Five lives (2016) 65’
Filmmaker: Jaroslava Panáková (Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences)
Location: Chukotka, Russia
The film addresses the issue of transformative experiences within religious beliefs, namely the phenomenon of "return". According to the local people, the dead can return to the realm of the living up to five times. Viktor Valerevich Mumikhotkak also known as "Mukha", Chukchi from the hamlet New Chaplino (Chukotka, Russia), died tragically in 2012. Two years later, when young Alla Ukuma gave birth to her first son, her mother told her: "Last night I saw Mukha in my dream. He had come back in your boy. Let us name your baby Viktor". The technologically diverse material recorded in 2008-2014 has become the basis for creating two realms – one of the living people (digital) and one of the spirits (8mm film material with children). Their dialogue then generates the tension that culminates in Kutylina's statement: "Everything there is the same as here, but some people say – life is better there. There's so much drinking here, probably not so much there. It would be nice if it were true." In the epilogue, drunken Mukha falls down onto the snow in tundra, then stands up, only to walk straight back to new life with a baby Viktor.

Portraits Berlin - Loreto (2017) 9’
Filmmaker: Sophia Söderqvist
Location: Berlin
Loreto talks about growing up in Chile during the Pinochet regime, about France, Fellini and her lost paradise. She also sings two wonderful songs for us. This portrait was shot on a beautiful spring day at Bornholmer Straße, which is the historical place where the first people crossed the border to west Berlin on the 9th of November 1989, the day

Portraits Berlin - Katri (2015) 8’
Filmmaker: Sophia Söderqvist
Location: Berlin
Katri tells us about why she left Finland and how cool Berlin was in the 80′s. She also talks very honestly about her family and motherhood. A charming portrait of a charming woman. This portrait was shot at Katri's Datscha (small cottage) on the Island of Reiswerder, close to Tegel Airport, so we are constantly interrupted be airplanes taking off and landing. Music: New Found Land.

Lukomir, my home (2018) 62'
Filmmakers: Manca Filak (Institute of Slovenian Ethnology), Žiga Gorišek
Production: Ethnocinema
Location - Lukomir (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Lukomir is one of the few villages on Bjelašnica that was not burnt down during the Yugoslav War in the 1990s, therefore it has maintained its traditional architecture and appearance. Today, this is its main attraction that brings in growing numbers of outside visitors. In tourism, Lukomir is painted as a picturesque village above the Rakitnica Canyon, one of the most authentic and unspoilt villages in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The entire area is popular among hikers as well as among skiers in the winter season. Lukomir, My Home is an ethnographic film that was in the making from April 2014 until May 2017. It portrays a visual ethnography of an older couple’s everyday life. The authors of the film lived with Hismet and Tidža in different periods and seasons. They accompany the couple while they carry out most of their everyday chores in Lukomir and Hadžići as well as when they release the sheep into the valley and when they return to Lukomir.

Through love, thorns become roses (2016) 20’
Filmmakers: Philippe Gazagne (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies), Alessandro Monsutti (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies)
Location: Athens, Greece
Ali is an afghan refugee caught in a limbo life in Athens for years. In this state of confinement, he escapes through dreams, prose and poetry. His words squeal like a cry of hope. 'Through Love, Thorns Become Roses' is a attempt to grasp his feeling of being in between place and time, his feeling of being in between a past not yet completely left behind and a present not yet fulfilled. Immobilized, socially absent, he revisits continually his memory. Ali’s taste for poetry mingles with a narration of his dreams and insomnia. Challenging conventional logics of time and space, 'Through Love, Thorns Become Roses' offers a poetic vision of a poetical act. The film is the result of a three-way negotiation: between Ali, a social anthropologist expert of Afghanistan and a visual anthropologist.

Poem and stone (2015) 10’
Filmmaker: Maryam Tafakory (Oxford University/Kingston University)
One experiences and records the present through bodily sensations that hold memories. The desire to remember, embeds the past involuntarily within the present. Poem and stone interweaves performance, documentary and poetry, drawing on notions of belonging, absence and the impossibility of a return. Strolling the streets of Tehran, unfolding recollections, inscribed as it were, through a language primarily material. Bringing the distant, the outside and the unreachable inside a studio space, the residual, the soil, dust and stains aren’t mere reconstruction of the past but an attempt to return to ritualise fragments of the forgotten and absent referencing Marcel Proust’s notion of ‘Involuntary Memory’ coined in his book ‘In search of lost time’.

Riski (2017) 12’
Filmmaker: Otto Reuschel
Location: Melilla, Spain
Along with dozens of other young Moroccan boys between 8 and 18 years old, Mohammed lives on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in the port of Melilla, a Spanish autonomous town on the east coast of Morocco. Mohammed lives in the hope of one day stowing away aboard a freighter headed for Europe.

69 minutes of 86 days (2017) 70’
Filmmaker: Egil Håskjold Larsen
Location: Europe
In the middle of a crowd of people on the run, a 3-year-old Lean slowly emerges. She takes in her surroundings between hundreds of adult trouser legs. Aware of the situation she and her family find themselves in, with childlike wonder she continues her journey and with every step, she is closer to her grandfather in Sweden.

Lust (2017) 22’
Filmmakers: Giannis Tsiachristas, Maria Zitaki
Location: Eleonas Camp, Greece
The documentary tells the story of Rahmat, refugee from Afghanistan who works as a translator in the camp of Eleonas. The film through the history of Rahmat deals with aspects of the daily life of refugees and the problems they face in Greece.

What the wind took away (2017) 75’
Filmmakers: Helin Celik, Martin Klingenböck
Location: Turkey
As a tribe of Kurdish nation, Yazidis never had an official land and had to suffer oppression from other countries since the beginning of their existence. Yazidi women additionally have to endure the hegemony of men and it's strict customs. During the IS attack in August 2014 in Sinjar (Northern Iraq) - the main settlement area of Yazidis - plenty of men were killed and thousands of women kidnapped. What the wind took away shows the destiny of two Yazidi women and how violence and oppression affected their lives. It aims to achieve an intimate insight into their personal experiences during the IS war. 

Wási (ver, to see) (2017) 15’
Filmmakers: Sebastián Gómez Ruíz (University of Barcelona), Amado Villafaña Chaparro (Universidad Central)
Location: Colombia
Wási (to see) is the story of a day of seeing (themselves) in the Arhuaco community in Kutunzama (Magdalena, Colombia). From the hand of the Arhuaco filmmaker Amado Villafaña, we enter into what it means to see for the indigenas Arhuacos. From the viewing of photographs and films, we approach how the Arhuaco people have been visually represented from the outside and what Amado's interpretation of these representations is, in an exercise of seeing, seeing and representing themselves.

Memory is not about the past (2016) 20’
Filmmaker: Anna Chahine
Location: Berlin, Germany
The film aims to understand how former East Germany is remembered in accordance with the general national historic discourse today. The intent of this ethnographic encounter is not to solely observe and conduct interviews, but also to stage encounters with the participants in order to access the different layers of memory and perception. The performance-like movement of the body through different places of the city functions as a catalyst for emerging stories and memories from the past. The focus on walking as a method and moving through urban space of Berlin might fit into the overall topic “Staying, Moving, Settling” concerning the form of the ethnographic research method itself.

Rhythms of attunement (2017) 6’ 
Filmmaker: Anna Lisa Ramella (Universität Siegen)
Location: Europe
A 2-channel video that presents an experiment to grasp senses of belonging in mobile settings through audiovisual means. Drawing from my fieldwork on the road with touring musicians, the piece explores the concept of “attuning” (Ingold/Vergunst 2008; Edensor 2008) through both, musical and mobile practices. Through the audio, recipients are invited to perceive the process of tuning an instrument on stage and witness the finding of the “right tone”. Visually, practices of finding one’s place within itinerant spaces and of constituting instances of belonging are made visible through the camera’s tracing of a precise movement of a hand, of finding the exact position of the screw to tune the drums or guitar, of tape-marking the instruments’ positions on a stage, of installing one’s body in a van seat. These two levels of attunement - visually and sonically - will lead the recipient through phases of arhythmic as well as rhythmic elements, coinciding in what can be described as “rhythms of attunement” - a certain state of bodily comfort and familiarity within space and sound.

A goddess in motion: María Lionza in Barcelona (2016) 64’
Filmmakers: Roger Canals (University of Barcelona), Jordi Orobitg
Production: Wenner-Gren Foundation and Jordi Orobitg Produccions
Location: Venezuela & Spain
The cult of María Lionza, one of the most important religious practices in Venezuela, is beginning to manifest itself in Barcelona. Through the testimonies of believers, artists and esoteric art sellers, this ethnographic film depicts, for the first time, the appearance of this religion in the Catalan capital. Through the montage, the author questions the changes that the ritual undergoes when it must adapt to a new context. This film is also a visual essay in the first person, in which the anthropologist –of Catalan origin– reflects openly on the nature of the fieldwork and on the boundaries between “us” and “others”.

Making home - with five artists based in the UK (2014) 35’
Filmmaker: Anna Laine (Swedish National Heritage Board)
Location: London, Belfast, Jaffna
This video-work presents five contemporary artists based in London and Belfast who use their art practices to investigate complex notions of belonging related to their Tamil Sri Lankan background. The artists convey how dialectic movements between accommodating themselves and creating disruptions take individual as well as shared forms. The complexities of their shifting positions in relation to making home have been explored through direct improvisations as well as constructed settings in London, Belfast and Jaffna, over a period of one and a half years. Laine's way of working at the intersection of art and anthropology combined with the artists’ engagement in visual and material practice as well as theoretical reflections destabilized the boundary between researcher and researched during the making of the video. Shared interests and methodologies influenced how relationships and knowledge emerged, and they consequently inform the composition of the collaborative outcome. In order to evoke the multiple layers of the participants' art making and everyday lives, sounds and images merge, clash and dissolve through the form of a split screen.

Together apart (2018) 57’
Filmmakers: Maren Wickwire (Manifest Media), Iara Rodriguez Vilardebó
Location: Cyprus & Philippines
Together Apart is an intimate family portrait of two Igorot women, a mother and a daughter, who leave the the Philippines to seek work in Cyprus. The film portrays issues of separation and hope across three generations. Guil Ann, a twenty-five-year-old woman from the Cordilleras, follows her own mother Carren to the other side of the world. As the most eastern outpost of the European Union, Cyprus has one of the lowest wages for migrant domestic helpers, but still recruits large numbers of workers. Only months after mother and daughter reunite on the island, unexpected events lead to Carren’s forced departure. Having lived abroad for almost two decades, the mother has to adjust to a new life in the Philippines, while the daughter is passed the baton of having to provide cross-generational income. Shifting between the temporary present and future imagination of serial migrants, the film contemplates notions of selfhood, belonging and care, sharing insights into the complex emotional web of transnational migration as it transcends victimization and sacrifice.

Paper paradise (2015) 30’
Filmmakers: Floor de Bie, Eva van Roekel (Utrecht University)
Location: The Netherlands & Belgium
Colombian Jenny and Dutch Dion want to live together in the Netherlands, but Jenny doesn't have a residence permit. To rebel against the rules they live 50 ms across the Belgian border. What seemed the solution slowly changes into a bureaucratic nightmare.

You'll find more details about the film we've selected to close this year's film sessions in the printed programme you'll receive at the conference.