The films in this program are autobiographical approaches in which women raise their voices – quietly or loudly, always insistently. They recount childhood memories that live on in fantasy worlds; absent fathers and the loss of home; phone calls with strangers who unexpectedly become confidants; confrontations with repressed sexual violence. Between cries and whispers, an echo of closeness and distance, questions and silence emerge – personal stories that show how powerful films can be as spaces for remembering, sharing, and healing. (Anna Melikova)
A passionate child undergoes various inconvenient situations. She turns to her favorite doll as a means of coping, using her imagination to create a familiar, ideal world that reflects her feelings and aspirations. The film combines archival footage from the director's childhood with animated scenes to show the inner world from the eyes of a child.
… >>>The director was one year old when she first lost her father. He left her mother and never came back to them. Today, Russia's attack on Ukraine is forcing her, as an adult, to leave her country and flee to Prague. All she knows about her absent father is that he has gone to the front. In this documentary diary, we follow the spoken and unspoken correspondence between an abandoned daughter and a father defending his homeland.
… >>>An artist with writer's block is sitting in an artist's residence in northern Germany. Outside, construction workers renovate a vacation home; inside, nothing happens – until the landline phone rings. A supposed Microsoft employee wants access to her computer. Instead, she starts to talk – about heartbreak, emptiness, and the failure to work. Without realizing it, she becomes a scam baiter. The film tells of an unexpectedly genuine, almost tender conversation between two strangers – and of how easily one becomes part of the structures one thinks one is questioning.
… >>>CN: Sexualized Violence
Working on an autobiographical film project takes the director back to psychiatric files, photographs, and rooms that no longer exist. The starting point is the violence she experienced as a teenager at the hands of her father and the aftereffects that are still felt today. From fragments emerges a cinematic diary about memory, pain, and the struggle for language. But the act of storytelling itself is also a form of self-assertion: the film becomes an examination of the past and an opportunity to no longer keep her own story trapped in silence.