SECTION: What´s left?

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How is Eastern Europe coming to terms with the "turn of the times"? What is left of the spirit of optimism after the fall of the Iron Curtain, in times of renewed war? The cinematic journey through former and present hotspots in Eastern Europe shows how people settle into a state of limbo between different promises of the future of the past and a present marked by the realization that all these promises cannot be kept - the industrial reconstruction pathos and revolutionary nation-building myths of socialism, the economic promises and nationalist proclamations of salvation from the 1990s until today. Based on collective and individual ruptures, the films in the WHAT'S LEFT? series discuss the condition humaine in the post-ideological space. The big dreams are over, but not the hope for a new togetherness - as long as one remains curious and meets each other at eye level. In all directions.

A Parked Life

Peter Triest
BE/NL / 2021 / 90 min

Europe only exists on the motorways says Bulgarian long-distance driver Petar. He almost only sees his wife and young son on his mobile phone. He wasn't even there when he was born. A visually impressive, subtle documentary about the solitude of a ...

BEYOND REVOLUTION – FIGHTING FOR DEMOCRACY

Generation Euromaidan – Sehnsucht nach Demokratie

Kristof Gerega
DE / 2022 / 90 min

Conflicting interests on the road to democracy: Three “euro optimists” in the Ukrainian parliament. This long-term observation describes their fight against corruption as well as for more transparency in political culture and speaks of successes ...

Boney Piles

Terykony

Taras Tomenko
UA / 2022 / 80 min

Children in a small town in eastern Ukraine, just a few kilometres away from territory occupied by pro-Russian separatists. An atmospherically dense protocol of an everyday life spent between ruins and mining dumps, post-socialism, war and trauma. ...

BRATAN BROTHER

BRATAN

Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov
TJ / 1991 / 100 min

A break for freedom: 17-year-old Farukh wants to leave his village. Together with his little brother he heads to the city. The journey, undertaken on a light railway, takes in both breath-taking landscapes and surreal everyday situations. The great ...

EURODONBAS

Yevrodonbas

Kornii Hrytsiuk
UA / 2022 / 73 min

Ostheim, Liebenthal, New York, Blumenfeld, Bunge, Marienthal; did you suspect that you would find traces of these places in the Donbas? Or that the today heavily-contested region was once settled by 10,000 Belgians and was known as the 10th province ...

Train Kyiv-War

Poizd: Kyiv-Viina

Kornii Hrytsiuk
UA / 2020 / 72 min

Until February 24th one of the front lines in eastern Ukraine was located right here, behind the town of Kostyantynivka in Donbas. Director Korniy Grytsiuk travelled from Kyiv to this borderline by train and asked the passengers about their personal ...

MARIUPOLIS 2

Mantas Kvedaravičius
LT/FR/DE / 2022 / 112 min

Episodes from the war: bomb craters, a house that's simply gone, a pigeon breeder with now only 20 of his original flock of 300, the two corpses out in the yard are already starting to stink. Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravičius returned to ...

ONE DAY IN UKRAINE

Den Ukrainskoho Dobrovoltsia

Volodymyr Tykhy
UA / 2022 / 78 min

Real-dystopian observations on the 2944th day of the war in Ukraine – counted from the beginning of the Maidan demonstrations. Women, the elderly and children seek shelter in a subway tunnel, a woman feeds stray dogs whilst the sirens wail, at the ...

The Case

DELO

Nina Guseva
RU / 2021 / 76 min

In Russia, the police and the state wilfully disregard the right to freedom of assembly. Russian lawyer Maria Eismont takes a stand against this with recourse to legal means. This documentary accompanies her for a year and a half as she defends and ...

THE ECLIPSE

Nataša Urban
NO / 2022 / 110 min

Nataša Urban grew up in Serbia. In "The Eclipse" she reflects on her country's responsibility for the Yugoslav wars. In doing so, she creates a richly layered essay film about shared remembrance and personal responsibility in a country that refuses ...

THE LONELY LONG-DISTANCE RUNNERS

THE LONELY LONG-DISTANCE RUNNERS - Four stories of journalists from the Balkans

Boris Missirkov/ Georgi Bogdanov
BG / 2022 / 85 min

Journalism under pressure. In many places across south eastern Europe working conditions in the media industry are characterised by symbiotic relationships between business, politics and the media. Those who ask too many questions are often ...

THE ROUTE RECALCULATED

marshrut perestroen

Maksim Shved
BY / 2022 / 52 min

They could hardly be more different: Anna and Pavel are both cab drivers, he in Minsk, she in Baranovichi. She supports the dictator Lukashenko, he disapproves. Their passengers have different views. Above all it’s the older generations that ...

THE TREASURES OF CRIMEA

De schatten van de Krim

Oeke Hoogendijk
NL / 2021 / 82 min

Stateless Art. In 2014, the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam exhibits artefacts excavated in Crimea. Whilst the collection is on display in the Netherlands, Russia annexes Crimea. To whom should these art treasures be returned? Who owns the art, ...

Tolyatti Adrift

Laura Sistero
ES/FR / 2021 / 70 min

Tolyatti was once considered a thriving centre of the Soviet auto industry. Indeed, this is where the production of the legendary “Lada” once began. Today, however, this city of three-quarters of a million people is but a shadow of its former ...

Waiting For Handke

Čekajući Handkea

Goran Radovanović
RS / 2021 / 74 min

Only a few hundred people still live in Velika Hoča, a Serbian enclave in southern Kosovo. Everywhere in the historic village, one encounters the portrait of Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke. After his feature film ENKLAVE (2016), director Goran ...

WATER HAS NO BORDERS

Tskals sazghvrebi ar akvs

Maradia Tsaava
GE/FR / 2021 / 85 min

Living together in secret: around a dam between Georgia and the breakaway region of Abkhazia, people create a piece of everyday life together. A film team actually wants to shoot a report on the highest arch dam on earth, but it fails due to ...

81 Meters

81 Metrs

Janis Abele
LV / 2022 / 14 min

In Lockdown 2021, a filmmaker wanders with his camera through the last remaining cinemas in Latvia. Nostalgic and yet full of humor, he leads us through the glorious days of yesteryear and even manages to give us a few sparks of hope.

THE FILM FACTORY

TVORNICA FILMOVA

Silvestar Kolbas
HR / 2022 / 15 min

The Fotokemia film factory in Samobor, Croatia, produced particularly sensitive black-and-white films for over 60 years. Now it is closed. Experimental still lifes of decay, accompanied by memories of former workers

NICOLAE

Mihai Grecu
FR/RO / 2022 / 45 min

What if Nicolae Ceaușescu, the self-proclaimed "Great Commander," were resurrected in present-day Romania? A film crew announces this miracle in a Romanian village. The Conducător then really does reappear, as a hologram. Not only amusing, but also ...

TEARS WILL REMAIN

SLEZЫ OSTANUTSIA

Leri Matehha
UA/DE / 2022 / 45 min

Bakhmut, a small town in Donetsk oblast. Above the ground, the monuments from the Soviet era are decaying; below the ground, the Crimean sparkling wine is ripening.