EiE Film

As Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger wanted to lead the Church back to its former strength, but instead he plunged it into a deep crisis. He reacted largely inactive to the revelations of multiple cases of abuse by clergy. In order to understand the thinking of this unconditional hardliner, documentary filmmaker Christoph Röhl delves deep into Ratzinger's past - but what really leaves us speechless are the testimonies of how the church, on a large and small scale, dealt with the crimes of its priests.

Sunday night. Alex is an ultras, his team has just lost a match and he is going home empty-headed. In the absence of his parents, he lives with his grandmother and sells Rivotril tablets to make some money. On a night that’s struggling to take off, Alex goes down to the basement and into a cellar where a bunch of people are gathered. A rap battle is in progress. Nemy is a girl with refined bars, who dances confidently and sinuously. She notices Alex and seeks him out. Together they venture into the night, driving in a stolen car. Two solitudes that recognise each other. Their bodies brush against each other in what seems to be the beginning of a story.

Sea Dreaming Girls is a gorgeous, joyous and funny documentary about discovering new things and living carefree at any age, as it follows a lively group of nonnas who have never seen the sea. In the tiny Italian mountain village of Daone, a group of grandmothers led by the straight-talking Erminia begin planning a trip in honour of their Rododendro club’s 20th anniversary. They quickly agree on a trip to the sea, where many of their members have never ventured. But how will they raise enough money so that everyone can wiggle their toes in the surf? They sell pies and sweets and even boldly pose for a calendar but when this doesn’t get them the money they need, they have one last idea and it is this one that sends them viral, making them famous across Italy.

The village of Poschiavo and its valley as a new Far West, more than six years after the killing of the M13 bear.

A nocturnal journey inside the abandoned spaces of the former Collegno mental hospital. Through the writings from within - the voices of the letters, diaries and testimonies of the internees - the labyrinthine and crumbling rooms come back to life and evoke the painful past of the psychiatric hospital. They tell of the electroshocks and tortures on adults and children carried out by Doctor Giorgio Coda, the "electrician" from Collegno. They tell of the official trial against him for torture and of the proletarian trial that Coda suffered at the hands of a Prima Linea group, led by one of his "patients". Only at dawn, with the story of the closure of the mental hospitals, will we see the light again.

As in a long suite, the cinematographic story of a country, Italy, in its current physiognomy, in a film made only of images and music. A home atlas of wonders that are sometimes misunderstood and of places known, loved and often lost. And of people cultured in their living in a highly stratified territory, between the still usable grandeur of the past and the apparent stasis of the present. A country marked by strong inequalities and nevertheless in continuous transformation in the difficult race towards sustainable development, problematically suspended between the old and the new and the increasingly difficult search for a balance to safeguard its éthos.

Irmela had one and only goal over the past 30 years: to erase each and every single trace of hate around her.