Over 20 films at Limassol documentary fest

Τhe 19th Lemesos International Documentary Festival returns the first week of August (1-8) at Ceronia Hall – Lanitis Carob Mill with more than 20 cutting edge documentaries from world cinema in an exciting line-up of screenings. All films are screened for the first time in Cyprus. 

In 2020, Gurbaz Sangha, a young Punjabi farmer led thousands to Delhi protesting new Farm Laws. Joined by over half a million from diverse backgrounds they remained at borders despite Covid lockdown vowing to stay until laws were repealed in Nishtha Jain’s documentary Farming the Revolution.

From filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky comes Architecton – an epic, intimate, and poetic meditation on architecture and how the design and construction of buildings from the ancient past reveal our destruction – and offer hope for survival and a way forward. 

On a disappearing mud island, 12-year-old orphan Afrin prepares to leave the only world she has ever known, to confront the mysteries of a new, sinking world, in Angelos Rallis’ Mighty Afrin: In the Time of Floods. 

In a remote Russian mining town, black snow falls due to extreme pollution. After the news videos of a local homemaker-turned-journalist go viral, she suddenly finds herself the target of a massive government disinformation campaign in Alina Simone’s Black Snow.

What do warnings for climate change, the pandemic, rising fascism sound like? In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, Preemptive Listening by Aura Satz is an ode to the sirens of a changing world.

For half a decade, Palestinian activist Basel Adra has filmed his community of Masafer Yatta being destroyed by Israel’s occupation, as he builds an unlikely alliance with an Israeli journalist who wants to join his fight resulting in No Other Land.

In the autobiographical film My Stolen Planet by Farahnaz Sharifi, an Iranian woman is forced to migrate to her private planet to be free. She buys other people’s memories in the form of super 8mm films, records and archives her own, to create an alternative history of Iran.

In the aftermath of the catastrophic explosion of August 4, 2020 in Beirut, a film crew is facing a serious dilemma: should they defy the chaos and move forward with the shooting of their film or surrender to the multiple crises that are spreading all over the country? Dancing on the Edge of the Volcano by Cyril Aris captures their relentless battle to keep making cinema in a shattered city.

Sugarcane by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, is a gripping investigation of unmarked graves at an Indian residential school. The film unearths secrets below and above ground, igniting a reckoning in the lives of survivors and their descendants.

Hold On To Her, by Robin Vanbesien traces a lived social infrastructure of care, solidarity and struggle, addressing a recent case of police and state violence in the context of migration border control in Belgium.

The newest film by multimedia artist and filmmaker Johan Grimonprez Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is an engrossing essay-film that examines how jazz and geopolitics collide in a nefarious chapter of Cold War history: the murder of Patrice Lumumba.

The Berlinale Golden Bear winner Dahomey by Mati Diop is a dramatised account of 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey, which were held in a museum in France, now being returned to Benin.

Obsessed With Light by Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl pulls back the curtain on Loïe Fuller, a wildly original performer who revolutionised the visual culture of the early 20th century. Creating a dialogue between the past and the present, the documentary delves into the astonishing influence Fuller’s work has on contemporary culture.

Facing the end of a 60-year musical career, legendary singer and activist Joan Baez takes an honest look back and a deep look inward as she tries to make sense of her large history-making life and reveals, for the first time, personal struggles she has kept private, until now in Joan Baez, I Am A Noise, by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky, and Maeve O’Boyle. Tish by Paul Sng is a moving portrait of social documentary photographer and trailblazer Tish Murtha, who dedicated her life to documenting the lives of working-class communities in North East England.

In the Sky of Nothingness with the Least, Christos Adrianopoulos follows the lives of an elderly couple who have been together for 43 years as the pandemic forces them to stay indoors, and their daily routines become repetitive and mundane. The film strips away the idealised view of a perfect, everlasting love and focuses on the realities of ageing and the gradual decline of both bodies and minds. 

A New Kind of Wilderness by Silje Evensmo Jacobsen from Norway is an intimate story that delves into our life choices, our responsibility to the planet, our children, and how we navigate life after a significant loss.

Since the 1970s, lesbians from around the world would flock to a small village on the Greek island of Lesvos. As tensions between the newly-arrived lesbians and local residents rose, director Tzeli Hadjidimitriou – caught in the middle as a local lesbian – chronicled 40+ years of love, community, conflict, and what it means to feel accepted in Lesvia.

The Perfect Meal by Alexandros Merkouris explores the most recent science behind the Mediterranean diet, looking into the pioneering research which seeks to understand why and how certain food combinations can prevent heart disease, cancer, obesity and brain ageing.

From Cyprus, the festival showcases two mid-length documentaries by visual artist Efi Savvides – Camp Pournara and Camps Vathy-Zervou. In Camp Pournara, border materialities, the sounds of the quotidian, and discourses on politics and belonging, past and present, are woven together to interrogate and reconstitute the everyday reality. Camps Vathy-Zervou documents some of the narratives of people living in Samos and their experience of refugee reception over the years.

There is a silent, sacred, yet mundane chain of procedures that follow a human, from the moment they die to their earthy return. Metavasis, by Yiannis Christidis, is a poetic documentary celebrating the humane nature of the death rituals in Cyprus.

Alongside the film screenings, the festival will be hosting an array of international and local guests, Q&A sessions, music events, DJ sets and open-air parties – all with a true summer vibe.

19th Lemesos International Documentary Festival

Annual week-long festival with documentary screenings and parallel events. August 1-8. Ceronia Hall – Lanitis Carob Mill, Limassol. www.filmfestival.com.cy