Tempo Film

This is the third part of a lengthy observation of human life that began at the end of the last century in the former USSR. Back then, the project’s creators filmed twenty 7-year old children, promising to return to them every seven years until they turn 70. They are currently 21 years old and living all over the world – USA,
Israel, Germany, France, Georgia, Lithuania, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.
While their fates are varied, they remain forever united by one fact –
all of them were born in an empire that no longer exists. They were born in the USSR.

Screened in collaboration with Svenska institutet.

In Swedish.

A theatre director, specializing in working with disadvantaged and traumatized people, Zeina Daccache struggled to set up Lebanon’s first prison-based drama project in the country’s notorious Roumieh Prison. For 15 months, 45 inmates, some completely illiterate, found themselves working together to present an adaptation of the famous stage play ’12 Angry Men’, here re-named ’12 Angry Lebanese’. In the film, the drama therapy sessions, the interviews with the inmates, and the interaction with both director and audience, convey a message of hope, forgiveness and change.

Screened in collaboration with K-special, SVT.

A man in Russia sentenced to life in prison knows that life means a lifetime. The only way he will leave is in a coffin. The director of this claustrophobic film, Alexander Gutman, is not frightened to hold hold long shots of nothingness, as the prisoner tries to fill yet another day with meaning.
There was no commentary but the excellant soundtrack of a world outside the prisoners cell told only too well of his being cut off from life. An impressive small scale scripted film.

Screened in collaboration with Svenska institutet.

”For seven yerars we kept at it. Me and mom. To find the perfect picture of me. ” Marius is crazy about snowboarding and obsessed to get the perfect jump immortalized. With humorous warmth his mom tells us about all the pictures she took of her son’s more or less successful jumps.

A documentary animation short film about a five year old boy (Thor Ochsner) who ends up in a dramatic car accident story with his dad.

Feeling that marriage is one thing that modern society does not prepare one for a filmmaker couple set out around the world to have an honest look beyond the “happily ever after clichés” Karin, Coming from divorced parents and Steven coming from parents that have been married for 50 years and fought like crazy. These two people are starting out in a new relationship. Both sceptical of their different experiences the two embark on a journey to find out how people stay married for 50 years. Set in USA, Canada, Netherlands, India and South Africa the couple follow 4 50 year married couples for over 4 years and try to understand the tools needed to keep a marriage together. Acting as almost therapists to the younger couple the 50n year old married couples offer some real gems. With the use of archive and photographs the film portrays the couples life over the years.

69 is a documentary about a group of young outsiders who found a place for friendship at a youth centre, at Jagtvej 69 in Copenhagen. In the last six months before Youth center was shut down, the youths are radicalized and see their fight to save the centre as a fight against society. With footage from inside the house and with interviews of main characters from the squat, we get a picture of how the youth saw the conflict.

As an investigative reporter for Novaya Gazeta, Anna Politkovskaya was sometimes the only person who gave voice to the victims of Putin’s regime. In 2006 she was murdered outside her home in Moscow. In Marina Goldovskayas film on Politkovskaya, politics is not the main focus, but the state is always present as an ominous background. After her death the drama continues with family and friends, who each in their own way add details to the portrait of the film’s main character. They all live in the shadow of the dead Anna and those who took her life and still walk free.

This is the story of Ahmed’s heart. Ahmed was a Palestinian boy who lived in the refugee camp in Jenin on the West Bank. When he was 12, in November 2005, he was killed by an Israeli sniper. His parents decided to donate their son’s heart to an Israeli girl. The film is also about this girl, Samah, who is now alive thanks to Ahmed’s heart. For Ahmed’s parents, their son lives on in the girl, as an expression of the hope for peace with Israel. Thus, it is possible to drill holes in dividing walls, if there is someone on the other side who wants to receive one’s gift. For more information, visit www.this.is/parsberg

A Kosovo Fairytale is a touching message for the little brother, so that he could understand the tough decision his family made – they fled to Finland, but he was left in Kosovo. The skilled animation tells the story of a happy family in the midst of war. Even if Finland is good, the family’s worry for the one left behind does not ease. The film illustrates collective pain and provides an intimate picture of one of Kosovo’s numerous human tragedies.

Something happened in Iran 2009.The outcome of the presidential election led to public unrest.Iranian state forces tried to shut down the demonstrations. In the middle of this a filmmaker Sara Sam documented what media could´nt cover. The result is a documentary that shows you what really happened in June 2009.

There was a rumour in Hollywood that the legendary commercial agent Dina had stolen money from her models, used it to do plastic surgery and eventually ended up in jail. In the film ABOUT DINA the ex model and now director Johanna St Michaels returns to Hollywood to look up her old agent to see what happened to her. They change places in front of the camera, Dina starts to tell her story and a complex portrait of a woman is conveyed.

After 30 years of war and Taliban rule, pop culture has returned to Afghanistan. Millions are watching Afghan Star - a Pop Idol-style TV series in which people from across the country compete for a cash prize and record deal. 2000 people audition, including three brave women. The viewers vote for their favorite singers by mobile phone and for many this is their first encounter with democracy. This timely and inspired film follows the moving stories of four young contestants looking for a new life. But their journeys take a terrifying turn as one young woman dances on stage, threatening her own safety and the future of the show itself. In Afghanistan you risk your life to sing.

On the sixth floor of a high-rise building in the 1960s Alby housing estate, there is a Buddhist temple. Several monks from Asia used to live and work here, but it was dark and cold, the landlord complained, and it was too depressing having to wear thick jackets and shoes. Only Bhante Pannaratana stayed on in the grey, cold suburb, keeping up the temple activities even though most of the people living in this area are Moslems or Christians, and his holy Bhodi tree from Sri Lanka is about to perish due to lack of sunlight.

The 1970´s in Western Finland: Elvis dies, my parents divorce and the set theory is introduced in school math. Made entirely with archive material, ALWAYS DECENT is an experimental, autobiographical documentary about a child’s fear of being different, shame, guilt and longing. The film dips into the logic and dimensions of a child’s thinking by means of humour and associative visual narrative.

Shown together with THE PENALTY BOX and THE LEFTOVERS

A visual documentary on soul artist Billy Paul, the city of Philadelphia and the life-long love story between Billy and his wife Blanche. For more than 50 years Billy has been a part of the African-American community and close friends with personalities such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Stevie Wonder. Billy Paul’s life is the story of the oppressions of African-Americans and how the civil rights movement came to shape the soul music. * I AM BLACK enough for you * is a film about love, marriage and life’s complications. The film follows Billy Paul’s song * Am I Black Enough for You * which was a follow-up and second single to * Me and Mrs. Jones *, which was a Smash Hit on both sides of the Atlantic. When * Am I Black Enough for You * was released it was a total flop, a setback that almost cost Billy his career. Was it the radical text that proved to be too much for the white audience in the early 70s?

Anders and Harri are best friends. They share both the interest in music. Besides the music, Anders is extremely fond of trains. The two friends decide to go to Getå, where the largest train accident, Getåkatastrofen, occurred in 1918. During the trip, when Harri bares his fears, like being locked in the bathroom or bathe in the large pool and not accepting any help Anders, puts their friendship to the test. But the reconcilation before the visit to the memorial site becomes a great experience for them both. Anders picks flowers in honor of the dead and is so struck by the situation that he evidently happens to hear the cries of the wounded. The situation is so inspiring to Harri. When the two friends go home from the adventure, their friendship has grown stronger. As Anders and Harri sing the song Getåkatastrofen goosebumbs rises due to the emotions.

In February 2009 a group of Danish soldiers accompanied by documentary filmmaker Janus Metz arrived at Armadillo, an army base in the southern Afghan province of Helmand. Metz and cameraman Lars Skree spent six months following the lives of young soldiers situated less than a kilometer away from Taliban positions. The outcome of their work is a gripping and highly authentic war drama that was justly awarded the Grand Prix de la Semaine de la Critique at this year’s Cannes film festival. But it also provoked furious debate in Denmark concerning the controversial behavior of certain Danish soldiers during a shootout with Taliban fighters.

An intimate portrait of living legend Bi Kidude, probably the oldest singer on the world stage today. Her home island of Zanzibar has long been a meeting point for black African and Arabic influence. The island’s music is its most potent expression. Bi Kidude beguiles audiences wherever she travels but domestically she continually courts controversy, her behaviour challenging perceptions of the role of women in a Muslim society. As Old As My Tongue reveals the dramatic contrasts in the life of this iconic musician and features a classic soundtrack spanning one hundred years of Swahili music.

Also shown in the section Music Docs

The Italian aid organization provides emergency medical assistance to civilian victims in war zones, of which one third are children. The film depicts Emergency work by telling us about two of these children’s fates. Yagoub from Sudan and Afghan born Murtaza. Yagoub fled with his family from Darfur and now living in a refugee camp in Sudan. He must undergo a complicated heart surgery, but neither his family nor members of his tribe can find money to pay for the operation. The buiding of a new hospital Emergency could not have come at a better time. The Afghan boy Murtaza who is recovering in hospital in Kabul after losing his left hand in a landmine explosion. About the men, women, and children who have been destroyed physically by the war and are denied any kind of treatment and care.

Belrade, 2009. It’s summer and the heat is unbearable. Majda, Miloš and Jelena are all trying to accept the fact that they live here. Majda through her activism, Jelena is hanging out with her international friends and Miloš tries to think of other things. They all grew up whilst the world around them fell into pieces. Now, they struggle to have confidence in their future.

Big John is a story of the very special relationship between a professional boxer and his father – or rather a father and his boxer? Ole ”Lukkeøye” Klemetsen’s father has lived for his son’s boxingcareer. As Ole Klemetsen is just a breath from becoming World Champion, the story of takes
a different path.

Young women in St. Petersburg are going to school again. They want to learn how to seduce, marry and control men. They want to learn how to be a successful bitch. The bitch is not a hysteric and jealous fool. The bitch is a Woman who knows exactly what she wants both from life and from men. She is attractive, self-sufficient and internally Free. Bitch Academy is a tragicomic documentary about the young Russian generation.

Screened in collaboration with Svenska institutet.

We live in a world where the situation of black men in the U.S. is a joke, says Bishop Kimathi during worship on Father’s day. He is the head of the radical Church Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit. BLACK NATION examines black men’s situation in the U.S. and is based on this church. It is the only one remaining of the sixties civil rights movements in the U.S. The Church turns it back on the white institutions of America back and slowly but surely builds up its own black institution. They work against the individuality and with Jesus as an example of a black revolutionary. Half of young black men in the country are unemployed and one third are soon to be imprisoned. In Detroit, the situation is even worse, with increasing unemployment and crime. How is it possible for black men in Detroit to hope for a decent future in these circumstances? *BLACK NATION’ is a hopeful film about a church against the norm in an imposible and hopeless situation.

A film about eighteen year old twins Julia and Johanna - and their sisterly love. About how it is possible to take the power back, the power that once was taken from you as a girl, and get on with life, encouraged by having your sister with you - always and forever, not only in your heart but also in ink…. Julia and Johanna came to Sweden from Azerbadjan after having been subjected to a brutal kidnapping that lasted for a month and included unbearable things that hardly can be spoken about. They survived because they have each other.

During a stay in Havanna Linda Thorgren meets what she then believes to be the love of her life. Some months later they get married and he moves back to Stockholm with her. Things don’t turn out the way Linda thought they would. When their daughter is born, matters are brought to a head and their existence collapses, overshadowed by her husband’s control obsession. Abuse, violated restraining orders and a deportation order follows. Linda Thorgren returns to Cuba to persuade the Cuban state to accept the Swedish deportation order and let her ex-husband re-enter the country. This is the first of many journeys to come. The film brings us to Costa Rica, Södermalm-Stockholm, New York, The Canary Islands and back to Havanna in the sixties. Linda Thorgren meets her mother and sister both of whom share her experiences of abuse. She talks to her father, her stepfather, her ex-husband’s former wife and she goes to see her one and only best friend Yurika. Through these meetings Linda Thorgren tries to understand how things became the way they are and set herself and her daughter free.

Beauty, love, work… sometimes it just isn’t worth getting out of bed for. BLOODY MONDAYS & STRAWBERRY PIES examines the role of boredom in the human condition by showing the lives of a 32 year old Wall Street stockbroker who makes millions a year, a desert nomad who does nothing all day, the last living spy from the Second World War, a painter who has been painting Time for the last 42 years and the first school shooter in history: Brenda Spencer, who at the age of 16 shot eleven people because: ‘I don’t like Mondays’. The actor John Malkovich gives voice to the inner bored human being. His fascinating timbre crawls under your skin and wonders: ‘How many people in the world are like me?’

A ten year old boy and his father live on to draw a ride through Bombay chaotic traffic. But when they visit the doctor, they get to know they’d better change jobs. A visual and sound-expressive documentary of nightmare of traffic which slipped out of our control.

The Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) consists of a group of about 30 Burmese reporters who secretly film the abuses in their country. The footage is then smuggled across the border and broadcast via satellite from the headquarters in Oslo. These are the images that could be seen across the globe when a revolution was about to erupt in the late summer of 2007. Led by Buddhist monks, more than 100,000 people took to the streets to march peacefully against the military dictatorship that has held the country in an iron grip for 40 years now. Burma VJ is almost exclusively compiled from footage shot by DVB reporters. With shaky hand-held images of protesters, of the dispersion of the crowd, of monks and civilians getting knocked down. Their cameras hidden in bags or clenched under their armpits, the DVB reporters risk their lives and take the viewer right into the heat of the turmoil.

At the peak of Swedish summer, Coco travels across the sea to the island of Gotland to take a break from his life as an undocumented migrant in Stockholm. He longs to meet other young people and to enjoy the summer. But the journey doesn’t turn out the way he imagines. Rumors begin to spread that the border police are looking for ”illegal” people in Visby, and that a group of neo-Nazis are setting up summer camp on the island. Coco takes cover in an apartment outside the city walls where Akke lives, a young anarchist who hates society, but loves to speak Spanish. Anxiety over not daring to go out is growing in Coco, as he fears falling into the darkness. But inside the four walls of the apartment he finds a soulmate in Akke. Meanwhile, the summer celebration continues outside as if nothing had happened.

”Buscarse la vida” is a film about what fear can do to a young man with lots of dreams, living in a place where no one else needs to be afraid. And how he, by seeing the beauty of the small things, refuses to be defeated.

73 years old Lina Merceis, lives in a two bedroom apartment by the beach in Rio De Janeiro Brasil. Lina works as telephonist and after work, she enjoys life and is always entertained by any of her young lovers. She has chosen life as an unmarried woman and can’t see her herself caring for a rough husband. BYE BYE, C’EST FINI is an intimate and warmly documented portrait of an older woman who enjoys her life in a world where men usually dominate.

Filmmakers have been turning their cameras on the world since the time of the Lumière brothers — and the idea of documentary has sparked impassioned creative debate ever since. Some of the genre’s most influential directors reflect upon its unique power in Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary. Over 30 luminaries — including Albert Maysles, Errol Morris, Alanis Obomsawin, Michel Brault, Nick Broomfield, Kim Longinotto and that great iconoclast Werner Herzog — offer insight into their craft while reflecting on the nature of representation and the perennially contested status of the “truth.” Can film capture reality? What ethical issues arise when portraying real lives? How does editing or music condition our emotional response to film? More than 100 clips enliven the discussion, offering a panoramic overview of contemporary documentary cinema, from Grey Gardens and The Thin Blue Line to The Day I Will Never Forget and Darwin’s Nightmare.

In Carmen Meets Borat, director Mercedes Stalenhoef follows the life of 17-year-old Carmen. She lives in a gypsy village in Romania, where the men spend their days tying one on and exchanging coarse words in her father’s bar. In the evenings, she watches a Spanish soap opera and dreams of a better life in Spain, where the men are romantic and decent. Her plan to emigrate falls to pieces when an American film crew descends on her village to shoot Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The village is used in the movie to show where the main character comes from, and Borat depicts the villagers as primitive caricatures supposedly from Kazakhstan. Carmen’s grandfather plays the part of an abortion expert and poses for the camera with a welding apparatus. A little later, Borat embraces a woman he introduces as his sister and brags about her status as the fourth best whore in Kazakhstan. The villagers don’t understand a single word of English and laugh in good faith into the camera. When the film is released, the world press throws itself on the village and jealousy and suspicion predominate. The chaos is made complete when an American lawyer holds out the prospect of a $30 million insurance claim to the villagers. For Carmen, it becomes increasingly difficult to realise her dreams of a better life somewhere else.

In early 1900 the curious story of the Israeli kibbutz children begun. Conceived as a utopian refuge, kibbutz were collective communities in which children were raised to become the new face of the Jewish people. In the kibbutz, children were offered only limited contact with their parents; completely oblivious to the bold experiment in which they were the primary test subjects. They were cared for by nannies, and slept together in a separate cottage designed specifically for them. As a result the children became their own family, a new breed that placed little value on material possessions while immersing themselves in physical labor and strict ideology.

Swedish premiar!

The ladies of the civil registry office in St. Petersburg have the strange fortune to be privy to people’s most personal moments. From marriages to divorces and from births to deaths these women see it all and usually all in one day. In this antiseptic windowless bureau, staffed with dead-pan female clerks (all married as per office rules) we witness young brides enthusiastically pledging forever, grieving widows looking for closure, mothers with screaming babies and nervous couples ready to call it quits. Shot it black and white this whimsical, yet profound film looks like something out of the 1960’s, but the emotion present – from infuriated husbands demanding a divorce to intimate whispers form a wife swearing she wasn’t unfaithful – is timeless.

A story about a young couple and their struggle to understand one another. A film that dives into the underlying emotions that often control our actions and the feelings we prefer to keep to ourselves. Winner of the Terje Vigen Price 2009, Norwegian Short Film Festival, Grimstad.

A portrait of different military cooks from all over Europe who served in various armies and have witnessed the European wars of the 20th century. Their recollections tap into a subjective view of historical events and one that diverges in some respects from conventional history. They take us behind the scenes of dates, facts, declarations of war, battles, and peace agreements. Cooking History shows the little secrets of these people, opens up a dimension of history one won’t find in textbooks or archives. The directness of the anecdotes and destinies of the people in this film conveys a sense of life and death in the “war apparatus,” a sense of hope, longing, and survival strategies in the midst of destruction and despair.

On the outskirts of Malmö is an area for temporary housing, called
Mosippan. Children and adults stay here waiting for a home. DEN SKA HETA GANGSTERFILMEN is a short documentary about the lives of four friends in
Mosippan and their work on their own action gangster film.

In May 2009, around 80 Iraqi asylum seekers sought refuge in Brorson’s church in Copenhagen to avoid being expelled. August 13, at midnight, the Danish government send the police into the church.

Screened in collaboration with Shahrazad.

Views towards the sea, insights into secrets rooms, going down to town, diving into books. We follow four children who are shut-in in their daily life in a segregated area on the top of a hill in Valparaíso, Chile. Being little, being big, being strictly brought up or not having a friend. Poetic photography takes us through changes of moods, winds, weather and thoughts. The childrens’ storytelling is strengthened by animations of comics strips drawn by themselves and it all culminates with the printing of their own magazine.

Along with Ermanno Olmi and Pier Paolo Pasolini, De Seta is considered one of the Italian cinema’s great imaginative realists of the Sixties, a true ”poet of reality.” As Salvo Cuccia points out in his beautifully filmed documentary Détour De Seta, his films push the boundaries between fiction and reality, touching on archaic themes in European culture. Born a Calabrian nobleman, De Seta came into contact with those he calls the ”subordinate people” as a POW during World War Two. His documentaries, shot in southern Italy, Sardinia and Sicily, have focused on the lives of shepherds, miners and fishermen.

In summer 2006, Chloé decides to celebrate the 30th anniversary of her Lebanese parents coming to France and to go to Lebanon, from which her parents escaped during the civil war, for the first time. The journey brings up thoughts and questions about identity and nationalism, when the plan is interfered by a bloody present as Israel attacks Lebanon, which finds itself trapped in war again.

Stockholm dramatic College has begun a film collaboration with the Russian film school VGIK. The idea is for students to make films together, and that this meeting and joint practical work will result in contacts and experiences that will be shown at festivals, but also in an experience, which could ultimately have a deeper impact on students’ artistry.

Screened in collaboration with Svenska institutet.

This is the story about Ebbe Carlsson, a mediocre book publisher who became one of Sweden’s most famous persons in the late 80s. This film presents Sweden’s most unscrupulous social climber ever and consequently reveals a fragile and corrupt political system. Through this one person we get a great insight into an extraordinary era in Swedish history - a virtual cavalcade of narrow-mindedness, dirty business, ideological stupidity and abuse of power. Ebbe was incredibly good at self-promoting and able to create a myth around himself. He used to hold court in front of the escalator outside the parliament building, and soon enough he was gossiping with the prime minister in his chambers. When Prime Minister Olof Palme was murdered, Ebbe took charge of the investigation, with no experience or relevant training. How was it possible that no one questioned who he was, or how he ended up in that position? Then at the hight of his career Ebbe’s life took an unexpected turn that changed everything. He got sick with AIDS. With only a few years left to live, Ebbe had nothing to lose. He just kept on going, eventually he crashed and became the nation’s most exposed subject. He’s private life was put under a magnifying glass. He became the most hated man in the country but Ebbe managed to turn it around, and when he died he was celebrated like a national hero. Ebbe Carlsson lived his life like a bestselling novel, but this is a story where reality surpasses fiction.

Exploring the past, present, and future of electronic dance music The Electro Wars features in-depth interviews with the electronic dance music scene’s most influential stars such as A-Trak, Steve Aoki, Crookers, Dave-1, Spank Rock, Ninja Sonik, Moby, Justice, Armand Van Helden, Dj Premier, Dj Qbert, N.A.S.A, Boys Noize and many more.

When the farmer Knut strode into a womens political meeting in the small village of St.Olof as a woman, all fell silent. Knut is a farmer from Österlen who lived all his life with the feeling of being born into the wrong body. A warm and humorous film about longing and the courage to stand up for who you really are.

ENJOY POVERTY is the 90 minute film registration of Renzo Martens’ activities in the Congo. In an epic journey, the film establishes that images of poverty are the Congo’s most lucrative export, generating more money than traditional exports like gold, diamonds, or cocoa. However, just as with these traditional exports, those that provide the raw material: the poor being filmed, hardly benefit from it at all.

EVERBODY LOVES DOLLY, is a film about the four singers Nina Persson, Cecilia Nordlund, Lotta Wengler, Helena Josefsson, and music producer Gudrun Hauksdóttir, who met at a tribute concert in Dolly Parton’s honor. It is a strong and hopeful film about the five women’s friendship, dreams and life challenges, about being a woman in the middle of their careers, and longing for children. And not least, the movie is framed by Dolly Parton’s personality - a role model and idol, who unites the five. Jessica Nettelbladt portraits of the five women is an inspiring movie about following your dreams and facing challenges with courage.

Screened in collaboration with Folkets Bio.

The story of how an eccentric French shop keeper and amateur film maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner with spectacular results. Billed as ’the world’s first street art disaster movie’ the film contains exclusive footage of Banksy, Shephard Fairey, Invader and many of the world’s most infamous graffiti artists at work.

Screened in collaboration with Atlantic Film och K-special, SVT.

After 500 years of uninterrupted plunder of its natural resources and the fierce repression of popular revolts, Latin America is at a turning point in its history: a series of new leaders has come to power, most of them from outside the traditional political establishments and all elected democratically by safe majorities hungry for change. Their platform? To seek ways of answering the enormous challenges presented by inequality and social exclusion. How they meet these challenges will depend largely on the consolidation of economic and political integration in the region, an integration that should at last make it possible for Latin Americans to be the masters of their own destinies, less dependent on the economic recipes meted out by “the North” in general and especially by Washington.

FAMILIA is the love story of the Peruvian couple Daniel and Naty Barrientos. It takes us through decades of struggle against poverty, for love and family. . They have not been able to afford education for any on their first three children, now all grown up. And they want something better for their last son Nata, six years old. 50 tear old Naty decides to look for work in Spain, among thousands of other migrant workers from the shanty towns of the developing world. Her husband Daniel stays at home to take care of little Nata and earn a meagre living with his run down motor cycle taxi. Love and family cohesion that so far has survived all the challenges of poverty is put to it’s hardest test ever. FAMILIA is the story and also the third part of the Peruvian family trilogy that started with The Other Shore and COMPADRE .

Filmmaker Pål Hollender travels throughout Afghanistan in search of Ali Sajjad, a bright kid he met in Kabul nearly 10 years ago. Will Ali still be as open-hearted and hopeful as he was when he was nine years old? Is he still alive?
With breathtaking material Finding Ali unveils the occupation of Afghanistan, the logical development of mistrust, disappointment and rage from ordinary Afghans against the U.S.A. and the Nato. They were promised peace and development, but were given a brutal War against Terror�.
Being welcomed with open arms a decade ago, the filmmaker now experiences an overwhelming feeling of rejection, painfully culminating in a road-side attempt on his life.

Combining colourful storyboards and lyrical narration, acclaimed filmmaker Andrea Dorfman reminisces about her own budding romance with a plastic surgeon. When his profession leads her to focus on her own perceived imperfections, Andrea is forced to confront feelings about both herself and her boyfriend’s job.

FOKOFPOLISIEKAR is a South African documentary film about 5 young Afrikaans punk rockers that transformed a generation during a unique time in history; in one of the most reluctantly complex and evolving societies of the 21st century. The film follows the story of the band over 4 years as they forge a place for themselves and their fans in a new South Africa; in the process challenging the stigmas and expectations placed on them by their Afrikaner heritage, the church and tradition. FOKOFPOLISIEKAR is a story of courage, passion and belief that reverberates through the minds and hearts of their fans - a story that transcends language and culture; and bravely faces a truth… that most would’ve left in darkness.

Also shown in the section Music Docs

With the exception of the trees next door, which have grown considerably larger, not much has changed about the apartment where filmmaker Mikhail Zheleznikov grew up. After 37 years, Zheleznikov still looks out the same window from the same house. He still lives together with his mother, and has only exchanged his childhood room for the larger one that he now shares with his wife. Using a poetic collection of school pictures, news footage, and 8mm home movies, Zheleznikov takes stock of his childhood in the USSR and post-Soviet St. Petersburg.

Screened in collaboration with Svenska institutet.

The Galmi purple, an onion from Niger, pervades West African markets with 400,000 tons a year. In Galmi, Salamatou has been waiting for her wedding for two years. Her father Yaro, on advice from both her future in-laws and the village gossip, makes a decision: The wedding will take place during the harvest! Yaro is aware that to follow through on his commitment this time, he has to produce more and sell at a higher price…

Förtvivlans Gräns is a story about two teenagers Reubar and Shahoo and their struggle against poverty and for a better life in Kurdistan Iran. They are involved in smuggling petrol between Iran and Irak and risks their lives to support their families. Shahoo lives with Reubar and his parents who have been taking care of Shahoo since he became an orphan. Rebuar started smuggling petrol at the age of 13 and dreams of bettering his parents life. Shahoo saves money to be able to marry 17 year old Nahid, whom he is in love.

Not very far from the Arctic Circle is a house that was once a was factory for the manufacturing of envelopes. It is now a home for refugees in a no man’s land. The refugees are observed cooking, watching TV and breakdancing in the recreation room. ”I just exist, that’s the only word I can use. I’m not dead, I just exist.”, one of the inmates says. Ghosts won the special prize at the Tampere International Short Film Festival 2009 and the Grand Prix at the International Short Film Festival Kratkofil 2009.

Girls on the Air is a strongly interesting document about Afghanistan and the ”new internal democracy” building process. Humaira, founder and manager of Radio Sahar, the first independent community radio station run by women, who tells the stories of the women of her country, becomes a symbol of Afghanistan, alive and multifaceted, capable of discussing and going through rigid stereotypes in which reality is so often trapped. Girls on the Air will take you into the minds of the young Afghani who are trying to make a difference. Radio Sahar’s name describes this hope beautifully. In Afghani, it means ”dawn”

The documentaryfilmer Måns Månsson’s new featurefilmdocumentary HR LANDSHÖVDING is a reflection of the countygoverner in Uppsala county and the former defenceminister Anders Björk’s life and work in his eventfull year . Måns Månssson’s film is inspired by Cinéma Vérité-tradition and follows Anders Björck during the yaer Upsala celebrates the 300-year aniversary av Carl von Linnés birth. Many royalties and other prominent people shake Anders Björck’s hand. Many ribbons are to be cut. But Anders Björck anticipates a threat in the proposition of the new swedish countysdivision.

Brothers Aldo and Carmine have been in conflict with each other since they were kids. They are now retired, but still can not be in the same room. After an event 13 years ago when Carmine tried to kill Aldo they have not spoken to each other. Can they make it up again?
Aldo and Carmine’s mother and father fifty years ago left unemployment in Italy for a dream about a future in the new country, Sweden. They both got jobs in the industry, but there the dream ended.
HE THINKS HE IS THE BEST is a film about the social inheritance mechanisms - how behavior is inherited and maintained from generation to generation within a family.

How They Dance is a documentary about ordinary people who love to dance. The film is a funny and unconventional portrait of these people.

Gunnar Bergstrom from Sweden supported the Khmer Rouge rampage in Cambodia. Gunnar was also one of the few foreign guests who were invited to Pol Pot’s Cambodia. He participated in a delegation which would later tell the world that Pol Pot’s vision of the perfect society was true, and Gunnar was convinced of it! In November 2008 Gunnar returned to Cambodia, but this time to ask the population for forgiveness.

In 1991 three teen girls called Midi, Maxi and Efti became celebrities over night and the suburb Akalla was suddenly known all over Sweden. Fifteen years later two old friends try to make a film about Midi, Maxi and Efti. But they no longer have contact, and they are not at all interested in talking about the past. A melancholic journey into the past by two friends who have a hard time letting go.

A film about a teenage boy, his father’s suicide and the emotional vacuum that occurred afterwards. Through forgotten drawings and photographs, we follow a young boy´s attempt to escape from a painful memory and handle things on his own, just like his dad used to do. After years of increasing isolation, it is ultimately love that leads to an inevitable ultimatum.

INTE EN AV DEM is a movie about two people who live alone in Stockholm and remember their childhoods in the Finnish countryside. The stories of how their lives became what they are developed slowly while we follow them back to their childhood homes, which now stand empty and overgrown.

During April 1994, on quiet road in Kigali a group of neighbors in Rwanda were filmed.  This was the opening days of the Rwandan Genocide, and even though almost one million people were slaughtered, remarkably there is only one known segment of footage showing any actual killing. This movie is about the extraordinary journey of that evidence as the original photographer returns to Rwanda, revisiting the people and events that he by chance caught on film.  As the footage returns to the community, friends and family relive the tragic events as they work with the photographer to identify the victims, and then eventually the killers.

Against a backdrop of industrial landscape in Northern Finland two
friends meet to explore images. Engaging in a self imposed ‘interrogation’ experiment Sara and Julia turn their cameras upon each other and reflect about their common lifein London and their return to their individual places of birth. It’s not exactly the End of the World but not Far from it Either’ is
a reflective film about friendship and returning home after many years
abroad

We played hide and seek, but they just looked for the others. Not me.
They found the others. But not me. How does it feel to want to play with the others when they do not want to be your friend. How does it feel to walk through the town centre where the big boys are. The children we meet are between six and nine years old and attends the same after-school class. They are all searching for a place to belong and a way to be part of the group.

Naoki 56, had it all in Japan’s bubble economy days: he ran a business with 70 staff, drove a brand new BMW, and lived in a 6 bedroom house. But when Japan’s economy crashed in the early 1990’s he lost everything, ending up divorced (for the third time) and penniless. He was saved from being homeless by his new girlfriend, Yoshie 29, who took him in - despite living in a tiny one-room apartment with no windows. Their life is a love story of survival in the world’s second richest economy.

Swedish premiere!

South African artists William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas discuss the conditions for artists, in an open-hearted look at similarities and differences in their oeuvres, sources of inspiration and audience reception. And the courage that is needed; how does one paint desire and sexuality without it turning into pornography? How can we relate to painful memories? Both Kentridge and Dumas comment on the times, albeit in different ways – Dumas mainly in her oil paintings, Kentridge in his exceedingly detailed animations. This documentary was filmed in the artists’ studios in South Africa and Amsterdam, where Marlene Dumas has lived since the 1970s.

This video essay, filmed in Tokyo and Paris, is based on the primordial concept of the impending loss of self. It is about Kumiko Muraoka, the main character in Chris Marker’s film The Koumiko Mystery, and Johnnie Walker, a fictional character in a novel by Haruki Murakami. Johnnie Walker, a Japanese homosexual Jew, is regarded by the people around him as a foreigner even though his family have been Japanese citizens for many generations. Johnny Walker has chosen the path of confrontation and provocation. With his Irish wolfhound he challenges the Japanese “cuteness” cult and its admiration for the neo-liberal concept of Soft Power.

The unknown family rock band Knights of the Night is made up of brothers and cousins to the established artist Salem Al Fakir. Knights of the Night’s frontman, Peter Al Fakir, is Salem’s complete opposite - hairy, overweight and a seeker. Peter watch close as Salem’s popularity increase. While he himself dreams of having a breakthrough. Suddenly Knights of the Night have an important show - the chance to be the opening act for Salem.
KUSIN AL FAKIR is a film about success, jealousy, family relationships and integration.

Screened in collaboration with K-special, SVT.

The Paris Opera Ballet is one of the world’s great ballet companies. Frederick Wiseman has filmed all the aspects of the work and life of this cultural institutional monument. By filming daily courses, repetitions and performances, Frederick Wiseman highlights the French school of ballet known for its emphasis on rigorous attention to technical perfection and precision of movement. This new opus is part of Wiseman’s long working method, a craftsman approach to filmmaking entirely shaped by his own aim: that of listening to the institution as it “speaks”, trying to identify the rule it lives by.

In Central America, they are called ”Maras”, these groups of youngsters who have modeled themselves on the Los Angeles youth gangs. They are extremely violent and are propagating terror in El Salvador and elsewhere. This is a study, through photography and the personal stories of these gang members, of a violent phenomenon that has been imported from the USA.

Duah, from the drusian village Sagur in Galilé, is one of twelve finalists in a beautycontest for Isreali-arabic women-Lady Kul el-Arab.
In preparations for the contest a relationship between Duah and fashiondesigner Jack Yaakob developes. They decide to also register Duah for the national Israeli beautycontest and travel to Tel Aviv where Duah decides to change her name to Angelina. A film about a beautycontest turned into a moving story about a family trapped betwen cultures.

”What sin have i commited to be born a woman?” This unpleasant sentence spoken by 21-year old maid Lakshimi, extends like an undercurrent, through the Mumbai based filmer Nishtha Jains small but unique documentary. Jain turns the camera towards his own maid, and highlights the complicated relationship between employer and employee, filmmaker and subject.

La Penca, Costa Rica: In May 1984, a bomb detonates in a press conference held by the former Sandinista-leader Eden Pastora. Two journalists and at le…La Penca, Costa Rica: In May 1984, a bomb detonates in a press conference held by the former Sandinista-leader Eden Pastora. Two journalists and at least one of the attending soldiers where killed instantly. Additional, a journalist died later on, from the injuries he sustained awaiting rescue at the river bank. A large number of people where seriously hurt and are still suffering from life long disabilities. As well as traumas. There are a many theories about how, who and why this bomb was detonated at this specific event. The truth has never been revealed. No man has been held accountant for this act of terror.

LET’S BE TOGETHER is a documentary about Hairon a fourteen yearold ordinary, but unusually courageous, danish teenager, who seeks answers about himself and love. Hairon has no boundaries and spends his majority time on makeup, nailpolish and ladiesshoes. The world expands as he decides to find his father on the other side of the Atlantic, in Rio De Janeiro, Brasil…

Three true stories about lies. In three animated episodes based on documetared interviews, we meet the burglar who inpersonates a blackjob working editor when he gets detected, the boy who lies and confesses a theft he did not commit, a woman whos entire life has been a string of lies.
Guldbagge awarded and rewarded with the best international shortfilm on the Sundancefestival.

Welcome to Europe’s largest brothel, one eleven-storey building on the outskirts of Cologne in southwestern Germany. More than seven hundred men come here every day and more then 150 women are employed from around the world to fulfill the men’s dreams. This is a separate world with its own payment system, security guards, doctors, staff restaurant, manicures and hairdressing.

A new film by Mikael Kristersson who’s earlier films include PICA PICA and FALKENS ÖGA. In giddiously beautiful picturesequences and minituosly documentered sounds he describes the broadness in the smallest if own little garden in Falsterbo. The reality is described in the titmouses, the wasps, and the cabbage butterflies perspective and us humans as the species among others.

LOOK AT WHAT THE LIGHT DID NOW documents the journey of Feist’s Grammy nominated album “The Reminder”. This poetic film pulls back the curtain to reveal intimate partnerships with the people Feist calls her ‘amplifiers’: The photographer who helped her hide within the frame, shadow puppeteers in hockey arenas, an artist who built a thread-radiating mural, the video director who conducted fireworks, the pianist who guided the recording of the album, and other musical and visual collaborators. The film follows Feist and her supporting cast through an impressionistic array of flickering scenery, echoing stadiums, puppet workshops, the red carpet, a crumbling French mansion, definitive concert performances and uncommonly candid interviews. Itself a part of the creative mosaic it portrays, Look At What The Light Did Now illuminates the synergy of collaboration, art as magnifying glass, and the power of trust.

In 1978, the legendary South Korean actress Choi Eun-Hee (Madam Choi) was kidnapped in Hong Kong by North Korean agents. She was taken to Pyongyang, just like her ex-husband, the film director Shin Sang-Ok. This video essay examines the historical and repetitive traits of Choi Eun-Hee’s life. Godzilla the Monster’s genealogy, via Pulgasari, to Galgameth (Shin’s remake of Pulgasari in Hollywood), are interpreted as straight-forward messages about nuclear weapons. The video takes a stand against conventional documentary practice in an experiment with “situated storytelling”, which entails that the narrator is visible and tied to a specific place.

In the 70s, Rosie was a drag racing driver and aimed for a racer career. But she had to put this life aside when her second child was born with a brain haemorrhage. It cost her both her career and her marriage. This is a film about being a single mum. About doing everything for others and losing yourself. But above all, about fighting to regain a life of your own at the age of 55.

After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populated the town he dubbed ”Marwencol” with dolls representing his friends and family and created life-like photographs detailing the town’s many relationships and dramas. Through his homemade therapy, Mark was able to begin the long journey back into the ”real world”, both physically and emotionally - something he continues to struggle with today.

A Bangladeshi man dashes through the streets burdened by the crossed shaped advertising signboard he carries on his back; a trader loses his family as a result of his addiction to the financial markets; a chain smoking insurance man tries desperately to escape the city’s daily grind; an aggressive metals trader lives for killing animals at the weekend; a street sweeper on a spiritual quest seeks a life in the wilderness. Marc Isaacs’ latest feature length film shot during the current financial crisis explores the human cost of life in the dog eat dog world of London’s Square Mile.

MEN WHO SWIM is a humorous and poignant look at a group of middle aged men who have found unlikely success as members of Sweden’s all male synchronised swimming team. What began as a weekly escape from the daily grind of work and family responsibilities, gradually evolved into a more serious commitment. Inspired by classical Esther Williams’ techniques from the 1950s, this group of train drivers and meat buyers, archivists and teachers soon became passionate exponents of the sport.

What is feminism? A mental illness? The cause of the mammoth’s extinction? Or is it something completely normal? Follow Nadya Plungyan-a feminist activist in contemporary Moscow and find out the answers. 2003, Ewa Einhorn, along with Terese Mörnvik, conducted a similar survey on the streets of Warsaw. Here’s the follow-up on the street of the Russian capital.

In an astonishing exposition of choreographic fomentation, nine African choreographers tell stories of an emergent art form and their diverse and deeply contemporary expressions of self. Stunning choreography and riveting critiques challenge stale stereotypes of ”traditional Africa” to unveil soul-shaking responses to the beauty and tragedy of 21st century Africa.

Michael Campbell is one of the few hundred white farmers left in Zimbabwe since President Robert Mugabe began his violent ’Land Reform’ program in 2000. Since then the country has descended into chaos. In 2008 Mike took the unprecedented step of challenging President Robert Mugabe in an International Court; accusing Robert Mugabe and his government of racial discrimination and violations of basic human rights. What follows is an intimate, moving and often terrifying account of one man and his family’s extraordinary courage in the face of overwhelming injustice and brutality.

A humorous essay on the Romanian odyssey from communism to capitalism, taking one of Romania’s most charismatic symbols as its starting-point – a Dacia. The film chronicles several Romanians, whose lives are interwoven by the modest car, and who reflect on the ongoing transformation of Romanian society. Perhaps the story of the Dacia reflects the social changes in Romania?

Four war-veterans, from different sides, step onto a boat at the mouth of the Kwando river, deep within the African interior. They are on a journey back to past battlefields, the sites where they as youngsters, tried to kill each other. But now, twenty years later, they’ve come together as former enemies, a new unit of disparate souls joined together not only by the common haunting of war trauma, but also by their need to understand, to reconcile, to forgive. Shot against a spectacular backdrop of African savannah, this is a film of unthinkable suffering, grotesque bestiality and meaningless violence, of disappointment, but most of all of hope.

As marketers’ favorite target, our brain seems threatened with an always more effective decoding. Because the market studies do not guarantee the success of a product, marketers now turn to neurosciences. They confess that the objective is to decode the subconscious part of our brain to know our desires better. By using techniques as the magnetic resonance imaging, they try to identify advertisements and products which seduce and displease us.
Is neuromarketing a real threat of manipulation or a slightly hazy selling point of marketing?

The impoverished Central Americans who leave their countries in hopes of a better life in the United States have a rough road ahead of them. NO ONE shows how, during their perilous 2500-mile journey through Mexico, they put their last money, dignity, health and life on the line. Mexican filmmaker Tin Dirdamal follows a number of refugees in a South-Mexican refugee centre, from where they hitch illegal rides on freight trains to the northern border. Apart from the Mexican immigration service and police, the illegal aliens are threatened by the security service of the railroad companies, and the criminal La Mara Salvatrucha gang. The horror stories of refugees, filmed with a handheld camera, are alternated with interviews with employees of the railroad, and the immigration service. The only hope along the way comes from a volunteer organization near the railroad tracks that hands out food to passing refugees, as they board a train towards an uncertain future.

”Nobody Passes Perfectly” is a subtle, humoristic and thought evoking film about the courage to change oneself radically. In beautiful filmic tableaux, debut director Saskia Bisp invites her audience to places where the gender isn’t a predefined condition, dictated only by biology, but a very personal part of the self that can be challenged, investigated and altered. Meet Tomka who is right in the middle of such a process. He lives in a very loving relationship with his Lesbian girlfriend Lotte. Together they try to imagine what his transitioning will mean for their relationship. And meet Erik, who was once a heterosexual woman, and has finally decided to live his life as a man.

Un fortunately there is no sound on the trailer for the film NY77 due to the rightsissue.

Ziska is born and raised in Sweden. Never the less she is often asked where she comes froms since she does not look Swedish. In ME & MY NOSE Ziska is off on a journey to find out if she is Swedish, how to get a Swedish nose and what a Swedish nose really looks like. She ends her journey in Copenhagen where she lives with her family. She has found that she will never become Swedish or Danish in a way where she will be one of ’us Danes’ – or one of ’us Swedes’. She needs to be Swedish and Danish in her own way. ME & MY NOSE is a film about identity. As audience we join her on her journey when she takes off to find her identity. We are with her, experiencing her confusion about what she is – Swedish, Danish, Parsee, immigrant… The theme is up to date and hits the Zeitgeist – not only in the Nordic countries, but in the Western world as a whole. ME & MY NOSE is a documentary added elements of animation and special effects. The film contributes to the debate on integration and national values, taking place in Danish and Swedish society.

At noon on December 21st, 1989 the members of Einstürzende Neubauten hit the road in West Berlin for their very first concert in East Berlin, (still-) capital of the GDR. 20 years later some of the concertgoers trace those paths that led them to the concert hall of the VEB Elektrokohle.

In Swedish only

Undeniably one of the most important and influential gay music acts in the last twenty years, Pansy Division pioneered the “queercore” genre long before other gay musicians had the confidence to come out of the closet, and without major record label support or mainstream radio airplay. Using original and archive footage and covering over fifteen years as a group, Pansy Division: Life in a Gay Rock Band is a fast-paced, intimate and humorous account of one of rock’s most fearless acts.

88-year old Simin from Iran now lives in a retirement home in a suburb of Gothenburg. She doesn’t speak Swedish and the staff does not understand Persian. Everyday life becomes a constant bombardment of tragicomic misunderstandings.

In Swedish only

Marina, Alla and Viktoria are taxi drivers in one of the fastest and toughest cities in the world. While Moscow is drowning in chaos, their Pink Taxi is a place of ease and sereneness. The three friends are good listeners, and this is what their female customers appreciate. With them they feel safe and start chatting about fashion, career and of course - men.

PLAY GIRL is about breaking conventions and norms and fighting against partriatichate rules of how a girl should behave. The film affects genderspecific rules, tabus, honour and about helping oneself more than being ”moderate” as a girl.

POETEN I ELEFANTHUSET is a personal story about a grandfather’s life, narrated by his granddaughter. With stills from past and present, filmed meetings, voices and tones, the director pieces together her grandfather’s thoughts.

A father struggles to learn the lessons of his forefathers before it’s too late in this documentary from Finnish filmmaker Visa Koiso-Kanttila. Kalle Rissanen is a single father looking after a young son while maintaining a successful career in information technology. Kalle likes his work and loves his son, but he’s a profoundly unhappy man who is still dealing with the aftereffects of divorce and struggling with a drinking problem. Kalle’s father took his own life when Kalle was only seven years old, and as he turns 40, he realizes he’s the same age as his dad when he died, and deals with many of the same issues that led to his father’s suicide.

Screened in collaboration with Finlandsinstitutet.

Radio Totalnormal is a radio show made by people who have experience with mental illness. -We are not lunatics; we are just fragile, as Janne says when he walks the streets of Stockholm with his microphone. He asks people about things he would like to know, for example what it is like to be mentally sane. Join us behind the scenes of this unconventional radio station that does not strive to fit in. At Radio Totalnormal everyone’s differences are useful assets in the struggle of changing society’s view of people who suffer from mental disease.

Though born as men, Mikael and Orlando both change their sex to become women. Now well into their 60s, the two meet for the first time to talk about their lives and, the one defining regret they both share, their sexual reassignment. Mikael underwent surgery in the mid-90s as a 50 year old, while Orlando was one of the very first sex change patients in Sweden in 1967. Mikael now dresses as a man again and desperately attempts to convince his doctors to change him back. He wears over sized clothing to hide his breasts. Now he finds himself trapped inside a strange body that isn’t his. He feels lost between gender, he tells Orlando. Orlando is an androgynous dandy, dressed in a red velvet suit, donning a single diamond earring. Mikael finds his outfit peculiar. If Orlando regrets his sex-change, why does he continue to dress so feminine? He enjoys living as both: sometimes man, sometimes woman. But there was a time when he did not live life as split-gender. Orlando tells the story of his 11 year marriage to a man who presumed him to be a biological woman, until one afternoon when his secret was revealed.

Julien Temple’s new film is a vivid evocation of an apocalyptic vision: a slow-motion Katrina that has had many more victims, all accompanied by an innovative soundtrack.
Detroit was once America’s fourth largest city.
Built by the car for the car, with its groundbreaking suburbs, freeways and shopping centres, it was the embodiment of the American dream.
But its intense race riots brought the army into the city. With violent union struggles against the fierce resistance of Henry Ford and the Big Three, it was also the scene of American nightmares.
Now it is truly a dystopic post-industrial city, in which 40 per cent of the land in the centre is returning to prairie. Greenery grows up through abandoned office blocks, houses and collapsing car plants, and swallows up street lights.
Police stations and post offices have been left with papers on the desks like the Marie Celeste. There is no more rush hour on what were the first freeways in America. Crime, vandalism, arson and dog fighting are the main activities in once the largest building in North America. But it’s also a source of hope.

Happiness. Can it exist anywhere? The film takes place in Solf, a small country village in Western Finland where everything has stagnated in its own peculiar way. Solf was offiically declared the ’most perfect village’ in Finland in 2006. To some extent this has caused the village inhabitants to stop dreaming of better places. Why leave this paradise?

Icon South Africa is a platform for unestablished South african filmmakers with anxious stories to tell. The project began in 1999 when the founders of Icon Story AB, Sweden met young black filmmakers in the townships. Friendship grew between them and the idea took shape to cooperate.

Tempo is now showing seven selected films from Icon South Africa:

BIKO’S CHILDREN by Vuyisa Yoko, 14 min
PAM & ASHRAF by Robyn Rorke, 14 min
AMINA MY DAUGHTER by Makela Pululu, 14 min
BLAKBOX SUITE by Nhlanhla Masondo, 10 min
YU CHI CHAN CLUB by Vaughan giose, 10 min
DEAFENING ECHOES by Eugene Paramoer, 18 min
BLOODROOTS by Martina Della Togna, 15 min

See also the seminar Ikon South Africa

Arranged together with Story AB and Ikon South Africa.

In 2006 South African composer, Philip Miller, created a cantata to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Using shards of recorded testimony from the TRC hearings Philip integrated these voices into his work as libretto and as part of the music. Voice inflections, sounds of sighs, murmers, gasps all make up the fabric of the work. ”Rewind” tells the story of the development of this music and is a bricolage of interviews with survivors and families of victims whose stories were used in the work as well as landscape, news archive and the Market Theatre performance of ”Rewind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony”. Starring world-renowned mezzo soprano Sibongile Khumlao, “Rewind” looks at the preservation of memory in music and is a compelling expose on the struggle to forgive.

A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride. A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.
Which side of the ideas war are you on?

Jackie, Mildred, Eureka, Sdudla, and Thuli are the women behind Bobbi
Bear, a nonprofit organization based in Durban, South Africa, that
counsels sexually abused children and works to bring their abusers to
justice. Born out of a recognition of cultural stigmas that
discourage reporting abuse and inadequate methods of communicating
with young victims, Bobbi Bear developed a method of letting children
use teddy bears to explain their abuse. Since 1992, the multiracial
staff has become the fearless and powerful voice for those victims
who would otherwise continue to live in fear, powerless against their
oppressors and ignored by the legal system.Director Kim Longinotto
(The Day I Will Never Forget screened at the 2003 Sundance Film
Festival) adeptly and intimately follows Bobbi Bear staff in
difficult direct sessions with children and consultations with family
members, and on raids with authorities to arrest the perpetrators of
these heinous acts. Facing tragedy daily as part of their advocacy
work and, heartbreakingly for some, in their personal lives, the
women draw strength from each other and find hope despite the
suffering around them.Equally as compassionate to the young victims
as they are steadfast in their pursuit of justice, these five
exceptional women have found themselves transformed by their mission
into ””rough aunties,”” crossing barriers of race, culture, and
socioeconomic status to become formidable agents of change in their
community.

The artist Fia-Stina Sandlund and actress Alexandra Dahlstrom meet at Stockholm airport one day in June. Three days later, they are to do a performance at the Venice Biennale in the form of an interview. Alexandra, in the role of Julie, is to answer questions about Fia-Stina Sandlund’s feature project, ”She’s Wild Again Tonight” - which is a contemporary interpretation of August Strindberg’s famous play, Miss Julie. For three days, all the preparatory work for the interview is filmed . It turns out that Alex, like Fia-Stina, has many similarities to the character they are trying to create - they have both felt stigmatized in the role as radical feminists. Alexandra as the rebellious teenage girl from Lukas Moodysson’s film ”Show Me Love”, Fia-Stina as the artist who made a coup against the Miss Sweden contest in live television in 2001. At the date of the performance expectations peak. But - suddenly there is a disaster that makes the performance take an unexpected direction.
Screened in collaboration with Moderna Museet.

Two neighbours live side by side, but they haven’t spoken for more than 15 years. Instead they have built not just one, but two hedges that separate them.

In this visually compelling story the director goes far beyond the animosity between the two rivals, and unravels the incidents that stirred the conflict in the first place. The gardens of the village of Tarm supply the images — the grass is never green and the sky has never been covered by such large grey clouds. With played down lines that only people from Western Jutland can deliver »Side by Side« is a moving portrayal of human beings, bubbling with dry humour.

”So, this is how we live,” says Anne-Marie. Twin sisters Ann-Marie and Lillemor were adopted while young. They now live together as they slowly grow older. The inseparable sisters share everything, ciggarets, laughter and sorrow. Together they sing and play guitar but they are also struggling with Anne-Marie’s mental problems and Lillemor is trying to repair how history repeats itself for her and her daughter.

Over six weeks, young people in Skärholmen have made short documentaries. The youngsters have been recruited in community centers and were assisted in their film making by young filmmakers from Filmbasen. The idea was to offer young people the film as a means of expression and and to guide them into place in their environment. Now is your chance to see the results and meet those behind the project!

Skärholmen Doc is done in collaboration with Stadsdelsteatern, Stadsdelen i Skärholmen, Fanzingo, Film Stockholm and Tempo Youth with the support of Olof Palme Memorial Fund.

More information at: www.tempofestival.se

-We were kidnapped by the militia, my mother, father, sister and i. Then they killed my parents and separated me from my sister. I was five years old at the time, says Abuk with a low voice.

-I had to stay with the man that kidnapped me. My purpose was to take care of his goats.

SLAVES is about Abuk nine years, and Machiek, 15 years. Like thousands of other children, that have are kidnapped by the government ruled militia in Sudan and exploited as slaves. They have been resqued from slavery of an organisation led by James Agur. The film is based on the interview with Abuk, Michiek and James 2003. The second film in the series of animated documentaries, with and about children in vulnarable situations, by David Aronowitsh and Hanna Heilborn.

Every weekday 1.7 million commuters board trains from Soweto to Jozi, join together for camaraderie and security, and take the opportunity to worship. And so the ‘church coaches’ each attract followers of South Africa’s many religions - from the Shembe to the Emadlozini Church, the evangelical Abalandelie Benkosi and the more conventional Baptist Church.

Where we are heading and how we move, depends on who is watching
A different way of observing time and relativity from a racetrack.

SPEKTRA:DOX is a joint project between the five regional film funds around Mälardalen and Film Stockholm-Mälardalen. The project aims to further develop regional film talent. The films that are now displayed in SPEKTRA:DOX was produced in 2010 on the theme of ”Here & Now”.
The SPEKTRA:DOX cooperation began in 2008 with ”5×5”, with follow-up in the form of five 4-minute experimental films in 2009.

More information at: www.tempofestival.se

As the first Jordanian audio-visual works begin to fall into the public domain, a constellation of interests are translating, drafting and revising copyrights laws, trade agreements and licences to control the flow of culture and build new markets.

Against the backdrop of these emerging intellectual property markets, artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White embarked on a period of research in Amman, Jordan in an attempt to seek out the common cultural resources of Jordan’s public domain.

The result is Struggle in Jerash – a project convened around a lost 1957 Jordanian feature film of the same name, which fell out-of-copyright in 2008, and is used as a catalyst to explore value and meaning in archival material.

The original film, directed by Wassif AlShaikh, is part 1950s gangster flick and part travel documentary. It was created by a self-organized group of aspiring filmmakers and is celebrated as the first Jordanian feature. After digitizing the only known surviving VHS copy of the film, the artists embarked on a series of discussions with Jordanian artists, curators, critics, musicians and filmmakers to create a new multi-voiced audio commentary for the film.

See the best of several exercises that students at Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts (formerly Dramatic Institute) conducted in 2010. The third year students collaborated with directors from the two film courses, Shashat in Palestine and ISIS in Burkina Faso. The project is funded by the Swedish Institute and Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts. Freshmen students have made films based on a poem. A short story in pictures and sounds that have a poetic elevation.

The chemical industry is the fastest growing industry of all in our time. SUBMISSION is a film about a society that produces, uses, and dumps old and new chemical compounds in an ever-accelerating rate. At the end of WWII 1 million tonnes of chemicals were used per year, currently 500 million tonnes are used. What happens to all those substances that enter the environment, how do they affect us and our bodies? In the film we hear the testimonies of 23 leading professors on the threat that surrounds us and fills us, and which could wipe out humanity long before epidemics, war or climate change does it.

Director by Stefan Jarl and Professor Carl-Gustaf Bornehag will speak after the film.

A film about the new Sweden. Today, the days are basically never-ending, and everthing seems to be within reach. The pace of life is going faster and faster and we have the ”freedom” to make life-altering decisions every day. But is it really better today than 25 years ago?

Angela, 15, and Arina, 14, have been struck by their first time love. No one in their world seems to understand them, but the girls are deeply in love with Tom and Bill in the German pop group Tokio Hotel. When Angela and Arina are together they fantasize about being somewhere else, being about something else, far away from immature boys and dull grey suburbia.

Tage is 94 years old, a retired police superintendent, and choir member. In his younger days he solved crimes by day and sang songs on the radio in the evenings. One day his boss asks him to go down and see how it goes for Elsa, the new police sister. The meeting changes him forever. 65 years later, alone in his apartment, she is the only thing he thinks about.

TAQWACORE: THE BIRTH OF PUNK ISLAM follows Michael and his kindred spirits as they travel across the U.S. in their green school bus, challenging Muslims and non-Muslims with punchy anthems like Sharia Law in the U.S.A. Their spiritual odyssey then leads them to Pakistan, where they bring punk to the streets of Lahore and reconnect with Islam in a bold new way.

Andrea Dunbar wrote honestly and unflinchingly about her upbringing on the notorious Buttershaw Estate in Bradford and was described as ‘a genius straight from the slums.‘ When she died, tragically at the age of 29 in 1990, Lorraine was just ten years old. The Arbor catches up with Lorraine in the present day, also at 29; ostracised from her mother‘s family and in prison undergoing rehab. Through compelling interviews we learn that Lorraine sees her mother as a destructive force throughout her childhood; an alcoholic who let her suffer abuse and whom Lorraine blames for all that is wrong in her life. Through interviews with other members of the Dunbar family, we see a contrasting view of Andrea, in particular from Lorraine‘s younger sister Lisa, who idolises Andrea to this day.

Caroline and Colette are a pair of social workers who deal with the constant flow of immigrants making their way into France; Caroline is well-meaning but inexperienced and is sometimes overwhelmed by her work, while Colette knows her job better but isn’t as organized as she needs to be. Both women are eager to help the people they see, but struggle with the frustration that they have little control over the French government’s immigration department, and have only so many resources to share with the needy who arrive at their offices. Filmmakers Patrice Chagnard and Claudine Bories profile the hopeful and sometimes desperate immigrants as well as the social workers who fight on their behalf in this documentary, which was an official selection at the 2010 Silverdocs Documentary Film Festival.

Screened in collaboration with Shahrazad and Franska institutet.

The film’s director Tova Mozard puts herself, her mother and grandmother on the scene of the Royal Dramatic Theatre. A therapy-like staging presents stories about what is accidental and unavoidable, what is transferred across generations, between mother and daughter.

The film’s director Tova Mozard puts herself, her mother and grandmother on the scene of the Royal Dramatic Theatre. A therapy-like staging presents stories about what is accidental and unavoidable, what is transferred across generations, between mother and daughter.

THE CONTRACT is a film about the relationship between Beverly Charpentier, a married mother of two and author Catherine Robbe-Grillet. The film portrays two strong women’s unconventional love affair, two women who actively chose to live out their love just as they wish and without compromise.

Thousands of struggling moroccan fishermen have to move further and further south to keep hope in catching some fish, any fish, if any fish left to catch. In the background, but quite close from the shores where they end up staying idle, huge foreign trawlers drag the waters with their death nets, killing an entire ecosystem, and sometimes literally « vacuuming » it. The government sold them fishing licenses allowing them to do so. Standing foreground, these fishermen, desperated, witness their own inevitable disappearance, while the revolt of their pairs, few month earlier, has been violently repressed by the authorities.

The love between the American burlesque stripper Teri Lee Geary (aka Kitten DeVille) and her punk rock singer husband Shawn Geary is strong but rather complicated. They live in their own time bubble, hers from the 1950’s and his from the 1980’s. It applies to their looks, their home and their lifestyle. Teri looks like Marilyn Monroe and Shawn looks like Joe Strummer from The Clash. All of a sudden their 25-year-long relationship and their lifestyle have a down side. But how do they move on?

A Nobel Prize winner and a pedophile. Carleton Gajdusek was one of the world´s greatest genius, and also a man who has been convicted for having sex with a foster-son. Carleton Gajdusek discovered a completely new form of infection - the human mad cow disease among cannibal Papua New Guineans. He is a scientist and a hero of other scientists. He is also someone whose friends and family are from a variety of cultures, different social classes, and from all over the world - subsistence farmers on Papua New Guinea, billionaires in New York, top thinkers in the Ukraine, Nobel-prize winners all around the globe, the young intelligentsia of China. Carleton Gajdusek claims himself to be a pedophile on the same lines ”as Jesus Christ”. According to the FBI, he has adopted 57 children from Papua New Guinea, Micronesia and elsewhere, and brought them up at his home close to the National Institutes of Health, close to Washington DC. This documentary film explores an extraordinary 20th century life, full of contradiction. How is it that humans can switch within milliseconds, between total intelligence, and total self-delusion? What is the nature of true exploration?

Two women, mother and daughter, live on the sunny Portuguese coast. They have been exceptionally wealthy all their lives and have relished the ‘good life’. There has been ample pleasure and a total absence of work. Now, however, they have one big problem. Their wealth has run out. How do they now cope with a life of poverty after having been born into wealth? How do they manage to find a job and keep it, when nobody in the family has ever worked? And who is to blame now that the sweet and dreamy life has turned into a nightmare?

The news that Klas father has been brutally murdered by his young
lover and the lovers mother, sparks off a journey into the unknown life of
His father and a decadent world. The Great Liberty moves between today and the past through a treasure of private filmarchives.

The directors Zanyar Adami and David Herdies show clips from and talk about their new movie THE GUERRILLA SON:

Zanyar Adami is a successful media profile with a mission: to bridge the gap between Swedes and ”immigrants”. But after his father Taher had a heart attack, all his efforts are focused on saving his father. Zanyar is convinced that his father will be saved if he breaks the silence about his past in the guerrillas, and Zanyar persuades him to go back to Kurdistan, a place they have not seen since they fled 20 years earlier.
THE GUERRILLA SON is a tender portrait of an absent father and a family situation that almost everyone can relate to, whether one is a ”new” or ”old” Swede.

Maria Zennström knew that her relatives’ days - in the preserved shape she loved - were numbered. Therefore, she recorded a material of the most beautiful people she had ever seen, the impoverished intelligentsia of Leningrad in the late eighties.
The film was shot in a small cramped apartment in a city that was called Leningrad in 1989. She needed a story and took her own family history, she needed a storyteller and recorded her own words. Now many years later the people, city and country where the film was shot are all gone. Her film is a time capsule.

Screened in collaboration with Moderna Museet.

A group of five people with different backgrounds challenge themselves by driving 200 miles along the Australian Eastcoast, with vegetable oil as fuel and their own food brought from garbagecontainers. With no money, except for their great engagement, the trip is a test in the travellers stamina as well as the societys, whose overproduction ends up in garbagepiles. An adventure of dedicated ”dumster dive”-experts Paul and Mykel as guides. With them on the trip is Nick from Scottland, swedish student Sofia and Krystal who must leave Brisbane by all means for a while.

Shown together with PENALTY BOX and ALWAYS DECENT.

The Most Dangerous Man in America catapults us to 1971 where we find America in the grip of a familiar scenario: a dirty war based on lies. And Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, one of the nation’s leading war planners, has the documents to prove it. Armed with 7000 pages of Top Secret documents; he leaks the truth about the Vietnam War to The New York Times and risks life in prison to end the war he helped plan. It is a story that held the world in its grip, with daily headlines, the top story on the nightly news for weeks on end.

THE NOT DEAD

“It wasn’t as though we wasn’t ready to get to war – everyone was fully prepared. It was coming home that people wasn’t ready for.” For young Guardsman Tromans, life after Iraq is every bit as difficult as being in the front line. In moving poetry written by Simon Armitage, and personal testimonials, Tromans and other British soldiers speak about coping with the horrors of serving overseas, from full on combat, to standing by helplessly while witnessing atrocities. But returning home brings its own horrors: living life as a ”Not Dead”. Patriotic and devoted to Queen and country, the psychological neglect these men experience back home is painful, embittering and soul-destroying,

Inta Ruka became internationally famous when her photos where exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2005. Despite this, she still works as a cleaner at the Swedish Embassy in Riga. As a personal friend of the Latvian photographer, Maud Nycander compares their two lives and looks at how the iron curtain impacted on their respective artistic oeuvres.

Thirty yaers ago Nahid Person attended a revolution that overthrew the monarchy and the Shah of Iran. Disillusioned by the muslim revolution, betrayed and letdown all her ideals and forced to a life in exile, Nahid Persson turns her focus and her new film on an unlikely subject.
Farah Diba. The Shahs wife and former queen of Iran. During the two year long filming of her former opponent in the revolution,many conflicts, many surprises and reveils occur. A journey about two women who have much more in common than they ever imagined developes.

In Russia 2007, the opposition to Putin’s regime is gathering forces for the next presidential elections due in exactly one year. The Film follows a father and his son in the National Bolshevik Party: a drama of crime and punishment played out backstage behind political slogans. A disturbing study of the “Other Russia” movement.

Screened in collaboration with Moderna Museet.

By looking at t.A.T.u., the most successful Russian pop duo of all time, the video ’The t.A.T.u. project’ looks into the possibilities of visual art and popular culture (with the focus on video/film and performance) to effect social change. The video investigates the social and political significance of t.A.T.u., and focuses on the singers Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova, and their former international promoter Martin Martan.

Screened in collaboration with Moderna Museet.

Anders and Maria never dared to believe in love, until they met one another. Life, which had been filled with tragedy, abuse and sleeping rough, suddenly had a meaning. This film recounts the wedding of this extraordinary couple and their journey to find hope through love.

A movie about a time of change. About falling in love, getting ones first period and about not wanting to be first or last.
We follow a group of girls on their tour with the show ”Tjejer
typ tolv” on the theater scenes of the north of Sweden.

They are really quite good, the two young women who dance in close embrace, one of them Kate Winslet, the other Leo di Caprio. “Titanik” is written on a partition wall and the audience of “Babushki” are in tears, each with a baby in her arms. The house at Tramvayny prospect No. 15 in St. Petersburg is special: it’s a crisis centre for women called “Little Mother”. They are underage orphans themselves, but already mothers. And they have very different stories to tell – about their children’s fathers, the disappearance of their parents or about being a mother. Everything comes together in an amazingly delicate whole. It gives you hope.

West German terrorist Norbert Kröcher was arrested in Stockholm on March 31, 1977. He was leading a group planning to kidnap Swedish politician Anna-Greta Leijon. A number of suspects were arrested in the days following. One of the people arrested was Kröcher’s ex-girlfriend, ”A”. This is her story…

One year after the tragic events that took place near the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in northern Morocco in September 2005, young deported African men and women talk about their unfortunate attempts to cross over to Spain and give us their own versions of those events. What drives these young people to risk so much in this adventure? Different voices from middle-class society – a historian, a jurist, a writer – attempt to explain the cause of this emigration from their own perspective

Summer 2006 in Kinshasa. Martini, Jeannette, Hélène and Rosette spar everyday with Coach Judex in the old stadium Tata Rafael, where in 1974 Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in the most legendary boxing match in the history of boxing. At dawn, thousands of people from the ghetto come to train here and political parties rally. In parallel to the fight for the Presidency of Congo (DRC), Judex struggles to organise a women’s boxing tournament with little money… Kinshasa sings, Kinshasa starves and Judex’s girls manage to survive, with no illusions but still hope. A film about women in a country where men have become crazy. A film overflowing with energy, life and humour in a place where death and misery roam.

In a videocracy the key to power is the image. In Italy one man only has kept the domination of the image over three entire decades. As a TV-magnate and then as Presidente, Silvio Berlusconi has created a perfect system of TV-entertainment and politics. Like no one else he has influenced the content of commercial television in Italy. His TV-channels, known for their over-exposure of almost naked girls, are seen by many as a mirror of his own taste and personality. Director Erik Gandini lives in Sweden but was born and brought up in Italy. In Videocracy he returns to his country of birth portraying from the inside the consequences of a TV-experiment that Italians have been subjected to for 30 years. He gets a unique access to the most powerful spheres, even in the President’s summer resort in Sardinia. Unveiling a remarkable story, born out of the scary reality of TV-republic Italy, a country where the step from TV-showgirl to Minister for Gender Equality is only natural.

... about losing your looks, suddenly, and what you took for granted. Well, it’s just the hair - but what if your personality is more in the skin and your output than you thought? A film about panic, grief and fear to lose the one you love. And worse, about losing yourself.

One hopes for love after decades of loneliness, the other fights for a dream that threatens her relationship with her child. Tatiana and her daughter Valentina live in the boring, provincial town of Zhigulyovsk 1000 kilometres south-east of Moscow. Valentina, 22, works in a vodka factory, while Tatiana, 50, is a bus conductor. Valentina, whose dream is to be a TV star in Moscow, has to overcome her own limitations as well as the irony and malice of her comrades at the vodka factory.

Hossein and Shaima have loved each other since childhood. As teenagers they were separated by war. They meet again in Kabul in the late 1990s. Poverty forces Hossein to fight in the war. A shell splinter leaves him paralyzed. Shortly afterwards, Shaima is sold in marriage to a man 40 years her senior. This situation doesn’t prevent the two lovers from seeing each other as much as possible – even though this means going against their families’ hard and fast rules.

After South Africa abolished apartheid and formed a new government, a lot changed for the good. The black population has gotten more rights and opportunities in a more democratic society, but not everyone has profited from the new situation. White Poverty – In the New South Africa is the story of several white families who have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty as a consequence of preferential treatment for blacks. They are known as the ”poor whites,” a group that hardly gets discussed but that is rapidly increasing in size. Director Saskia Vredeveld follows an older couple that tries to help by picking up food at the supermarkets and meat auction and handing it out to the poor.

Because they are often the first victims of war and virtually left to their own fate in times of peace, artist JR honors the women in the developing world who, despite all the pitfalls in life, retain the ability to smile, the strength to fight and hopes for a better life.
From the favelas of Rio to the slums of Kenya, on the streets of India and in Cambodia, stands a different view of their struggles and aspirations. JR shows his portraits as enormous collages on the walls of these neighborhoods and towns, highlighting the strong personalities that rarely get the attention they deserve.

Screened in collaboration with K-special, SVT.

Women with Cows tells the story of an intricate and sometimes painful relationship between two sisters, whose lives revolve around a dozen cows. One sister adores them, the other abhors them. The sisters are constantly engaged in mutual recriminations and brutally honest exchanges about their vastly different outlooks on life. Britt wants to save the forest adjacent to the farm, Inger wants to log and plant more productive trees. Britt gives fresh milk to a multitude of cats, Inger tries to keep their numbers down. Britt chose cows over love – Inger did the opposite. Only when the authorities threaten to close the farm and slaughter the cows do the sisters find a common language.

A documentary based on security camera footage from the Guantánamo Bay prison.
This encounter between a team of Canadian intelligence agents and a child detainee in Guantánamo has never before been seen. Based on seven hours of video footage recently declassified by the Canadian courts this documentary delves into the unfolding high-stakes game of cat and mouse between captor and captive over a four day period. Maintaining the surveillance camera style this film analyzes the political, legal and scientific aspects of a forced dialogue

Senegalese pop sensation Youssou Ndour has spent the last 20 years in the spotlight as a world-renowned musician and the iconic representative “voice of Africa”. At the height of his career, Youssou, became frustrated by the negative perception of his Muslim faith and composed Egypt, a deeply spiritual album dedicated to a more tolerant view of Islam.
It was a critical and career-defining moment. Ndour’s brave musical message was wholeheartedly embraced by Western audiences but ignited serious religious controversy in his homeland of Senegal.
Combining unprecedented images of Senegal’s most sacred Muslim rituals, vibrant concert performances filmed around the world and intimate access to Ndour and his family, I Bring What I Love chronicles the difficult journey Youssou must undertake to assume his true calling. Youssou Ndour is a voice of hope and tolerance, a modern day moral and political leader whose message transcends music but remains grounded in the universality of faith.