Full Programme

A foremost Czech documentarist with a unique authorial vision challenges us once and for all to stop perceiving autism as a medical diagnosis and try to understand it as a fascinating way of thinking that’s often maddeningly difficult to decipher. Because who’s to determine what’s normal – living in a constant rush while disregarding the absurdity of modern life, or wistfully seeking order, peace and tranquility in the world?

This is an autism-friendly screening.

This urgent and moving documentary focuses on the struggle of Yi Jie, a young girl who lives with her family in a plastic-sorting town in China where recycled waste from Europe, the United States and other parts of Asia winds up. China is the world’s largest importer of plastic waste. Throughout the country, there are nearly 30 towns engaged in processing this refuse in highly toxic environments. This highly intimate portrait reveals the human and environmental costs of living and working in these artificial, and truly plastic, landscapes.

Across walls, fences, and alleys, rats not only expose our boundaries of separation but make homes in them. A portrait of Baltimore as a laboratory for both rodent and human populations alike, Rat Film is an acerbic, seductive and hugely inventive documentary that explodes the American city’s ‘rat problem’ into a powerful and poetic tale of urban, social and racial inequalities. Combining elements including academic research, tender encounters with eccentric characters, Google Maps hacks, a Dan Deacon soundtrack, the tactics of rat hunters and the architectural adaptations of rat keepers, Rat Film tells a devastating tale of a city’s means of keeping its ‘undesirable’ elements in order.

Why is Mr W. Laughing? is a portrait of three members of an atelier community of artists with different disabilities. Questioning the usual asymmetry of inclusion (meaning that often there is just a monologue about and not a dialogue with the persons concerned), the film is a cinematic experiment that politicizes boundary-practices in its form and content: Rather than making a film about inclusion, the film itself was produced inclusively. The juxtaposition of life and art doesn’t apply for the three who are artists in order to be citizens. Art for them is not a breakaway dream from normality, like for most neurotypical artists, but the quintessence of bourgeois work that enables them to participate in society and to solidarize.

We will be joined after the screening for a Q&A with director Jana Papenbroock.

In Siberia, Russia, Alexander Kuznetsov follows Yulia and Katia, who went from an orphanage to a neuropsychiatric institution. Deprived of freedom, work and family, they had no say in it and getting those fundamental rights back is a long and painful bureaucratic process. We’ll Be Alright is their path to freedom.

This screening will be followed by a panel discussion on the issues raised, chaired by Richard Warden of Mental Health Foundation and including Christine-Koulla Burke of Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities.

Presented in collaboration with Mental Health Foundation (UK)