What does it mean to not just break binaries, but to queer them too? When Neel decides to transition from his assigned gender at birth he is rendered homeless having to leave his parental home. But does he find the expected/promised shelter in his affirmed gender? Does he find familiarity in his chosen-lived life? Beyond the blues is a journey of breaking and unmaking binaries, never quite settling down in the comfort of borders and categorizations. It is the story of finding love and resilience in quiet corners, feline kinships, and vibrant colors of the rainbow. It is a promise to hold hands, walk in strength and solidarity, to facilitate newer journeys.
The word kewaaj (কেওয়াজ) is colloquially used to explain chaos, noisiness or annoyance. "Kewaaj" is an audiovisual attempt to give you a glimpse into how the people of Dhaka function in one of the most unliveable cities, according to the Global Liveability Index. Dhaka is fast, dense, intense. Yet the people try to find their peace in it.
Tabassum’s Khudi Bari (Bengali for “tiny house”) is an example of a modular mobile home that, in Bangladesh, is inexpensive, durable, and relatively quick and easy to assembled and disassembled with minimum labor, taking advantage of a rigid space-frame structure to save goods and lives in the wake of flash floods on tiny “desert islands” of sand known as “chars” that precariously dot across the Bengal delta. Land is fluid on the floodplains of Bangladesh, and these islands often break off and erode into the water, forcing people to physically move their home. Khudi Bari reminds us to look to locally rooted knowledge to innovate solutions for uncertain futures. Desert X has commissioned a film about the project in which Tabassum addresses dry and wet cultures and the role of design in enabling life in some of the world’s most extreme climate conditions.
The art of making the inanimate move, talk, laugh, dance, cry was perhaps the most prized inheritance Madhab received from his father; he lapped it up and made it central to his existence. As he helplessly witnesses the fast fading popularity of the puppet theatres and his own team is nearly defunct, Madhab fears that he is heading towards obscurity. Dolls Don’t Die chronicles the battles and dreams of a man who is caught between the rugged realities and the ecstasies of a passionate artist. It celebrates his lonely, gritty fight, which he put up simply to keep his artistic practice alive.
Habibur Rahman’s The River of Partition (Ichamati, 2023) documents this riverine environment, the diverse communities that live around it, and the socio-historical role played by the river in the wake of the partition of India in 1947 and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.
The thousand-year-old tradition of pottery in the Indian subcontinent is now under threat. With the market being flooded with plastic in the evolution of civilization, today this Pal community is becoming displaced.
The metamorphosis of a young boy from a sub-proletarian background in Picardy into a star of French cultural life. Édouard Louis, who in a few years has become the spokesman writer of a generation, encourages each of us to make permanent transformation a new way of life.
In 2016, French writer and photographer Carole Achache took her own life. After Carole's death, her daughter Mona Achache, a film director, discovers thousands of photos, letters and recordings that Carole left behind, but these buried secrets make her disappearance even more of an enigma. Through the power of filmmaking and the beauty of incarnation with the help of actress Marion Cotillard, the director brings her mother back to life to retrace her journey and find out who she really was.
In his own words, the burglar behind the 2010 robbery of the Paris Museum of Modern Art tells how he pulled off the biggest art heist in French history.
In 1945, two young American soldiers, brothers Budd and Stuart Schulberg, are commissioned to collect filmed and recorded evidence of the horrors committed by the infamous Third Reich in order to prove Nazi war crimes during the Nuremberg trials (1945-46). The story of the making of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, a paramount historic documentary, released in 1948.
In the town of Xoco, the spirit of an old villager awakens in search of its lost home. Along its journey, the ghost discovers that the town still celebrates its most important festivities, but also learns that the construction of a new commercial complex called Mítikah will threaten the existence of both the traditions and the town itself.
The preparations of a sound installation by artist Ernesto Romeo is suspended when his mother falls ill. This interruption motivates the director to embark on a series of projects that share a mysterious connection to each other.
In Paraguay, during the regime of dictator Alfredo Stroessner, almost 400 people disappeared without a trace, and several hundred thousand were sent to prisons where they were tortured. One of these people was Emilio Barreto, an aspiring actor who spent a total of thirteen years in prison despite never being tried for any crime.
A fascinating journey through Mexican culture and spirituality in search of the origins of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon that emerged after the shocking clash between Europe and the Mesoamerican peoples. With all its lights and shadows, this 'brown skinned' virgin is the first and most important sign of Mexican identity.
Through archive footage and images as well as interviews, the movie paints the portrait of a legendary trans womens' rights activist in Argentina. Like a family album to flip through, the narrative charts the ties solidarity and mutual aid create between people of the LGBTQI+ community and the long road to make the personal political, during the brutal 1980s in latin America.
Embracing a temporary visual impairment, a filmmaker immerses in her family’s 1990s home movies, composing a narrative that reimagines her father’s vision. They reconnect in the present, amid vulnerability, awkwardness and love: the story of a gardener and a one-eyed woman.