On 22 June 1941, the German Wehrmacht launched a war of aggression against the Soviet Union. Under the code name ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the campaign aimed to bring the vast country in the east to its knees. Millions of people died as a result.
Vivienne Vermes
as Narrator
A collection of 8mm film reels from İlhan Mimaroğlu’s archive—once tucked away in whisky boxes—has found new life through art. Curated by director Serdar Kökçeoğlu and producer Dilek Aydın, the project brings together visual artists and musicians to reimagine these long-lost images. Over thirty artists transformed the footage into fifteen distinct audiovisual pieces, blending experimental soundscapes with contemporary video art. The project concludes with a special highlight: the first-ever screening of Mimaroğlu’s silent short film about a street jazz festival, accompanied by Erdem Helvacıoğlu’s dark jazz score.
The film weaves together archival footage of Yugoslavia’s idealized unity with a personal investigation into the filmmaker’s grandfather’s imprisonment under the regime. Rooted in archival theory, the project questions the authority of official histories, exploring how archives shape power and memory.
A mysterious film, featuring three Russian cosmonauts heading into space, is found. This document is the only and last trace remaining of these three men. A team of journalists decides to investigate in Kazakhstan to solve the mystery of their disappearance.
Sunny Beach at socialist Bulgaria, the summer of 1967. 19-year-old Bulgarian SNESCHA meets FRANZ, an 18-year-old Austrian lad. They dance and talk, he is speaking German and she – Bulgarian, and despite the language barrier, they fall in love. In 1975 they get married and leave for Austria. SNESCHA gets pregnant and gives birth to twin sisters. FRANZ embarks to an expedition in Iran and Pamir. SNESCHA gives birth to a third daughter. His next adventure is passing the river Niger to the city of Bamako in Mali. After that he goes back to Austria and buys a house on credit. In 1987 he decides to make a bicycle tour going through Tibet. Despite SNESCHA’S disagreeing, he sets for Pakistan and never comes back. SNESCHA has to take care of her daughters and pay for the house.
Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" is one of the great novels of world literature. The documentary immerses itself in the very own cosmos, spanning 3,000 pages and hundreds of characters, for which Proust's own world was the source of inspiration, and brings Proust's moral portrait of the Belle Epoque to new life.
This film is a testimony. These are the images and sounds recorded throughout the area of struggle of the Saharawi people and they testify to their will to live free at home while placing the "Sahroui problem" in a real context. Ex-Spanish colony whose wealth is considerable, Western Sahara should, like many African countries, gain independence according to United Nations resolutions.
Director Juan José Arias uses old family videos to try to find out what kind of person his father was. His image comes back in dreams, his voice whispers in the smell of rain and his embrace lies in an old house in the country where they used to spent the holidays. Reality, memories and dreams blur together in a poetic way.
Intimate and fragmented moments unfold in a community of zoos and animal rescue centers across Argentina. As histories of these institutions are uncovered, dedicated workers commit both day and night to caring for the remaining enclosed animals, fostering a mutual bond that transcends imagined boundaries between human and animal.
In 2016, an album containing 250 previously unseen photos of Nazi officials was discovered in the USA by Stephan Hördler, a prominent Holocaust historian, who immediately understood the album's inestimable value. The album brings together photographs of a "group of friends," all from the same region of Germany, all of whom became SS men. From 1928 to 1943, the photo album allows us to follow their journey. Hördler conducted the investigation, comparing the photos in the album with other, better-known ones, the faces of these men with those of concentration camp officials, and ultimately revealed that it was at Lichtencburg that these young men were trained, a "school" for future camp executioners, and the bonds of camaraderie and informal network that would allow them to help each other, even after the war.
The Black Book, drafted during World War II, gathers numerous unique historical testimonies, in an effort to document Nazi abuses against Jews in the USSR . Initially supported by the regime and aimed at providing evidence during the executioners’ trials in the post-war era, the Black Book was eventually banned and most of its authors executed on Stalin’s order. Told through the voices of its most famous instigators, soviet intellectuals Vassilli Grossman, Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels, the documentary, provides a detailed account of the tragic destiny of this cursed book and puts the Holocaust and Stalinism in a new light.
Documentary almanac directed by the great cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman about the life of the Soviet capital.
