While faces and words from Iran will dominate the debate with dedicated meetings and lessons, the official competition will give space to different perspectives, other places and other styles to tell the story of European and non-European contemporaneity.
Two different vectors guide the themes: that linked to environmentalism and green movements, and that of biography, portrait, individual investigation. The first includes Documerica and Planet B, respectively French and Belgian testimonies of battles of yesterday and today: Pierre-Francois Didek’s film will return to the locations of an ancient American photographic project, a forgotten investigation of which the transalpine artist will sum up fifty ‘years after the birth of the global environmental movement; returning to the present, Planet B by Pieter Van Eecke will instead focus the camera on the heirs of that season, the very young militants of Extinction Rebellion.
Apparently opposite worlds and stylistic features will be developed by the other two films in the competition, intimate works in the name of personal reflection: in Light Falls Vertical the Greek artist Efthymia Zymvragaki will explore the painful relationship with the places and people of her country of origin, while in the long-awaited Timekeeper the cinema of Russian Kristina Paustian will open an imaginary dialogue with the Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov – one hundred years after his death.
