Dane Komljen
Afterwater is a three-part film spanning fiction, documentary and experimental film aiming to study and compare lakes across the world and their hidden treasures: submerged settlements, failed utopias and collective dreams, the remains of past eras and the seeds of a hopeful future.
In a remote, abandoned industrial site near a centuries-old ore mine in the Austrian Alps, a self-taught mechanic runs a business exporting used cars to his native Nigeria. As he pursues his lonely day-to-day activities with wondrous serenity, past, present and future begin to overlap, and memories of a lost friendship resurface against the backdrop of a mysterious promise of everlasting resources.
After a 13-year-old student disappears without a trace for a week and suddenly reappears, his mother and teachers are confronted with existential questions that change their whole view of life.
Borrowing its title from an experimental text by Walter Benjamin. Many years ago, the cities by the river were gripped by a contagion. Things started to change and everything slowly became something else. It was not clear if transformation was a symptom of the disease or a way to escape it. The contagion touched everything and everyone: animals and plants, stones and soil, men, women and children, their thoughts, their dreams, their memories. An old woman once told me how all memories turn into trees, I could hardly make out what she was saying. She said she could hear the trees singing: To be a body, to be any body. After the years of contagion ended, the cities appeared untouched. One had to look hard to see the traces of the previous time. If one could listen to the trees, what would they say? A way out, a way out?
A breathtaking quest for the dream the imposing city of Brasilia was based on, a marked contrast with the chaos of the adjacent construction workers' village. Everything about Brasilia was devised and designed, but not on the basis of some cold urban design concept: the plan proves to originate from 19th-century priest Don Bosco’s dream. The chaos and disorder of the adjacent construction workers' village Vila Amauri long stood in stark contrast to the grandeur and majestic regularity of Brasilia. Now the village has disappeared beneath the reservoir’s surface, the necessary order has been restored. All Still Orbit examines both these histories.
It’s like almost all is lost. Yet still they are here – abandoned bungalows, an artificial lake, dirty plastic bottles, lost donkeys and stray dogs, draining pipes running over fields of salt, deserted factories, statues of revolutionaries, concrete playgrounds covered with weeds, rotten fruit, folded T-shirts, pop songs, decades of forgetting, a single room with a blue tent inside. And it felt like a kiss.
Two men - one in the West, one in the East, brothers. In both places, life is muted, solitary, nondescript. Here, windows are painted, switches rewired and cigarettes smoked; there, lengths swum, boxing matches prepared for, transactions made. What is it that links these things? Winter swimming pools, the sound of a bell, a bullet passing through bone?
In the flat where I grew up, in a closet, hidden behind his clothes, uniform and a pistol, my father kept a box with papers, school documents and volumes. After he died, I searched the box. In his student report book I found a name of professor who lectured "The basics of Marxist sociology" in 1976. I went to the professor and asked him: "What is friendship?" - "A tiny bird," he said.
Adnan is driving a grocery van on his way to sell produce at the market. While he is waiting for a friend's phone call, he suspects his loyalty.
Through the intimate stories of seven young directors, October is the generational attitude towards Serbia today, shown in different perspectives and through different genres - from black comedy to melodrama, poetic portrait to the socially engaged horror. Motif that binds all of the stories together is the tenth anniversary of the democratic revolution. Each film is taking place on that day, 5th of October in 2010, and each film is differently related to the anniversary and what that event means 10 years after. The film brings fresh visions of the seven young directors who were teenagers at the time of the overthrow of president Milosevic and his regime. On a personal and emotional way they show a complex picture of modern Serbia.
Composed of archival footage of his friends' travels, the director creates a special view of the spaces he did not physically visit.
The boy is new to the city. Daniel doesn't know what to do with himself. He visits his sister, he visits friends. Noise begins to emerge: how to say no to yourself?
