DocNomads

Audiovisual essay about walking through the streets of Lisbon. It explores discrimination and moving through spaces where one is not welcome.

How to carry life inside you while surrounded by the threats of death? In blockaded Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), a pregnant mother carries both hope and fear, as war, hunger, and deprivation threaten the fragile life within her.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many Russians have started having dreams about their president and sharing them on social media. More than a thousand dreams about Putin have now been recorded and posted on public platforms. In Dreams About Putin, a selection of these dreams have been brought to life using Unreal Engine, a 3D graphics program for creating scenes for computer games. In this exciting experiment with form, the animations are complemented by rare archival footage of the Russian president. The dreams are related by a narrator, and their “translation” into 3D scenes is not literal; likewise, the archival footage has been lightly edited. The result is sometimes dryly comic, sometimes absurdist, sometimes disturbing, and sometimes even hopeful. A series of bizarre but therefore oddly familiar nightmares as a vision of Putin’s Russia.

Djus, a thief with the soul of a filmmaker, uses a smuggled phone to record himself from inside prison, recounting a love story that has stayed with him long after the bars closed behind him. In the film the character and the director together explore and articulate the meaning of love.

Building on the discourse around the infamous area of molenbeek in Brussels, the filmmakers invite you on a walk in a patchwork of places held together as a floating concrete jungle where logic is substituted by interwoven spaces held in absurd rooms. The journey tries to follow the logic of those who designate an area as a bad one, detaching it from a broader context, as no man is an island.

In the northern region of Hungary, the populist propaganda of Orbán’s regime dictates the lives of military high school student Luca and her friends. But how do you distinguish between the opinions imposed on you and your own intrinsic beliefs in the most forming period of your life?

Maja T. is a young non binary activist in solitary confinement in Budapest, facing a 24 year sentence for attending an antifascist protest in a system that negates citizens’ basic rights.

In her autobiographical documentary, the young director uses cartoon impressions, photographic memories, and the various stages of baking a cake to draw the viewer into her own stream of consciousness, and using images full of kindness, tenderness, and playfulness, she deals with the sadness that began during a children's birthday party many years ago.

Omama, a rural grandmother in Hungary, has one main wish: to not wake up tomorrow. Martin, her cinema-expatriate grandson, comes for a visit, hoping to connect with her before Omama's wish comes true.

Women who have lost their husbands and sons in Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine find themselves mourning in the Carpathian Mountains. Yet, the stunning landscapes cannot fill the unbearable void left by their loss. Still, Tamara, Liubov, and Svitlana learn to live with their unhealed wounds through poetry, sisterhood, and deep conversation. At a certain point, the once-silent nature finds its voice, joining the women in their grief.

An excursion into the lost woods of childhood.

Through monotony of daily realities, we see Sandra, a mother of two, raising her children with a frequently absent father. The satirical representation of her conventional familial life leaves us with questions about her personal desires.

A poetic journey into an untranslatable Kazakh word, whose meaning deepens with every passing moment, crossing oceans of time and distance to reveal the profound, unspoken bonds that tie us to our past.

Following two polar bear cubs born in captivity at Nyíregyháza Animal Park in Hungary.

A family of wild owls experiences the springtime: hunting, feeding, raising their young. A camera in their nest captures their every move. While a community of online viewers monitor the owls 24/7 via livestream, a strange story begins to unfold, calling into question the paradigm of control that underpins our human interventions into the non-human realm.

A sketch of a woman who is a regular in an old bar called Café Estádio in Lisbon. Quina has been visiting it for the past two decades because she believes that it is the only place that is a cure for her loneliness.

A colonial-era play becomes a framework for examining the backdrop of today’s political landscape.

In a few brief moments in the life of a young girl, we see her drawing on the window with a marker as she sings and chats, and walking along the main road on her way to meet her friend, meanwhile surrounded by cars and trucks racing dangerously close to her.

Under a full sun that turns the wide pastures and woods around a house into an idyllic playground, a boy plays with his father to be a man. In the midst of the greenery, the aggressiveness is heartwarming: the father teaches him boxing and with it, the responsibility and restraint that come with mastering one's own body; the boy listens to rap and caresses chicks. Masculinity and childhood are documented in a contradictory, sweet and incautious nature. Seen in this light, the images of upbringing can convince us: love and virtue are built and transmitted in small lessons.