Every family has its secrets, mine is no exception. First I discover an old 9.5mm film, then my mother’s childhood albums, where all photographs strike me as optical illusions. Later on my grandfather, (the well-known portuguese writer Tomás de Figueiredo) whom I never met, reveals himself and communicates through a strange television program. Between past and present, I try to find meaning in what I discover, and in the silences and closed doors I continue to face. – Catarina Mourão

Route 181 offers an unusual vision of the inhabitants of Palestine-Israel, a common vision of an Israeli and a Palestinian. In the summer of 2002, for two long months, Eyal Sivan and Michel Khleifi travelled together from the south to the north of their country of birth, traced their trajectory on a map and called it Route 181. This virtual line follows the borders outlines in Resolution 181, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1947 to partition Palestine into two states. As they travel along this route, they meet women and men, Israeli and Palestinian, young and old, civilians and soldiers, filming them in their everyday lives. Each of these characters has their own way of evoking the frontiers that separate them from their neighbours: concrete, barbed wire, cynicism, humour, indifference, suspicion, aggression… Frontiers have been built on the hills and in the plains, on the mountains and in valleys but above all inside the minds and souls of these two peoples and in the collective unconscious of both societies. Route 181 takes us on a disorienting journey across this tiny territory with vast ramifications.

Diego works the night shift in an isolated gas station close to the Galician-Portuguese border. His work is solitary, silent, monotonous, somniferous. One night, two unexpected visitors show up and unsettle the routine of the place.

The raia is the border which divides the southeast of Galicia (Spain) from the northeast of Portugal. It is a mountainous area of extreme climate. A land in the interior, a land of farmers. The villages in this area have been forgotten by history, at the periphery of each nation. These are only some of the circumstances that made and still make this place and its people exceptional, their stories being as valuable as unknown.

Two films, each projected onto one side of the same two-sided screen. Viewers of one film are unable to see the other. In the first film, four people recount their actions as passeurs, smugglers involved in clandestine networks who helped to get people out of the country between 1971 and 1975, for political reasons and/or due to desertion. In the other, three different long takes cross the Trancoso river, a tributary of the Minho river that marks the border between Portugal and Spain where the clandestine activities took place.

Who are May and Fusako Shigenobu? Fiasco – leader of an extremist left-wing faction, the Japanese Red Army, involved in a number of terrorist operations – has been in hiding in Beirut for almost 30 years. May, her daughter, born in Lebanon, only discovered Japan at the age of twenty-seven, after her mother’s arrest in 2000. And Masao Adachi? A screenwriter and radical activist filmmaker, committed to armed struggle and the Palestinian cause, was also underground in Lebanon for several decades before being sent back to his native country. In his years as a film director, he had been one of the instigators of a ‘theory of landscape’ – fukeiron: through filming landscapes, Adachi sought to reveal the structures of oppression that underpin and perpetuate the political system. Anabasis? The name given, since Xenophon, to wandering, circuitous homeward journeys. It is this complicated, dark, and always suspenseful story that Eric Baudelaire – an artist renowned for using photography as a means of questioning the staging of reality – chose to bring forth using the documentary format. Filmed on Super 8mm, and in the manner of fukeiron, contemporary panoramas of Tokyo and Beirut are blended in with archival footage, TV clips and film excerpts as backdrop for May and Adachi’s voices and memories. They speak of everyday life, of being a little girl in hiding, of exile, politics and cinema, and their fascinating overlap. All of which adds up not so much to an enquiry, but a fragmented anamnesis. -Jean-Pierre Rehm

This film arises from the urgent need to talk about violence from another position, conscious of the over-used statement ‘Third World society places violence at the center of its meaning’. Accordingly, let’s forget the modes of representations that my cinema has used and consider that where an idea manages to take control and becomes hegemonic, an anarchic rebellion of multiple narratives, colors, and formats emerges in a drive towards permanent revolution. The Caribbean re-invented European tongues; my montage is inspired by that far from standard orality, mutating constantly into different modes of representations as it stalks its freedom. – Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias

Project for doc-fiction shot in the territory of the border.

Two men look for their space inside the forest. Stevenson delves into his memories of his discoveries and researches, Deolindo tries to preserve his own ancestral way of life. Halfway through this journey comes the transformation of a territory that shifts in every instant. What are the secrets of the jungle? Where are the borders?

In Mined Soil, César connects the history of Guinean freedom fighter and agronomist Amílcar Cabral and his research on erosion in Portugal, associating it with contemporary documentation of a mining operation led by a Canadian company in the same area, which Cabral once studied. The soil itself is a depot of memories, traces, exploitation, crises, arsenals, treasures and palimpsests. This work directs out attention at contemporary macroeconomic questions in the wake of the Euro-crises, where countries like Greece and Portugal have been forced to look for new ways of generating wealth that may have deep social and environmental consequences. Filipa César does not only tell the story of this 47 km2 stretch of portuguese landscape – among so many other absent from the media’s attention -, she also tells about neo-colonialist operations striking back on European ground.

In the outskirts of Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, the police invades a black ball on the pretext of repressing drug trafficking. Actually, behind this invasion is a racist and territorial action. A lawsuit is proposed to incriminate the Brazilian State for crimes committed against black and marginalised populations. Is the Brazilian State guilty?

“None of the people who were asked about me had seen me.” Le Boudin documents the encounter of the young Elias Geißler with the testimony of Nuno Fialho, who at the age of sixteen was forced to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. “I didn’t enlist. They enlisted me.”

Winter, Beirut. On a littered beach, Lili and Michel meet. Or perhaps they know each other from before… As they struggle to piece together the fragments of an uncertain past, memories emerge: an act of terrorism, an explosion and the disappearance of a child, Elena. Woven throughout these fragments is the deep voice of a Japanese narrator who recounts his own experience of a weeping Beirut, and his clandestine years fighting alongside the Palestinians as a member of the Japanese Red Army.

The incredible trial of an appealingly ordinary man. Drawn entirely on the 350 hours of rare footage recorded during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, in Jerusalem, this film about obedience and responsibility is the portrait of an expert in problem solving, a modern criminal. The film is inspired by the controversial book by Hannah Arendt ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem, report on the banality of evil’.

Paulo offers sublime portrayals of the cruelties and paradoxes of power and of the revolutions that brought them down, only to erect new bureaucracies, new cruelties and paradoxes. His work as a mercenary on in the fringe of these two worlds.

In 1967, following the success of Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni planned to make a film in Japan. The project was cancelled, and Antonioni opted for the United States instead, where he shot Zabriskie Point. In 1983, Antonioni published ‘That Bowling Alley on the Tiber’, a compilation of notes and intentions for films that were never made, ‘narrative nuclei’ that point towards a cinema that remains invisible after Antonioni’s death in 2007. In the spirit of the famous Zen riddle about the sound of one hand clapping, artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire invents the notion of the ‘make’ as a remake of a film that was never made a first time, the ghost of a movie lurking behind a document attesting to its possibility. Adopting the format of a DVD bonus track, Baudelaire’s 26 minute experimental film The Makes unfolds as a staged interview with Philippe Azoury, an Antonioni specialist and famous film critic for the French newspaper Libération. In the course of the film, Antonioni’s unrealised cinema finds a form through an assemblage of various materials that end up giving meaning to each other: story ideas from Antonioni’s ‘That Bowling Alley on the Tiber’, found film stills from various unrelated Japanese productions, a precise and surprisingly convincing critical discourse by Azoury, real life anecdotes, and an ominous correspondence between Barthes and Antonioni. Exploring the notion of invisible cinema, this montage of unrelated material from the past creates a strangely concrete cinematic experience in the present.

There are films where conflicts spontaneously arise between the director and cast. And then there are films where the conflict is thought right into the film’s premise from the very beginning. In Thomas Harlan’s feature film Wundkanal, a real, former Nazi is confronted by his horrific crimes. But the process behind the film was in fact one long confrontations between the director, the film crew and its mendacious protagonist. Just how intense (but also immensely complex) this confrontation was can be seen in Robert Kramer’s Our Nazi, which documents the creation of Harlan’s film, but which i its own right is a unique reflection on the limits of human morals and comprehension when faced with something that in the absence of better terms can be called evil. The filmmakers behind Wundkanal were descendants of the protagonist Alfred Filibert’s victims or of other Nazis. Thomas Harlan’s own father, the German filmmaker Veit Harlan, made the film Jud Süss (1940), one of the most notorious anti-Semitic propaganda films during the Nazi era. And just like the young kidnappers in Wundkanal start to lose their grip around their plan, the inflamed relations between the filmmaker and the participants here turn into a power game, that at times culminates in direct physical conflicts. An uncompromising masterpiece from one of documentary filmmaking’s most radical artists.

An old man is kidnapped. His interrogation uncovers the biography of a mass murderer: The 80-year-old man was a SS leader and responsible for the killing of thousands of people in Russia. He also ‘invented’ an evil technique of eliminating political prisoners: the manipulated suicide. Thomas Harlan reconstructs the history of a bureaucratic murderer, he also develops a direct connection between the National Socialism and the treatment of prisoners of the RAF terrorists in the Stuttgart isolation prison.

In a lyrical video letter, Robert Kramer addresses Paul McIsaac, his old accomplice, main character of Doc’s Kingdom and, in some way, his alter-ego. An image of the passing time and a brief reminiscence of the film they did together. This was captured during the edition of Route One/USA.

“Paris, June 29th 2012
Dear Max,
Are you there?
Eric
“”Abkhazia is something of a paradox: a country that existis, in the physical sense of the world (a territory with borders, a government, a flag and a language), yet it has no legal existence because for almost twenty years it was not recognised by any other nation state. And so Abkhazia exists without existing, caught in a liminal space, a space in between realities. Which is why my letter to Max was something of a message in a bottle thrown at sea, a wink to the world of Alfred Jarry’s ‘Ubu Roi’ that Maxim Gvinjia seems to inhabit. But my letter arrived, and somehow fiction has penetrated the real.”” And so Eric Baudelaire launched on a letter writing campaign, 74 letters sent over 74 days, a script for a voiceover to a film in which Maxim Gvinjia, former Foreign Minister of the unrecognised state of Abkhazia, becomes the narrator. The film is structured by this exchange: letters that should not have arrived and yet somehow reached Max, his recorded responses, and images that Eric Baudelaire filmed in Abkhazia once their correspondence ended. – Jean-Pierre Rehm”

The palm is the inside of the hand and a tropical tree. Contribution for the symposium ‘Thinking with Harun Farocki’.

Fauske, Norway. 70km northward from the Arctic Circle. The penultimate week of the year, the week of the winter solstice, the average length of daytime here is 58 minutes. The sunrise occurs at 11.27 am and the sunset at 12.25 pm. This film is a portrait of those brief moments of light.

“El Dorado is a documentary fiction that narrates 24 hours in the life of Mamani, an informal miner that migrated to La Rinconada, Peru. He works under the system of cachorreo (similar t the scheme imposed by the Spanish crown to native slaves) hoping that tone day he can set his family free from Dante’s Inferno by returning to their home village. La Rinconada is the largest mine in that village. Men, women and children enter and dig dark holes in Ananea mount, dragging bags of stones and wandering in permanente exhaustion. The system is an unpredictable lottery; even so, with cachorreo, miners and employees ca avoid ‘certain taxes’. It’s a mind game – the possibility of generating a small fortune motivates the miners and believing in ‘something bigger’ serves as a great inspiration, since the thin monthly salary would not justify itself a life of danger. It’s been four years since the Peruvian government pretends not to see the growth of inhumane conditions in this remote community, where most law enforcement officers refuse to patrol the area.
“No: tomorrow everything will be finished!” – The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky”

Alberto is an evangelical gardener who travels to his native village to attend his father’s funeral, who was murdered by a policeman. Upon arriving, he discovers that he will have to participate in rituals contrary to his religion and will, and furthermore, avenge his father’s death.

In 2013 the military police of the Brazilian Federal District initiated a large operation against drug traffic in the peripheral city of Ceilândia, dismantling a series of illegal networks and arresting sixteen men. A year later, the women, their partners, took over the streets. Rapidly they established their own field of action, imposing new codes reorganising labor relations, transforming the modes of production of a Brazilian periphery. Their disputes for economic, symbolic and territorial power slowly turn into a war. They claim a space for the peripheral female body, and its own codes of action. They are the map of a new territory. Mato Seco em Chamas is a film where these women take over a city, imposing the image and the imaginary projected by their own bodies. It’s a film where marginalised spaces become central zones of action, where imagined fables turn into real political possibilities, where female gas station workers become oil explorers, and where Ceilândia, historically deserted as the unwanted child of Brasília’s utopian modernist dream, claims its site as the symbolic capital of the country. It’s the film of a city that is reconquered, reclaimed, blazing, a city in flames burning from within.

The rapid turning of a beam draws a circle. In the space bound by its line an archive of postcards sent between the island of Madeira and the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique unravels. As Figuras Gravadas na Faca com a Seiva das Bananeiras meshes between a fictional colonial memory and science-fiction.

Thirty-five years after gaining independence from the Portuguese colonial rule, Goa is definitely a state of many contrasts. Together with a strong migrating Hindu population, there is still a Portuguese speaking minority which seems somewhat frozen in nostalgia and kept in a strange time limbo. Aida, the Lady of Chandor, lives alone in Goa. At 82 years of age she devotes each day to caring for her beautiful old house, which has survived three centuries Portuguese colonial rule. Without the Lady of Chandor the house will die. Without the house Aida would lose her reason for living. But inside this house time moves in a magical way and both the house and the Lady of Chandor seem immortal.