Category: ARFF Barcelona – Best Documentary

Original Film Title: Shots: Eugenics to Pandemics

Director’s Name: John L Potash

Writer’s Name: John L Potash

Producer’s Name: John L Potash

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 2 hours 26 minutes

Film Description:

This semi-comic documentary details the Rockefellers and other oligarchs’ genocidal eugenics movement, their support of Nazi Germany, their perpetual war including biological warfare, and other anti-public health campaigns. The majority of the film covers the pandemic and the mass of problems in the way it was handled as if a group of billionaires had actually planned it, with their Rockefeller Report of 2010, and the Gates Foundation Event 201 with The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. It ends with the government coercion around the most deadly shots in a 100 years. Welcome to Boosterville. Your shots will be ready for you every six months.

Original Film Title: SIGNS OF LIFE

Director’s Name: Marko Nikolić

Writer’s Name: Marko Nikolić

Producer’s Name: Nebojsa Miljković

Country of Origin: Serbia

Country of Filming: Serbia

Language: Serbian

Runtime: 34 minutes

Film Description:

SIGNS OF LIFE is a film that reaches out for the stories behind long-abandoned hotels in Serbia, told by their former employees. Through combination of visual and historical narrative elements, we discover that these once crowded premises still show signs of life. As these rotting buildings are bravely struggling for air, their destiny reveals itself to be a metaphor for the present state of our society. Do we euthanize them, deliver the coup de grâce, end their miseries, or do what’s in our power to bring them back to life and give them a new sense of purpose? Would rejuvenating them bring back at least a fragment of what they used to mean to us, that we miss so much today?

Original Film Title: The Great Reset and the Rise of Bitcoin

Director’s Name: Pierre Corbin

Writer’s Name: Pierre Corbin

Producer’s Name: Pierre Corbin

Country of Origin:Poland

Country of Filming: Poland

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 17 minutes 47 seconds

Original Film Title: 《台灣的精靈》 台灣草鴞：台灣最稀少瀕危的神隱精靈

Director’s Name: Shin-I Pai

Producer’s Name: Marina Shin-I Pai

Country of Origin: Taiwan

Country of Filming:
Taiwan

Language: Chinese

Runtime: 49 minutes

Film Description:

he production crew of “Elves of Taiwan” partakes in perhaps the most difficult animal rescue operations in line with conservation efforts and the most dignified science-based survey projects. The program unveils diversified local landscapes and endemic species completed by various angles and perspectives—from aerial rescues, ocean investigations, to underground bone excavations; it is indeed a brutally honest series that documents the conservation and restoration of the terrestrial, oceanic, and airborne endemic species in Taiwan.
In the Southwestern badlands in Taiwan, there is a very mysterious owl of terrestrial habitats, the Taiwan grass owls, and as of today, scientists are still unable to decipher its whereabouts and behaviors. Against all odds, the production team followed up all kinds of clues for two years— from bird net rescues, follow-up research, to nocturnal studies— and is finally able to present the stirring life story of these aerial elves of Taiwan as they face the changes and destructions in their habitats.

Original Film Title: Husker du din mors hænder

Director’s Name: Barbra Coco Laurré

Writer’s Name: Barbra Coco Laurré

Producer’s Name: Barbra Coco Laurré

Country of Origin: Denmark

Country of Filming: Denmark, Norway

Language: Danish, Norwegian

Runtime: 18 minutes 38 seconds

Film Description:

A poetic and strong documentary about our mothers.
About the threads of life that are tied and woven,
and about carrying the weight of our own lives for better or worse.

Random people get one question in front of the camera. They all grew up in the Nordic countries, in a culture where children usually live with one or two parents in their own house.
The question asked is: Do you remember your mother’s hands?
The answers come from another depth than the stories we usually share about our mothers. They are raw and unprocessed, as none of the interviewees know the question in advance.
What memories emerge from the past?
So many years later, what images come up when your mind ponder on your mother hands?

Our earliest experiences in life make us who we are, and the film touches the place within us where we understand how big a size Mother is in a person’s life.

Original Film Title: 4 Suns & Piano

Director’s Name: Boris Kovac

Writer’s Name: Boris Kovac

Producer’s Name:Boris Kovac

Country of Origin: Serbia

Country of Filming: Serbia

Language: Serbian

Runtime: 1 hour 19 minutes 15 seconds

Film Description:

A poetical documentary. Four men live and do everything that a modern man does not do – they live in nature and harmony with it. Producing almost everything they need with their two hands, their humble life becomes an inverted image in the mirror of modern man who destroys nature and destroys himself in his self-sufficiency. Four characters, through four seasons, paint a fresco of the transience of their everyday life and their intimate life stories that are refracted through phases by the eternal return of the same one of the countless natural cycles. The film creates a space where the director’s and composer’s poetics meet the life of the protagonist, the last examples of the native way of life in the real and metaphysical space of the Pannonian country, its world of nature, and traditional culture.

Original Film Title: Bringing Assad To Justice

Director’s Name: RONAN TYNAN

Writer’s Name: Anne Daly

Producer’s Name: Anne Daly, Ronan Tynan

Country of Origin: Ireland

Country of Filming: France, Germany, Portugal, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 50 minutes

Film Description:

Bringing Assad To Justice is the remarkable story of efforts against the odds to make one of the worst regime’s of our time accountable for heinous crimes without parallel since the Nazis, with even photographs of thousands of prisoners tortured and starved to death resonating with images from Hitler’s Holocaust.

Many Syrians at great personal risk have been gathering evidence of crimes against humanity from 2011 when President Bashar al-Assad and his regime began brutally crushing an historic peaceful uprising. Meanwhile, extreme repression has continued without a break since then using unparalleled horror including torture, enforced disappearances and mass murder. ‘Never Again’ might look like yet again in Syria but undeterred very courageous Syrians like human rights lawyers Anwar al-Bunni and Mazen Darwish, who themselves were imprisoned and tortured by the regime, have continued to work for justice and accountability making history as Germany and France have issued international arrest warrants against leaders of the Syrian regime.

Across the years since the peaceful uprising President Assad and his regime has pursued a strategy of starve or surrender against the civilian population. More than six hundred thousand are dead and much of the country has been destroyed. Over half the population have fled their homes leaving six million refugees outside the country and almost the same number internally displaced. But while Assad’s allies Russia and Iran help keep him in power and the Russians have used their veto to prevent Syria’s referral to the International Criminal Court, Syrians and their collaborators are sending a clear message no matter how long it takes those responsible for crimes against humanity will be brought to justice in Syria.

Original Film Title: Song For Hope

Director’s Name: Chris Haigh

Writer’s Name: Chris Haigh

Producer’s Name: Tara Wyatt, Luke Wyatt

Country of Origin: United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 1 hour 20 minutes

Film Description:

Ryan Anthony, regarded as one of the greatest trumpet virtuosos ever, was only 42 years old when he was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma and given just months to live. Faced with an uncertain future and an unending uphill battle full of hospital stays, chemotherapy treatments and blood transfusions, Ryan continued to share his talent with audiences around the world through solo performances, master classes and concerts. Not only that, he and his wife, Niki, created “CancerBlows”, a charity which has raised millions for cancer research since 2015.

Song For Hope is a story about living life to the fullest, about the unwavering strength and support of family and friends and about one man’s refusal to allow his affliction to affect his love of his art.

Original Film Title: Songbirds

Director’s Name: Dagan Beckett

Writer’s Name: Dagan W. Beckett, David Davidson, Irv Berner

Producer’s Name: Irv Berner, David Davidson, Dagan W. Beckett

Country of Origin:United States

Country of Filming: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 60 minutes 4 seconds

Film Description:

The Songbirds guitar museum hosted the world’s largest collection of vintage guitars. Covid-19’s devastating blow to the music industry forced the museum to permanently close. This documentary film explores the final hours and cultural impact of this special collection.

Songbirds has been nominated for a 2022 EMMY in the category of Best “Topical” Documentary.

“It never drags and imparts the passions of all the participants and the musicians. It is a tragedy that many will only find out that this beautiful place existed only after it is gone, but that is how history works.” – Film Threat Review

“I can’t believe I never got to this place when it was open. People have got to see this film. How can I help?” – Jason Momoa

Original Film Title: Sun & Petals

Director’s Name: Sun & Petals

Country of Origin: Italy

Country of Filming: Italy

Language: English

Runtime: 12 minutes

Film Description:

From the point of view of a painter, Sun and Petals is a 12-minute documentary looking into how the early interventions in HIV/AIDS left mothers and children behind. Commissioned by Penta Foundation, the film uses broad brushstrokes to look into the multidisciplinary roles of scientists and activists and the impacts on today’s child health research. As a multimedia piece, the canvases in the movie are on exhibition to draw more attention to maternal child health as championed by the Penta Foundation.