With FILMSCAPES the IFFMH is expanding its curatorial repertoire. Every year, our team discovers exciting, innovative, and daring films that don’t quite fit the parameters of either ON THE RISE or PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES. With FILMSCAPES, we broaden our scope to encompass the entire film landscape of a vintage year. Different formats – short and medium-length, serial, essayistic, documentary – also have their place here. What all these films have in common is that we absolutely do not want you to miss out on them. That’s because they all represent the highest contemporary standard of the moving image – sometimes classic, sometimes ground-breakingly new.
The range of aesthetic forms in FILMSCAPES is once again symbolized by Catalan director Albert Serra, who was already a guest at the IFFMH in 2022 with ›Pacifiction‹. In his hypnotic work ›Afternoons of Solitude‹, recently awarded the main prize in San Sebatián, he now transcends the boundaries of the documentary. In the spectacle of the bullring, he discovers a ritual that is as fascinating as it is bestial - evoking a queer world in its rhetoric, masculinity and gestures.
›Der Fleck‹ by Willy Hans, about a group of young people in the forest on a summer's day, oscillates between documentary elements and poetic realism. The German-Swiss co-production was part of the Mannheim Cutting Edge Talent Camp. Scandar Copti's politically controversial Palestinian thriller ›Happy Holidays‹ and Mo Harawe's Somali father-son story ›The Village Next to Paradise‹ take a different approach to family life. A father-daughter relationship is the focus of India Donaldson's ›Good One‹, a pleasantly quiet yet determined American contribution to the current conflict between the generations. The warm-hearted and loving ›Eephus‹ is about an alternative form of family and togetherness. But also about having to let go. This also applies to the two very different cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) in ›A Real Pain‹, Eisenberg's new film. They travel from the USA to Poland, to a former German extermination camp, and come back changed. Japanese director Yoko Yamanaka takes us to Tokyo. She takes us on the emotional rollercoaster ride of a young Generation Z woman (›Desert of Namibia‹).