Block 3. Past/Future

Seventy years after the death of one of history’s most feared dictators, the town of Gori in Georgia remains inextricably linked with its most famous son. For Nasi, a resident of the town, keeping that association alive and promoting an image of Stalin as a benevolent leader is central to her identity. Her beliefs bring her into conflict with her adoptive granddaughter Zhana, an activist fighting for a more open reckoning with his dark legacy. As the two women attempt to reconcile their differences, of unresolved Soviet-era legacies on present-day culture wars.

Hazira survived the massacre of Srebrenica. She has lived in the Ježevac refugee camp near Tuzla for almost 30 years. She has never been able to return to her home village in the mountains above Srebrenica. Today, it is in Republika Srpska, the Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Put on hold by political and social conditions, her days are marked by survival routines – collecting firewood, cleaning obsessively and navigating the harsh conditions of camp life.

Through dark humour and quiet resilience, Hazira copes with the trauma of a war that continues to define her life. To keep it from becoming too painful, she is in constant motion, always running from her memories, her situation, and the fear that it could start all over again. This standstill is symbolic of the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. 2025 marks the genocide in Srebrenica and the end of the war in former Yugoslavia for the 30th time. This film pays tribute to those who are still suffering from the consequences of this war.

“In My Day” is a visual poem exploring the intergenerational experience of love. Through intimate, real-life phone calls between grandmothers and their granddaughters, we are invited into the heart of personal confessions, where stories of heartbreak, enduring love, and loss unfold. The film paints a universal portrait of womanhood, shaped by love’s complexities across time. At its heart, “In My Day” is a reflection on the shared experiences that connect generations of women.

Through language lessons with her mother, a daughter learns more about her Indonesian roots, her mother’s painful journey, and her longing for a place to call home. In Budapest, an elderly mother teaches her Hungarian-speaking daughter the difference between active and passive tenses in the mother's Indonesian mother tongue.

What starts as a simple film about a familial language lesson encompasses the mother’s painful past, her journey to Hungary, her unintended life there, the effects of history on the individual, and the power of language to both reveal and connect.

Given a portrait, who is responsible for the image we see, the painter or the subject? Ion was a rockstar of Ballet in Communist Romania. When we discuss the possibility of a shooting, Ion is initially overjoyed. He’s been dreaming that someday there’d be a film about him. But as things progress, he finds it hard to accept my approach. He questions my ability to make the film happen.

An Athenian filmmaker is struggling with insomnia and seeks help from a tarot reader. She says that when she does manage to sleep, her dreams are strange; she dreams of her childhood apartment, where everyone has turned to stone. Yet such surreal thoughts hardly sound outlandish given the current state of Greece: petrified monuments to past glories as far as the eye can see, even as any sort of movement in the present has slowed to a standstill. She sets out to understand this curious paradox, dipping into literature, fiction and documentary to do so, disparate elements given unity by playfulness, political sensibility and shimmering celluloid.

Conversations with locals on the streets of the Greek capital about the nature of statues; the 1944 manifesto by poet Yorgos Makris that proposed blowing up the Parthenon and the groupuscule that now seeks to complete his work; the story of the political prisoners forced to rebuild the same monument in miniature; a rogue Caryatid now discovering love. Such times are hard to make sense of, whether in Greece or beyond, and perhaps there is only one way to proceed, to move forward, to live: everything bit by bit. “When will we gather the world together piece by piece?”