What does it mean to live a successful life today? Whose standards count? How far are we willing to go? Which rules do we want to obey, and what must we resist? Four films approach the question of contemporary subjectivity and individuality, finding different ways to do justice to their protagonists in their portraits while at the same time revealing the forces that govern our ideas about what it means to be ourselves. (Sebastian Markt)
A torrent of
promising affirmations rains down from the off and escalates into grotesque
banalities. A man in a suit inserts his body into the corners and stairways,
corridors, and benches of a modernist building, performing grotesque
contortions. Filmed in the Tallinn ferry terminal and based on a text by poetry
slammer Joonas Veelmaa, YES! creates a clever and funny distorting mirror of a
society in which self-optimization seems to be everything. “Say yes to
happiness, say no to sadness. Don’t think, just say it!”
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Pol
wants to get rich, preferably through crypto trading, €10,000 per month. In his
small room in his grandmother’s apartment, he has hung photos of fast cars and
houses with pools on a motivation wall, he attends motivation workshops and
listens to investment podcasts. Gala Hernández López’s vivid portrait takes a
dialogical and empathetic approach to a young man and his dreams – while at the
same time drawing attention to the forces and image streams that shape
individual desires in society.
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Premiere:
German Premiere
Nominated:
A38-Production Grant Kassel-Halle
- Director: Gala Hernández López
18-year-old Antonis
Antoniadis has enlisted in the German Armed Forces for 17 years. He serves as a
medic and wants to study pharmacy. His roommate finds it difficult to adjust to
military life. With quiet and sometimes humorous detachment, THE UNIFORMED
portrays a soldier and makes palpable the tensions that arise between a young
person’s attempt to become himself and the structures, disciplines, and
hierarchies of an institution that seeks to mold individual bodies into one.
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Premiere:
German Premiere
Nominated:
Goldener Key
CN: Sexualized Violence
When she was 13, the
director got a digital camera, but only a single snippet of footage remains.
Now she looks at cell phone recordings made by a girl who is 13 today and
reconstructs her experience of the transition from childhood to adulthood in
the space between the existing images and those that are missing. The moment
when she had to start dealing with the gaze of others, with gazes that come
from a society of powerful and violent gender differences.
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Premiere:
German Premiere
Nominated:
Goldener Key
- Director: Mireia Vilapuig
