Waking Up in Silence 2023    star_border 7.5
A summer’s day in a former German military barrack: children forced to flee Ukraine have found refuge here. In their games, they discover military symbols from the past and link them to their experiences.

Aralkum 2022    star_border 6
The Aral “Sea” powerfully reveals the deadly impact of human activities—in this case, the intensive cultivation of cotton in the USSR—on an ecosystem. Daniel Asadi Faezi (The Absence of Apricots, VdR 2018) and Mila Zhluktenko (Find Fix Finish, VdR 2017) film the shore’s last inhabitants, who have lost their way of life to the desertification of their environment. A beautiful and poignant work about our probable future.