I Am a Mobile Librarian

In 1976, a young punk lands in Natashquan. It’s the beginning of an unlikely love story between a small fishing community and this new arrival. Yet the relationship meets a brutal end when, three years later, the punk disappears without a trace. Forty years have now gone by, and the village of Natashquan is experiencing a slow, irreversible devitalization—one by one, villagers have been going missing. Those who tell the tale of the punk today see it as the story of a small community’s symbolic survival.

The film describes the microcosmos of the small village Wacken and shows the clash of the cultures, before and during the biggest heavy metal festival in Europe.

Toute la mémoire du monde is a documentary about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It presents the building, with its processes of cataloguing and preserving all sorts of printed material, as both a monument of cultural memory and as a monstrous, alien being.

In a valley in the Ukrainian Carpathian forest lies the small and forgotten town of Königsfeld. In 1775, the Habsburg Queen, Maria Theresa, sent a hundred foresters and their families here from the Austrian west of the kingdom. All that remains today of the now over two century-old timber industry are factory ruins, potholes in the valley road and an increasingly seldom heard German dialect. Only a few factories survived a flood that cut the village off from the rest of the world, and left it economically isolated. An atmosphere of farewell hangs heavy in the air.

Sarah Kamya is a school counselor in New York City. She began the project Little Diverse Libraries on June 3rd and has already raised over $13,000, supported black owned bookstores, and has distributed 775 books to Little Free Libraries across all 50 states. Sarah is helping educate communities while most importantly amplifying and empowering black voices.

Docudrama about the Soviet occupation of a Finnish village in the fall before the Winter War.

Madiha Aijaz’s observational documentary on public libraries in Karachi, Pakistan, provides an entry point into present-day Karachi, where irredeemable changes feel imminent. While the libraries become a bastion for the literary tradition of Urdu, their frequent visitors lament the increasing dominance of English – a residual reminder of colonialism, partition and the ‘globalising’ present. Wrapped in quiet solitude, seated readers are shown hiding away from the hustle and bustle of urban life that can be seen outside.

A representation of queer and feminist imagery that was mainly shot in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, remote and developing areas in southwest China, and metropolitan cities like Beijing from 2000 to 2004 to document the social changes in contemporary China. The director sympathetically and erotically represents a variety of women, including women as laborers, women as prayers, women in the ground, women in marriage, and women who lie on the funeral pyre with their dead husbands. Her camera juxtaposes the mountains and rivers in old times, the commercialized handicrafts as exposition, the capital exploitation of the elders’ living space, and the erotic freedom of the young people in a changing city.

A Sunday fair with hunger in the air, in a lost Galician village under the black umbrellas of a pitiless rain...

Short documentary about an archetypal library concept for kids in Clamart.