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International Feature Film Competition 2020

Gushegu Exile

Director: Emil Nørgaard Munk

Country: Denmark and Ghana

In the shadow of a tree Salamatu separates pebbles from the beans she has found at the local market square. Nighttime is coming and her children are hungry. Gmanun is packing 14 years of life in bags and preparing to go home and Maate is controlling the local water pump with an iron fist. In Gushegu 100 women live in exile. They have been expelled from their villages because of witchcraft accusations. As years go by, the women become old and weak, and some are allowed to return home. However, years of separations from their families makes the repatriation challenging.

Lamalera

Director: Karsten Tadie

Country: Denmark

The village of Lamalera, situated on Lembata Island in Eastern Indonesia, is notoriously known for its traditional whale-hunting. This ancient hunting technique, passed down from generation to generation is the main livelihood of the village. However, times are slowly changing as the youth are leaving the village for work and studies, while there is pressure from the outside world for them to stop their whaling.

The Second Encounter

Director: Veronique Ballot

Country: Brasil

64 years ago, the first encounter between the white men and the Metuktire Indians took place in the state of Mato Grosso, in the north of Brazil. Henri Ballot, my father, a Franco-Brazilian photojournalist who worked for the famous magazine “O Cruzeiro”, was part of the expedition Xingu, organized by the Villas-Boas brothers, well-respect Brazilian anthropologists. Now, I, Véronique, decided to follow my father’s footsteps. Several questions haunted me: what happened to the Metuktire more than six decades after white men invaded their territory? How did that wishful first encounter influence their lives? What would I find about my father, about whom I after all knew so few? In this film I let the Indians still alive and their descendants do the talking, so that they can confront past and present by reviving their memories through the testimony of my father's photos.

Earthquake of Time

Director: Gian Marcos Godoy

Country: Chile

The invasion of Western Europe has imposed a conception of linear time to the circular cosmos vision of the indigenous people of Latino America. Since the military regime of the Spanish Colony to the establishing of the republics in the 19th century, the cultural and territorial resistance of the Mapuche nation to the Republic of Chile symbolises a tectonics of divergent plaques confronting the neoliberalism of the 21st century. This documentary essay explores the earthquakes, the republic, the ancestors, the mining industry and the concept of time as symbols of the Chilean and Mapuche identities; as their parallel realities turn in opposite directions.

Rajaa, that means hope

Director: Marielle Duclos 

Country: France

Men who have come to France, separated from their children who stayed in their country, are living in a center for immigrant workers. A musician invites them to sing lullabies. Within the intimate setting of these workshops, they reconnect with buried emotions and memories. These lullabies resonate with their testimony on the complexity of paternity from a great distance and life between two countries. From far away, the voice of a child tells us the father's lack and the wound of separation.

Cracks

Director: Dimitra Kofti

Country: Bulgaria

Shiny supermarkets stand next to dilapidated factory buildings in the Bulgarian city of Pernik, one of the Balkans once most important industrial areas. The film tells stories of intense historical transformations and economic crises, through the experiences of people who lived through an industrial rise and an industrial decline.

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