Sinergia

Divided into 26 parts, an attempt to remake James Benning's film, YouTube (2011) with similar internet footage after 13 years.

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century.

The sarcastic account of the assassination of five Spanish politicians between 1870 and 1973 is mixed with the narration of five short stories by Edgar Allan Poe illustrated by five skillful pencil artists. A documentary, a video essay, a collage, a provocative experiment where various pop culture figures and icons perform unexpected cameos. The macabre joke of a jester. Never more.

Province of Ciudad Real, Spain, December 29, 1990. During the annual march to the Herrera de la Mancha prison, held in support of the members of the terrorist gang ETA imprisoned there, the Basque rock band Negu Gorriak holds a concert, which is recorded, edited on video and turned into a tool of vindication. Decades later, a film crew tries to elaborate a personal essay around this event and its meaning.

A girl mixes fiction with reality while writing a letter to her grandmother.

A cinematic essay interweaving private archive images and a mixture of reflective, speculative and poetic intertitles that, like “an old movie from the 20th century”, invites us to meditate on what Des Pallières once liked to call “our old homeland”.

It has been a lifelong dream of Kyrgyz director Melis Ubukeyev to create an elaborate film version of the Kyrgyz national epic 'Manas'. He spent years working with the National Academy of Sciences of Kyrgyzstan to gather material for this film project, which was ultimately to remain a dream. However, the director's efforts were not in vain: Not only did he make films in 1962 and 1988 about the highly respected Manasçı – folk singers who passed on the epic over countless generations in melodic speech –, but in 1995, on the occasion of the 1,000th anniversary of 'Manas', he also made a beguiling essay film that not only outlines the plot of the epic with the help of magnificent images and lavish costumes, but also gives a semi-documentary account of the history of the Kyrgyz people interwoven with the myth. Long inaccessible, the essay film has recently been restored by the film studio Kyrgyzfilm and uploaded to YouTube in 4K.

The six-decade transformation of a block of houses, shown by means of artfully featured archival shots, highlights the beauty and sadness of human-made decay. In the blink of an eye 66 years pass by and a savings bank replaces a church.

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.