BY THE NAME OF TANIA

The Amazon flows lazily through the goldmine-gashed landscape of northern Peru. Using real eyewitness accounts, directors Bénédicte Liénard and Mary Jiménez tell the story of a young woman, who winds up forced into prostitution when her initially hopeful attempt to escape the stifling limitations of village life goes wrong. Step by step, she is robbed of her moral and physical integrity. The film reconstitutes a space of dignity and returns a voice and identity to that which has been rendered nameless. With its powerful imagery, the girl’s traumatic odyssey embodies the horrific devastation visited upon the natural world by contemporary industrial society.

Original title: Sous le Nom de Tania
Directors: Bénédicte Liénard, Mary Jiménez
Cinematographer: Virginie Surdej
Produced by: Clin d'Oeil Films
Country and year: Peru, Belgium, 2019

HONEYLAND

Nestled in an isolated mountain region deep within the Balkans, Hatidze Muratova lives with her ailing mother in a village without roads, electricity, or running water. She’s the last in a long line of Macedonian wild beekeepers, eking out a living farming honey in small batches to be sold in the closest city – a mere four hours’ walk away. Hatidze’s peaceful existence is thrown into upheaval by the arrival of an itinerant family, with their roaring engines, seven rambunctious children, and a herd of cattle. Hatidze optimistically meets the promise of change with an open heart, offering up her affections, her brandy, and her tried-and-true beekeeping advice.

Polish title: Kraina miodu

Directors: Ljubomir Stefanov, Tamara Kotevska
Cinematographer: Fejmi Daut, Samir Ljuma
Produced by: Apolo Media, Trice Films

Polish distribitutor: Against Gravity
Country and year: Macedonia, 2019

HOUSE FOR YOU, A

A 30-year old man from a faraway village in northern Iran is bankrupted, and at the same time, finds out he has progressive lung cancer. He makes a series of new decisions for continuing his life.

Director: Mehdi Bakhshi Moqadam
Cinematographer: Mohamad Hadadi
Produced by: Documentary Film Center of Soureh Cinema Org
Country and year: Iran, 2019

IN TOUCH

In Touch is a story about people from a little Polish village called Stare Juchy (in Polish – Old Blood). The village is located in Masuria, an area often referred to as “The Land of a Thousand Lakes”. Around 400 people from this village (over half the population) have emigrated to Iceland since the 1980s and not one has returned. Those who stayed behind – most of them from the older generation – are hoping for a reunion. But by now their children and grandchildren have settled into new lives on the other side of Europe. The distance separating them is great and the journey expensive, so they don’t get to hug each other very often. The best alternative is virtual meetings on Skype.

Director: Paweł Ziemilski
Cinematographer: Filip Drożdż
Produced by: NUR
Country and year: Poland, Iceland, 2019

LONG DAY TOMORROW

Helena is a doctor who should have retired a long time ago due to poor health, but she finds herself unable to leave her patients. Thirty years ago, she moved from Poland to India, where she has worked at the Jeevodaya centre for leprosy patients and their children ever since. To her youngest patients, she is not only a doctor, but also a motherly figure, and everyone at the centre calls her ‘mum’. There is only one person who seems to have a problem with her: the new Head of the institution. Unwilling to accept Helena’s authority among the patients, he has been trying to get rid of her. Despite being a Catholic priest, he does not appreciate her charitable work and has given her a derisive nickname, ‘Mother Teresa’.

Original title: Jutro czeka nas długi dzień
Director: Paweł Wysoczański
Cinematographer: Bartosz Bieniek
Produced by: Black and White Productions
Country and year: Poland, 2019

MAGIC LIFE OF V, THE

An intimate film about a young woman who uses the magic of LARPing (live-action role-playing) to address childhood trauma, protect and bring normalcy for her disabled brother, and become the hero of her own story.

Original title: Veeran maaginen elämä

Polish title: Magiczne życie V
Director: Tonislav Hristov
Cinematographer: Alexander Stanishev
Produced by: Making Movies Oy, Soul Food Films
Country and year: Finland, Denmark, Bulgaria, 2019

MAREK EDELMAN ...AND THERE WAS LOVE IN THE GHETTO

Imagine that the city where you were born is suddenly split in two, with a better half and a worse half. And you’re enclosed in the latter, by a wall 3 metres high, with broken glass and rolls of barbed wire along the top. If you cross it, they’ll kill you. If you stay, you’ll slowly die of starvation anyway. That is precisely what happened in Eastern Europe, in Poland’s capital city of Warsaw in the 1940s. “Why does nobody ask me if there was love in the ghetto? Why is nobody interested?” asked Marek Edelman, resistance fighter and the last leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, shortly before his death in 2009. In this film, he answers that very question, telling us that good and beauty did exist in the hell of the ghetto. And there was love, too. That was of the greatest value – even greater than life itself. A strong, unconditional love where you are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and give yourself completely to another person, body and soul.

Original title: Marek Edelman ...i była miłość w getcie
Director: Jolanta Dylewska
Cinematographers: Jakub Kijowski, Jolanta Dylewska
Produced by: Otter Films
Country and year: Poland, Germany, 2019

MIDNIGHT FAMILY

The Ochoa family runs a for-profit ambulance service in Mexico City, competing with other EMTs for patients in need of urgent help. While making a living in this cut-throat industry, they struggle to keep their financial needs from jeopardising the people in their care. When a crackdown by corrupt police forces the family to try to legitimise their operation, their desperate financial situation pushes them into questionable practices, even as they continue providing essential emergency medical services. In humanising the Ochoas’ ethically compromised business, Midnight Family explores important questions around healthcare, the failings of government, and the complexity of personal responsibility.

Director: Luke Lorentzen
Cinematographer: Luke Lorentzen
Produced by: Hedgehog Films
Country and year: Mexico, USA, 2019

NAKED KING - 18 FRAGMENTS ON REVOLUTION, THE

1979 - revolution in Iran. 1980 - revolution in Poland. The fall of the Shah, the "King of Kings" in Iran, mass strikes and the "Solidarnosc" movement in Poland. What happened in the minds of the young men and women who were involved in the revolutions of that time? What happened to them when the revolution was suppressed or - as in Iran - when a religious authoritarian elite took power? The director Andreas Hoessli lived in Poland as a research fellow. There, he met the reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, who reported on the revolution in Iran. Kapuscinski's notes are the starting point of the film’s narrative, in which the director also collects the Polish secret service’s files about himself, where he discovers that he is to be recruited as an informant under the name "Hassan" for the secret services of the Polish People's Republic.

Original title: Der nackte König - 18 Fragmente über Revolution

Polish title: Nagi król - 18 fragmentów o rewolucji

Director: Andreas Hoessli
Cinematographer: Peter Zwierko
Produced by: Centrala, Mira Film, TM Film
Polish distributor: Centrala
Country and year: Switzerland, Poland, Germany, 2019

NIGHTINGALES HIDE NO SECRETS

This film was shot over a period of 10 years, as the personal diary of the director/cinematographer and his wife, Ewa. The 16mm spring camera footage turns into a family story spanning over a decade - the story of time passing, describing the difference between the two worlds of children and adults, touching life and its unexpected end. Family. Different worlds.

Original title: Tajemnic nie kryją słowiki

Director: Paweł Sobczyk
Cinematographer: Paweł Sobczyk
Produced by: Miracle Worker
Country and year: Poland, 2019