A series of films that shows the diverse and contemporary ways in which cinema revisits the past and re-evaluates the position of history&rsquo;s losers.

IFFR 2018

Luis Fulvio

The maker, born in 1977, made this montage film about his endlessly fascinating year of birth. In Italy the streets were full of groups protesting, there were deaths during riots in Rome, Milan and Bologna, while armed movements attacked politicians and journalists. At the same time, there was a creative boom on many fronts, punk broke through and Elvis died.

Perspectives

A History of Shadows

'77 No Commercial Use

Luis López Carrasco

Tesa Arranz, a key figure in the 1980s Madrid scene and the lead singer of The Zombies, has painted over 500 portraits of outer-space creatures.

Aliens

Neary Adeline Hay

The filmmaker, daughter from a forced marriage in a Khmer Rouge detention village, returns with her father to meet his former  persecutors in the obscure intimacy of the village in which they lived together for four years. Between past and present, the forgotten spectres re-emerge and the story, face-to-face, is finally told.

Angkar

Christopher Gozum

Layered historic essay presented as polymorphic fiction, about the notorious rebellion in 1931 in Tayug, Philippines. A filmmaker goes looking for the memories of the population about the local hero Pedro Calosa, leader of the rebellion. In the meantime, she tries to imagine the original events.

The Ashes and Ghosts of Tayug 1931

Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard's cinematographic reflection on time as a Pandora’s Box in which all the horrors of the world are hidden. This is his contribution to Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (2002).

Dans le noir du temps

Armando Iannucci

When Joseph Stalin had a stroke in March 1953, the political court of the Red Tsar flew into a blind panic. The unprincipled struggle for power that ensued is sharply sketched by Armando Iannucci (I’m Alan Partridge, Veep) and a choice selection of top English-speaking actors in a pitch-black, hilarious and timeless political satire. Closing Film IFFR 2018.

The Death of Stalin

Jaime Chávarri

It has been described as the best Spanish documentary ever. Portrait of the widow and children of the poet Leopoldo Panero, celebrated by Falangists, whose merciless shadow, both erudite and cruel, still hangs over the family 10 years after his death and towards the end of the dictatorship in 1976.

El desencanto

Travis Wilkerson

In 1946, filmmaker Wilkerson's great-grandfather shot a black man dead – and no one batted an eyelid. Seventy years later in Alabama, when he asks for more details about this family secret, he soon realises that people don’t want to awaken the ghosts of the past.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?

Narimane Mari

In three acts, Mari investigates in a brilliant, complex way the heritage of the colonisation process. From a historic portrayal in her birthplace Algeria, where those in power speak a language only they understand, the film changes into a documentary report of utopians and anti-imperialists in Greece.

Le fort des fous

Hwang Donghyuk

During the Qing Invasion, in 1636, the Korean king had to withdraw to an unassailable fort in the mountains. Surrounded by the enemy and more and more starved, his counsellors succumbed to infighting. If you know you can’t win, what’s the best way to lose?

The Fortress

Anthea Kennedy

Ian Wiblin

Pre-war Berlin: a mysterious voice tells of daily expropriations and thefts by the Nazis. These created an object diaspora to no longer extant buildings. The camera hunts for secrets in contemporary public spaces, slowly developing an impression of a person and a history in this delicate, moving cinematic essay.

Four Parts of a Folding Screen

Jörn Donner

To mark the hundredth anniversary of Finnish independence, Donner again picked up the subject of his legendary Fuck Off!. How is Finland getting on? An occasionally bitter but always human portrait of a society where contrasts and disinterest have grown in parallel with wealth.

Fuck Off 2 – Images from Finland

Sparkling documentary classic from 1971 in which Donner and his mates made Finnish but also Swedish streets unsafe with their investigation into how the country and the people were doing. "If the film is crazy, that’s the fault of the Finnish people," is how Donner affectionately defended himself against all the fuss he caused.

Fuck Off! – Images from Finland

Jean-Marie Straub

Danièle Huillet

Straub &amp; Huillet, after Bertolt Brecht. Opinions on this masterpiece vary from ‘political cinema at its most advanced and provocative’ to ‘cold anti-cinema’, but the film itself is like a history teacher who tolerates no contradiction. A modern young man in Rome interviews four contemporaries of Caesar about his career.

Geschichtsunterricht

Robert Schwentke

It’s a good thing the Germans themselves tell this kind of uneasy story. When the deserting Wehrmacht soldier Willy Herold finds an officer’s uniform in a deserted army vehicle in the last days of the war, he puts it on. It doesn’t take long before he also adopts a suitably haughty form of cruelty in this gripping and beautifully shot warning-from-hell.

Der Hauptmann

Angela Ricci Lucchi

Yervant Gianikian

In the late 1980s, found-footage pioneers Gianikian &amp; Ricci Lucchi travelled to Russia looking for living memories of the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. The result is a work consisting of a 10-metre-long watercolour roll with their notes and drawings from the trip, as well as a video installation showing their search for the survivors.

Journey to Russia

Wolfgang Staudte

Staudte, never unwilling to stir stinking still water, directed this FRG classic in 1960 about a corpse that is found during construction of a fairground, 15 years after the war. Everyone knows who the young man was and why he had to die, but people prefer to forget and leave the remains unidentified.

Kirmes

Pablo Sigg

In the jungle of Paraguay live the Schweikhart brothers, descendants of the Aryan colony Nueva Germania, once founded in Paraguay by the sister of Nietzsche. With them as protagonists and in difficult conditions, Sigg shot this painterly fiction about the collapse of the fossilised order of their daily existence. With a leading role for a hypnotic, threatening soundtrack.

Lamaland (Teil I)

Shadi Abdel Shalam

Based on the true story of a 19th-century Upper-Egyptian clan that robs a cache of mummies and sells the artefacts on the black market. The authorities start an investigation. A sense of obscure mystery inhabits this masterpiece, that almost 50 years after its production has become an ambiguous parable for our times.

The Mummy

John M. Stahl

Margaret Sullavan is wonderful in her debut as a lively and idealistic single mother, whose adventures form a bridge between World War I and the Great Depression. Told in moving, melodramatic flashback, the film focuses on issues such as prohibition, the rise of Hollywood, but above all the changing relationships between the sexes.

Only Yesterday

Leandro Listorti

Based on the remains of never-completed Argentine features from the archives of the film museum in Buenos Aires. The film is, as it were, a parallel film history: an essay like a cinematographic Frankenstein, that blows new life into images that once seemed unsuccessful and pointless.

La película infinita

Giovanni Donfrancesco

The story of Piero, now an old man in Vermont, who recalls his time in a violent fascist Italian militia in World War II. Powerful, captivating and above all rare interview with someone who has been silent about his dark past, but now feels to need to reflect critically on his actions as a teenager.

Il risoluto

Dominik Graf

The productive master filmmaker Graf made this long version of a thrilling Tatort production for the cinema. Forty years after shocking events surrounding the RAF in the ‘German Autumn’ in 1977, detectives Lannert and Boot find themselves confronting the long shadow of the past.

Der rote Schatten

John Ford

John Ford often cited this 1953 drama as his favourite among his films. The master weaves three Judge Priest stories together into a good-natured exploration of honour and small-town politics in the American South circa 1900. A gentle companion piece to Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, also part of A History of Shadows.

The Sun Shines Bright

Annik Leroy

This polyphonic film by the Belgian film artist about the history of Europe and art is an unforgettable, sensual journey between memory and nightmare. To a meditative, threatening soundtrack, we hear a series of monologues by poets and crazy people, mothers and children. Meanwhile, the image forces the eye to reflect on what and where.

Tremor – Es ist immer Krieg

Fabrizio Ferraro

The rocky landscapes of the smuggling route from France into Spain is an imposing backdrop to the last days of Jewish cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). From his experiences and ideas, Ferraro has created a superb cinematographic lesson of acute contemporary relevance, shot in enchanting black-and-white.

Les Unwanted de Europa

Alireza Khatami

Cemetery caretaker discovers the body of a young female protester at the morgue. He does everything he can to give her a proper funeral. The Iranian filmmaker was forced to shoot this universal, sometimes magical parable about dictatorship and repression’s long shadow in Chile.

Los versos del olvido

Feng Xiaogang

Love, dance, lust, war, friendship, betrayal, heroism, disappointment and then love again in spite of it all fight for attention in this colourful, melancholy hit from China's most successful filmmaker. In the background, China’s turbulent history from 1970; in the foreground the young people fulfilling their military service, propagating the revolutionary values through song and dance.

Youth

Lucrecia Martel

At the end of the eighteenth century Zama, a servant of the Spanish crown, whiles away his time on the banks of a South American river waiting for a letter from the king to reunite him with his wife – and civilisation. Martel’s film is an enchanting and original masterpiece that seems to have been made in a different era.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025