121280 Ritual
Pregnancy becomes ritual in Antoinetta Angelidi’s film of her son’s birth, finished 28 years later.
16'
Greece
IFFR 2024
Georgica is a loose variation on Virgil's Georgics (29 BC), a poem on agriculture. Like the ancient Latin inspiration, the film is divided into four books or songs, taking up similar themes: the discussion and practice of apiculture, or the remembrance of foreign lands and wonders. But the latter already shows the differences in tone between Virgil and Keedus.
If the former’s Laudes Italiae is truly a praise of culture, the memories of Africa that haunt Jakub, the sole person allowed to live on a barren island in newly Soviet Estonia, are of a more ambiguous nature. The authorities send a young mute lad there, to keep Jakub company. He calls him Maecenas, as a tribute to Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to whom Virgil dedicated the Georgics, a work Jakub would love to translate into an African language. Difficult to say whether Jakub ever was in Africa or whether his memories are in reality dreams, visions evoked by images of the continent he collected as a child. All the while, Maecenas is wrestling with his own traumatic images, showing his mother lost in society's lower depths.
An extraordinarily physical, even sensual piece of cinema that is deeply contemplative at the same time.
– Olaf Möller
IFFR 2024
Programme IFFR 2024
A sphere of collective remembrance and imagination offering restored classics, documentaries on film culture, and explorations of cinema’s heritage.
Read more about this programmePregnancy becomes ritual in Antoinetta Angelidi’s film of her son’s birth, finished 28 years later.
16'
Greece
IFFR 2024
An invasive film crew attempts to make a gritty documentary on some Cali slums.
27'
Colombia
IFFR 2024
A sensitive and insightful documentary on the art of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti.
53'
Switzerland
IFFR 2024