Ji.hlava

The 2009 student strike at Zagreb University had several clear objectives – the struggle against the commercialisation of higher education, against tuitions, and for government subsidies. Soon, it spread throughout Croatia. This study of one blockade takes a look at democracy without a vertical hierarchy, its utopian spirit, and its fragile environment. As usual, power objectives and political roles win out over the students’ utopian visions. A film as a manifesto of autonomy, ideals, the seeds of democracy in practice, and history repeating itself.

The dual nature of North and South Korea, forcibly divided by the Soviet Union’s power plays, continues to aff ect the lives of both countries’ inhabitants to this day. Every year, more and more people leave the totalitarian north; every year, more families and lives are torn apart. Kidnappings, extortion, human trafficking, threats of extermination, and hundreds of missing are the order of the day. A dark shadow looms over neighbouring China as well, where the trail of most traffickers and their victims comes to an end. The film goes searching for North Koreans who have disappeared, interviews victims and traffickers, and explores the grey zone of these political twins.

This portrait of Okinawa, a Japanese island formerly home to an American military base, is conceived as a young boy’s daydream-like wanderings, his attention randomly falling on various objects and events. The film thus represents a bold victory of cinematic intuition over method and order. The combination of 16mm black-and-white camera with color images, a soundtrack disconnected from the images, and the blurring of the boundaries between documentary and fiction make this film an enigmatic but fascinating experience.

“They declared war (vojna) on freedom, we declare freedom for Vojna”. Vojna has declared war on Putin’s Russia – this art group’s extreme events are a part of a complex attitude of radically questioning life in late capitalism, including the manufacturing and social relations of private ownership. From inside the Vojna art group, Andrey Gryazev uses diary-like footage to follow their street events and the radical and relentless struggle against the values of today’s Putinocracy, including the arrest and court trial of the members of a guerrilla unit.

Calcutta, 2011. A birthday party. Amidst the restless mood of the family celebration, we are thrown back to the student years of the ambitious and promising communist poet Sarthak. As a young idealist and bon vivant, he works to refine his empathy for the social problems of his nation, his altruistic concern for living beings, and his revolutionary consciousness. The past is woven together from memories, dilemmas, and basic human fears, concerns and joys. The echoes of old rooms resonate with a revolutionary ethos, artistic elitism, and the inability to take care of oneself.