academy Award–nominated short Watu Wote. His first feature-documentary, Softie, a story about balancing a deep love for one's country with the needs of family, premiered at Sundance 2020, winning a special jury prize for editing. His satirical radio play, "The New Bwana," was produced and broadcast by BBC4. Soko is an outspoken defender of freedom of expression and has taken part in global conversations on how to make media matter when the world is on fire.

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

Cyril Aris is a Lebanese Director & Screenwriter and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences®. He holds an MFA from Columbia University in the City of New York, and has taught Film at Columbia University, NHSI at Northwestern University and Barnard College. His latest feature documentary Dancing on the Edge of Volcano (2023), recipient a post-production grant from the Sundance Institute in the US and the Robert Bösch FilmPrize in Germany, premiered in the Main Competition of the 57th Karlovy Vary IFF and won a jury special mention. It had its UK premiere in competition at the 67th BFI London Film Festival and its North American premiere in competition at DOC NYC. His debut feature documentary, The Swing (2018) premiered at the Karlovy Vary IFF, and won awards in El-Gouna, Rome, London, Budapest and Tunisia.

The Other Profile

After studying Political Science, Armel Hostiou studied cinema at La Fémis film school in Paris in the camera department. His graduation film SoLoS, that he directed, has travelled and won several awards nationally and internationally. He has since dedicated himself to directing, first of short films but also installations and music videos. His first feature film Rives premiered in ACID Cannes and was distributed in France in 2012. His second feature, shot in New York, Une Histoire Américaine, premiered at Lincoln Center in New York at RDV with French Cinema and was distributed in France in 2015. His first documentary La Pyramide Invisible premiered at Cinema du Réel in 2019. His last feature The Other Profile premiered at the main competition of CPH:DOX and will be released in theatres in France by Météore Films in June 2023. He is also working on a script for his next fiction feature film.

Falling

Anna Gyimesi was born in 1985, in Budapest. After receiving her degree in medicine in 2011, she turned to filmmaking. She graduated from the film directing program of the University of Theater and Film Arts, Budapest, in 2019, and from documentary film directing in the DocNomads Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Course in 2021. Her interests are taboo social dilemmas represented through personal dramas, especially connected to motherhood, womanhood, and social marginalization. Her latest short, Affricate focuses on a single mother raising her disabled teenage daughter while facing her own deeply-buried needs. The film premiered in the short film competition of the Sarajevo Film Festival and screened, among many others, at PÖFF Shorts 2022, Seattle International Film Festival, and OFF-Odense International Film Festival. Recently, she has been focusing on the development of her debut, Soft Hours, under the frame of Midpoint Feature Launch 2023. Falling is her graduation film for the DocNomads Joint Master Programme.

Deserters

Damir Markovina was born in 1973, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. In 2022, he graduated in Film and TV Directing (Documentary Film) from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, having previously graduated in acting from the same school. He appeared in many Croatian films and TV series. He is a film director, producer, and writer. His short documentary film, Šihta was selected for the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival official student competition in 2019. His medium-length documentary film, Wait for Me won, among other things, the AJB DOC festival’s main award in Sarajevo in 2021, and Oktavijan – the Croatian national FIPRESCI award for the best Croatian documentary film. His second medium-length documentary film, Deserters won the best Central and Eastern European medium-length documentary and the Best Sound Design at Jihlava IDFF 2022, where it had its world premiere.

The March on Rome

Mark Cousins is an Irish-Scottish director and writer. His films – including The Story of Film: An Odyssey, What is This Film Called Love?, Life May Be, A Story of Children and Film, Atomic, Stockholm My Love, I am Belfast and The Eyes of Orson Welles – have premiered in Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and Venice film festivals and have won the Prix Italia, a Peabody, the Stanley Kubrick Award and the European Film Award for Innovative Storytelling. He has filmed in Iraq, Sarajevo during the siege, Iran, Mexico, across Asia and in America in Europe. Mark’s books include Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary and The Story of Looking. He has collaborated with Tilda Swinton on innovative film events, and tries to find new, filmic ways to explore his themes: looking, cities, cinema, childhood, and recovery. His 14 hour documentary Women Make Film tries to rethink cinema. His newest films are The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, The Story of Looking and The Story of Film: A New Generation. He has walked across Los Angeles, Belfast, Moscow, Beijing, London, Paris, Berlin, Dakar and Mexico City and likes night swimming.

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