Milan Balog / Slovakia / 8 min Short documentary about unbearable distance between two separated lovers.
Refugee from Czechoslovakia left his home country and beloved during the sixties because of Soviet Union occupation. More than thirty years later he tries to return to his homeland. He is dying and doesn’t want to perform his next emigration- this time to another reality- all alone. The return is impossible, the only possible way how to keep contact with his beloved is to keep on sending her packs of photocopies (...)
Sepp R. Brudermann / United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland / 84 min ‘Squatting is still a legal occupation’. According to Section 6 of the Criminal Law Act 1977 the occupation of empty property in the UK is not illegal. In London there are more than 13.000 people living in squats. In 6 eclectic stories “5 1/2 Roofs” gives us six visions of squatting in London and shares with us the freedom and conflicts brought by living such a transitional, insecure lifestyle. We start with a group of young professionals from Eastern Europe who move (...)
Peter Kerekeš / Slovakia / 86 min A document about a swimming pool in the city of Kosice, the place where, according to the filmmakers´s slogan, "history used to go to bath". Through stories that took place by the pool between 1936 and 2003, the film captures the 66 years of the popular spot as well as the same years in the history of Central and Eastern Europe.The mosaic of the individual stories reconstructs the history;people's lives are not shown on the background of depersonalized history;people's lives make (...)
Alexandra Gojdičová / Czech republic / 13 min In this film subtitled Alternative Soundtrack, which emerged as a student exercise in the Editing Department at FAMU in Prague, the capital city of Slovakia becomes a sign, a symbol, unleashing a game of multiple associations. This is the basis of a fragmented portrait of reality, where the fluid manner in which an occurrence, an atmosphere, or an environment is expressed is heightened by artistic and musical sensitivity, which helps to create an authentic representation of an inner world, (...)
James T. Hong / China, United States of America, Taiwan / 27 min Troop No. 731 was a secret unit of the imperial armywhich tested biological weapons during WW2. Although its cruel experiments on living people produced thousands of casualties, this activity is still denied by a number of Japanese historians. This documentary reacting to thegrowing historic revisionism consists of two parts: in the firstone history is presented from the Chinese perspective, thesecond part offers the Japanese interpretation. Usage of thesame shots in both parts of the film (...)
Marcel Loziński / Poland / 12 min An impression of a railway station on the border of Poland and Byelorussia, a former Soviet Union. Polish Brzesc-Litevski marks the point where the standard European rail tracks terminate, further to the East they are 89 millimetres wider.
In order for trains to cross the border, rail workers change thousands of wheels for a bigger model, everyday. They are watched through the train windows by French, German and Dutch travellers.
The director builds his film upon this peculiar metaphor derived (...)
Leszek Dawid / Poland / 55 min The unemployed thirty-year old men, Mark and Piotek, dread a feeling that there is nothing to wait for in their home town. Opposed to the resigned neighbours, they succeed in resisting their fate and they go for a job to London. Through a confidential camera, the socially-critical documentary follows their journey for a promised job right from the block of flats to the west to the dreamt-of city. But then it happens the same as to many of immigrants before: there is no work in there and the men (...)
Mirosław Dembiński / Poland / 56 min After the Soviet Union collapsed, Belorussia became an independent country and a humanistic Lyceum was founded in Minsk, with the aim of raising an elite Belorussian intelligentsia. However, in 1995, Lukashenko comes to power. Democracy and freedom come to an end. Also the Lyceum is labelled a banned institution. The Lyceum pupils do not give up though, but steadfastly keep studying in the underground. The Presidential elections, for which Lukashenko changed the Constitution in order to be (...)
Klára Tasovská / Czech republic / 14 min A Vietnamese Shaolin soccer team attempts to advance in the Strahov league. It goes through the competition with success until the final. The effort of the Vietnamese team to get assimilated through soccer, popular both in the Czech Republic and in Vietnam, but being a competitive, frequently conflicting display at the same time. The conflict with the Czech opponents thwarts their dream of the final victory and friendship. Paradoxically, the solution of this conflict came in the form of a (...)
Mišo Suchý / Slovakia, United States of America / 43 min When I first arrived in America, (from my native Slovakia), I neither spoke nor understood a word of English and I soon found myself in the position of a mute creature. Perhaps it was this experience of muteness that inspired me to make a film about America from the perspective of a creature that neither speaks nor understands this country’s language or ways. Dogs can’t speak, but they can tell a lot about the society in which they live. About Dogs and People is an account (...)
