One morning in August 2012, renowned Syrian photographer Issa Touma saw young men lugging sandbags into his street. It turned out to be the start of the Syrian uprising in Aleppo.
Joris Ivens films Amsterdam during a rain shower. This poetic city symphony, a “cine-poem” per the film’s opening title cards, shifts moods, following the gradual transformation from sunny Amsterdam streets to raindrops in the canals and on windows, umbrellas, and trams, until it clears and the sun breaks through once again.
Zuza Banasińska reinvents the famous Slavic witch Baba Yaga through a clever montage of films from the Polish Educational Film Studio archive, containing sexist content. Questioning their own non-binary identity, they unleash the queer dimension of found footage tasked with conveying a normative conception of identity.
