10th Chennai Film Festival 2022 : International Documentaries - Non Competition

10th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2022

International Documentaries. : Non Competition

1) Land of Women
Dir : Marion Gaborit ; 77.19 min; France 

"Land of women" tell the story of five women farmers around the world, working the land, which plays a key role in the planet’s food production. A tribute to some of these women, invisible but essential links in the chain who ensure subsistence agriculture every day and everywhere on earth.

2) Emergence : Out of Shadows
Dir : Vinay Giridhar; 79.58 min; Canada

For Kayden, Jag, and Amar, awakening to and expressing their sexuality within conservative South Asian families was a lonely and terrifying experience. Denial, shame and despair haunted their youths, even threatening their lives. Yet, they’ve emerged. In the feature documentary Emergence: Out of the Shadows, the disparate journeys of Kayden, Jag and Amar converge around a shared sense of compassion and healing as they bravely convey their often heart-wrenching stories.

3) Incomplete Sentences
Dir : Adar Bozbay; 58.05 min; Turkey

Aslı Erdoğan, world-renowned author and activist, has fallen into silence after she fled to Germany. Incomplete Sentences is a feature documentary on her literature and life, leading to exile in Frankfurt, after the Turkish regime’s oppression results in her unlawful imprisonment.

4) The Last Man
Dir : Dakxinumar Bajrange; 60.17 min; United Kingdom / India 

‘The Last Man’ aims to show the ground reality through everyday life of manual scavengers engaged in different types of manual scavenging, endangering and losing their lives in cleaning the choked sewers, and manholes in India.

5) Kalashnikov Society
Dir : Christophe Karabache ; 54 min; Lebanon   

Beirut, right after the August 4th explosion….

Trails of life, torn out of a burdensome and peculiar daily existence, interweaving melancholia, wanderings, endurance and anger, of several people, living in a country on the edge of the abyss.

6) Genocide and Movements
Dir : Luis Carlos de Alencar, Hamilton Borges, Andreia Beatriz; 60.37 min; Brazil

The setting up of a solo performance, the outbreak of revolt, the collective clamor of the marches. Art, organization and rage against the genocide of black people. An audiovisual manifesto recorded between 2008 and 2016, in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro.

7) Nasima
Dir : Heather Kissinger; 85.20 min; United States / Bangladesh

A little girl’s dream of riding the waves threatens to change the course of history for an entire nation. 

Selling trinkets on the beach, 7 year old Nasima’s attention is caught by something out on the water and immediately she is transfixed: surfing has come to Bangladesh. Nasima instantly knows what she wants and that is to surf the waves. She will become the first female surfer in Bangladesh, a place where women don’t even swim in public, let alone ride waves.

8) What Your’re Going Through
Dir : Binyamin Haneman; 20.53 min; Israel

Benny Haneman the director takes up his camera to explore the love, sadness, jealousy and loyalty that exists between him, his father and his older brother Gidi, who has a complex combination of special needs. For the first time, Haneman comes face to face with the fact that it is his childhood perception of his brother that informs their relationship today.

9) Ushiku
Dir : Thomas Ash; 87 min; Japan 

“Ushiku” takes viewers deep into the psychological and physical environment inhabited by foreign detainees in one of the largest immigration detention facilities in Japan. On the eve of Japan's recent--and highly contentious--immigration reform efforts, the filmmaker eludes press embargoes the government has imposed on its immigration facilities, bringing viewers into immediate contact with the detainees, many of whom are refugees seeking asylum

10) Dajla : cinema and oblivion
Dir : Arturo Dueñas Herrero; 15 min; Spain

Life is going on in Dakhla, one of the Sahrawi refugee camps in southern Algeria, forgotten for 45 years. The celebration of a film festival, the Fisahara, breaks the monotony. The event ends, life (and oblivion) continues.

11) If We Told the Truth
Dir : Emanuela Giordano, Giulia Minoli; 59.30 min; Italy

"If we told the truth" travels from Vienna to Copenhagen, Malta to Amsterdam and South Italy to Berlin with the goal to understand what can be done to react to a culpable torpor, a mass denial that touches us all.

If we told the truth is a journey involving students, teachers, journalists, magistrates, businessmen, artists and educators who strive to envisage a new path to a world finally free from the virus of organised crime.