Philipp Diettrich

Comprised entirely of archive material, drawing on a rich seam of documents to reveal how Swiss filmmaker and travel writer René Gardi left his mark on how a whole generation viewed Africa from the 1950s onwards. The film doesn’t just highlight Gardi’s colonialist way of thinking, but also functions as a reflection on the projections of Africa of today.

An audition for men aged between 16 and 99. There are no props nor make-up, just pure improvisation. All that is required is the willingness to engage openly with the topic and language of the words on the page. No small challenge, since the text in question is the scandalous novel published anonymously in 1906 “Josefine Mutzenbacher, or the Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself” which, as this film confirms, continues to be the subject of passionate and controversial discussions about desire, even today. What might be world-class pornographic literature for some is seen by others as an abusive depiction of child sexuality.

Giulia looks to a future in which all the inherited heaviness from the female line of her family has been cast aside. She stumbles out of the family home that has made her heart square and follows the shimmering summer flirtation of a queer crew to Italy.

Rebecca Hirneise’s film centers around the uncles and aunts of her Protestant family engaging in a conversation about their faith for the first time. This reveals an unexpectedly intense and personal world of Christianity. A dialogue unfolds, revealing a broad spectrum of absolute devotion to the Bible, charismatic ecstasy, and a deep-seated fear of God.

La empresa is a strange creature of a most ambiguous nature: a fiction film about documentary filmmaking as fiction filmmaking, and what it all does to a region’s economy as well as a collective psychology. Or is it? Isn’t it more to the point to say that... But before we get lost here, let’s state what La empresa talks about: how the caminata nocturna, the illegal crossing of the border between Mexico and the United States, was turned into a business that ranges from four-hour night-time tours for tourists out for a sick thrill to reenactments for film and television crews. The latter, of course, is at the core of André Siegers’ casually ironic look at this economy of disaster. When the Germans arrive in town, they meet a workforce already in place and willing to play to any national stereotype – as the French seem to get other kicks out of presenting the caminata nocturna than the Netflix internationals.