14-05-2026 GIEFF-Films
Student Film Competition continued
Learning to Fly, Tokiwadaira Danchi, Distant Intimacy, A Decent Person, Work Between Us, Living Room (i-doc), Highway Nomads, Throne Of Wood, Safoora, Souls, Clay Woman, Kathmandu Monsoon, Mukunã Apprentice of Shaman, Angry Spirits
Learning to Fly
Germany, 2024, 49 min
Location: Mexico
A Film by: Amelie von Marschalck
In Puebla, Mexico, Salvador, an elder of the Totonako community, guides young dancers as they learn the ancient flying ceremony. Between forest and church, they study the ritual’s meaning and prepare for the demanding performance. With the help of villagers, a tall tree is cut and raised before the church, forming the pole from which the dancers descend during the feast of the patron saint. The film was made at the request of the protagonists to accompany the learning process on film and capture the heritage of their culture. An honorable mention at the Hamburg Film Awards encouraged the filmmaker to share the work with a wider audience.
Screening: 14.05.2026 09:00
Tokiwadaira Danchi
Japan, 2025, 33 min
Location: Japan
A Film by: Haru Kato
Tokiwadaira Danchi in Matsudo City, Chiba Prefecture, was built in the 1950s during Japan’s rapid economic growth and once housed more than 17,000 residents. Today fewer than 8,000 people live there, and over half are elderly. As the population ages and the buildings themselves grow old, the community faces challenges such as isolation and solitary deaths. At the same time, new residents, including foreign workers, are reshaping daily life. This documentary observes the changing community without narration or music. As Haru Kato states, the film seeks to let viewers reflect on these social realities without imposing the filmmaker’s own views.
Screening: 14.05.2026 10:00
Distant Intimacy
United Kingdom, 2023, 20 min
Location: China
A Film by: Yuzhe Zhu
Distant Intimacy follows Chaosu, an 87-year-old woman who moves across China to live with her family as age, illness, and distance reshape her daily life. Separated from familiar surroundings and loved ones, she turns to a mobile phone and iPad to maintain connection. Through messages, video calls, and small gestures of use, digital media becomes part of everyday care and communication. Filmed remotely during the pandemic, the film reflects on how intimacy is sustained across distance, as screens become both a bridge and a reminder of separation, where new forms of closeness gradually emerge.
Screening: 14.05.2026 10:45
Discussion
A Decent Person
Russia, 2024, 35 min
Location: Russia
A Film by: Nastia Zheltova
Vyacheslav, an 88-year-old man, lives alone after the death of his wife of 55 years. He spends the summer at his dacha, following a fixed routine of tending the garden, reading newspapers, and watching television. The days pass in a steady rhythm. One day, neighboring women invite him to dinner. He prepares carefully and joins them, but afterward returns to his usual routine. As the season shifts toward autumn, he prepares the house for winter. Before leaving, Vyacheslav invites the women to his home. This second dinner unfolds differently and marks a change. Back in the city, women continue to enter his once closed-off world.
Screening: 14.05.2026 11:30
Work Between Us
Austria, 2024, 29 min
Location: Austria
A Film by: Elaine Goldberg
Care work is rarely visible. It takes place in the background, is mostly performed by women, and is often underpaid and undervalued. Work Between Us moves through Austria’s care landscape while posing questions about the healthcare system and the ways we’ve (un)learnt to live together: How are family carers coping? What circumstances do 24-hour carers find themselves in? And how is inclusion practiced in care institutions in Austria? Conversations with researchers, care workers, and activists show that practitioners have much to say to politicians about the need for a societal re-evaluation of care work.
Website: here
Screening: 14.05.2026 12:10
Multimedia Presentation
Living Room (i-doc)
United Kingdom, 2025, 0 min
Location: United Kingdom
A Film by: Caterina Sartori
Living Room is a multimodal interactive documentary developed as part of anthropological doctoral research into the demolition of a modernist public housing estate in London. It foregrounds the experiences and activism of low-income, racialised residents who resist demolition and asks how everyday life is shaped and reshaped under structural violence, dispossession and gentrification. The i-doc allows users to navigate five thematic strands in non-linear order, from legal struggles and housing occupations to media, architecture and homemaking, reflecting the open-ended nature of residents’ refusal.
Website: Living Room: An Interactive Documentary
Presentation: 14.05.2026 13:00
Welcome to the main festival
Highway Nomads
Mexico, 2023, 84 min
Location: Mexico
A Film by: Alberto Arnaut Estrada
Luz de Luna (Moonlight), born Clara Fragoso in Durango, becomes a truck driver after escaping a violent marriage. She moves to Nuevo Laredo and works in a customs agency restaurant, where she meets truckers and grows interested in their work. She struggles for months to be hired as a female driver despite excellent training, and even after being hired faces labor exploitation and violence that at times make her consider quitting. On the road for 20 years, she supports her four children and is now one of the most recognized female truckers, with over 150,000 followers on social media. Her exposure has inspired other women to take the wheel.
Website: here
Trailer of Film: here
Screening: 14.05.2026 14:00
Throne Of Wood
Iran, Islamic Republic of, 2025, 30 min
Location: Iran
A Film by: Sadegh Kazemi
In the village of Avanj in Iran, a hundred year old woman known as the Chief spends her days gathering and stacking firewood outside her house, even though the village has long been connected to natural gas. While neighbors mock the towering piles, she insists on living independently and refuses to rely on her children. When a fire in a nearby house prompts villagers to demand the wood be removed, her quiet routine becomes a point of conflict. As the filmmaker reflects, the film invites viewers to ask why she endures such effort for a pile of wood, and gradually to approach her world with empathy rather than judgment.
See filmmakers
Screening: 14.05.2026 15:35
Safoora
Iran, Islamic Republic of, 2025, 18,5 min
Location: Iran
A Film by: Perviz Rostemi
In the Kurdistan region of Oramanat, the story of Safura lives on through ritual and memory. Known as a chaste and saintly woman, she is said to have revealed a mysterious light from her hands while tending to her child, a moment that led her husband to leave, believing himself unworthy to remain by her side. This absence continues to shape the village, where men do not take part in the ceremony held in her name. Each year, women gather in the month of Ordibehesht to perform a ritual believed to heal the sick and call for rain, sustaining a tradition rooted in devotion and collective faith.
Trailer of Film: here
Screening: 14.05.2026 16:25
Souls
Argentina, 2023, 79 min
Location: Argentina
A Film by: Laura Basombrío
Across the stark landscapes of the Argentine Northwest, Estela shares memories shaped by loss, dreams, and the lingering presence of the dead. Since her mother’s death, dreams return with messages, while memories of her father’s violence and the distance from her husband weigh on her spirit. Between the everyday and the mystical, her story unfolds in a place where the living and the dead coexist during the Day of the Souls. Laura Basombrío first wrote a piece of fiction imagining a soul wandering the puna, but when she realized that both she and Estela dream about their dead, she left fiction behind and began making a portrait of her.
Trailer of Film: here
Screening: 14.05.2026 16:45
Clay Woman
Mexico, 2024, 17,5 min
Location: Mexico
A Film by: Concepción Vásquez Martínez
In the mountains of Tlahuitoltepec, Oaxaca, Rufina, an Ayuujk potter, shapes clay to heal her soul and forge a path toward freedom. In a community marked by machismo and gender-based violence, she transforms pain into art, creating hope for her nine children. Mujer de Barro is an intimate and poetic testimony, narrated through the eyes of her daughter, the director, who captures the silent strength of a woman. Clay Woman celebrates the resilience of Rufina and many women in the community who, through craft and perseverance, redefine their destinies and show the transformative power of art as a tool for empowerment.
Trailer of Film: here
Screening: 14.05.2026 20:00
Kathmandu Monsoon
Nepal, 2023, 18,5 min
Location: Nepal
A Film by: Ngima Gelu Sherpa
Kathmandu Monsoon observes the filmmaker’s hometown Kathmandu through an ethnographic lens during the monsoon rains. Having lived in Kathmandu for over two decades, the filmmaker has long been drawn to portraying the city as a distinct character, a pursuit that gained urgency with the recent climate crisis. The film reflects on climate change and the continuity of everyday life as rain intensifies and streets flood, revealing the resilience of the Nepali people. Providing a hypnotic ethnographic study punctuated by the evolution of the approaching storm, it shows how life must go on as rain pours and streets flood.
Trailer of Film: here
Screening: 14.05.2026 20:30
Mukunã Apprentice of Shaman
Brazil, 2025, 25 min
Location: Not Specified
A Film by: Rodrigo Sena Sena Sena
Mukunã Apprentice of Shaman follows Mukunã of the Potiguara Katu village in Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, as he prepares to become Pajé, or shaman, in a community without demarcated Indigenous land. Amid threats from agribusiness, deforestation, and land conflict, environmental care and plant medicine shape his formation. As he learns from elders and spiritual traditions, the film reflects on the survival of Indigenous knowledge, oral history, and community life, while also addressing the urgent struggle for territory, protection, and cultural continuity in the face of ongoing external pressure.
Screening: 14.05.2026 21:00
Angry Spirits
Germany, 2024, 104 min
Location: Mongolia
A Film by: Iris Pakulla
In Ulaanbaatar, Ainur, a young mother, struggles to support her children and parents while living with a growing sense of unease. Feeling unwell and haunted, she returns to her grandfather’s land in search of relief and reconnection. Along the way, she encounters landscapes transformed by mining and climate change, where environmental destruction and spiritual imbalance are closely linked. As her journey unfolds, personal hardship and social realities begin to echo one another. In a country where many live in poverty despite vast natural resources, her story reflects tensions between survival, displacement, and ties to land and unseen worlds.
Screening: 14.05.2026 21:50