極星

In 1989, a woman writes a letter to her mentor. She reminisces about a life-changing campaign they spearheaded to save a historic home, Irving Gill's Walter Luther Dodge House in Los Angeles, twenty years prior.

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

A young Polish filmmaker sets out to find out what happened to Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer who became a propaganda hero in the 1950s but later fell out of favor and disappeared.

An archival fiction feature about the eternal battle of the sexes, in which two star-crossed lovers trapped in a kingdom of shadows fight to keep their love alive as they gradually fall in hate. Their names are Forever Man and Forever Woman. They are embodied by actors and actresses from long-gone eras, but also by cartoon characters and puppet animations. Together they narrate the story of the euphoric ups and tragic downs of human existence. When Forever Dies, a virtuoso collage of film fragments from the Eye Filmmuseum archive, is an epic ode to largely unseen cinema anchored in the polarizing world of today.

After seven years in prison, a female student in Tehran is hanged for murder. She had acted in self-defence against a rapist. For a pardon, she would have had to retract her testimony. This moving film reopens the case.

November 22, 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Through the perspective of various stakeholders, Patrick Jeudy attempts to trace step by step the progress of this black day in American History.

A tangled network woven with tiny particles of movements broken out of found footage and compiled anew: the elements of the "to the left, to the right, back and forth" grammar of narrative space, discharged from all semantic burden. What remains is a self-sufficient swarm of splinters, fleeting vectors of lost direction, furrowed with the traces of the manual process of production.

It was one of the great crimes of the Second World War: from 1941 to 1944, a total of 872 days, the siege and starvation of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht on Hitler's orders lasted. Over a million people fell victim to the blockade, most of them dying of hunger. Countless of these starving people wrote diaries with the last of their strength, and cameramen filmed in the paralyzed city. Evidence from the hell of the siege, many of the film recordings, but above all the written memories on which this documentary on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation is based, remained under lock and key after the war. The voices of those who had suffered through this terrible time should not be heard by anyone, because they did not fit the pathos of the Leningrad heroic song that was officially sung. Most of the recordings come from women. The writers feared neither the enemy nor the Communist Party or Stalin, who often proved incompetent in providing for the population.

An idealistic United Nations official learns the harrowing truth about war when she falls in love with an American officer charged with the evacuation of civilians. As hostilities escalate, the officer and his small detachment are left to hold the line until allied forces can be brought into action.

Tasmania, 1954: Slovenian migrant Melita abandons her husband and young daughter, Sonja. Sonja's distraught father perseveres with his new life in a new country, but he is soon crushed into an alcoholic despair, and Sonja herself abandons him at the earliest opportunity. Now, nearly 20 years later, a single and pregnant Sonja returns to Tasmania's highlands and to her father in an attempt to put the pieces of her life back together.

“Archeology” and “Archive” share the same roots. Both words come from “Arkhé”, the Greek word for “origin”. In the ruins of buildings, lost forever by earthquakes, as in the depth of the archives, we dig. What happened the morning of the big earthquake? The morning of September 19th 1985 is fading away in our memories. These recordings have never been seen. Unedited images of the catastrophe dug out by the archaeological adventure of an archivist that suffered with them. He dug and suffered until he could no longer see.