13th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2025
21-28 February; multiple venues, Chennai
Organised by MARUPAKKAM
Dream to Cure Water
Dir: Ciril Jazbec; 21:54 min; Documentary; Slovenia
Synopsis: Two remote mountain communities in Peru that depend on the water try to fight back against the effects of climate change through innovative adaptation, combining ancestral tradition with state-of-the-art science.
Peru is home to 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers, but 40% of their surface area has disappeared in the last fifty years alone.
The glaciers are a crucial water source in Peru. People are forced to adapt as they disappear.
According to Peru's Natural Institute of Natural Resources, all of the country's 200 glaciers are under threat. It is feared that all of them will be gone soon.
In the Andes, due to glacier melt, rocks are exposed to the air for the first time in thousands of years. The glacial meltwater now carries acid-heavy metal minerals into the rivers. And from the rivers, to the crops and drinking water for livestock and for people.
We Saw Fire
Dir: Santiago D. Risco; 48:00 min; Documentary; Spain
Synopsis: Vitória and her children were forced to flee after their village was violently attacked. They reunite with her son Momade and his family in a camp for displaced people in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique. The little they had was left behind in the flight. Through perseverance, song and love they try to overcome the consequences of years of conflict, psicological trauma and harsh living conditions. Now they have to build a new home together.
Tanya. Summer. Winter.
Dir: Aleksandr Avilov; 01:21:00 min; Documentary; Russian Federation
Synopsis: Tatyana Seminyako learned the language of forest and the philosophy of hunting before she learned how to read and write. From time immemorial, the ancestors of Tatyana and her husband lived on these lands fishing and hunting. When Tanya was very young, she was raised by her grandparents -– the Khanty. She taught her everything. After all, in the forest you do everything yourself. You eat what you caught; you wear what you sewed; you live in what you built. Tanya, her husband and children are Khanty. The Khanty are a small indigenous Finno-Ugric people living in the north of Western Siberia. Population 31,500 people. Documentary film about the life of Tanya and her family.
ECHOES OF DEPARTURE
Dir: Miku Nishihara; 23:05 min; Documentary; Japan
Synopsis: Echoes of Departure was created by students in the Faculty of Sociology, Otemon Gakuin University. Ibaraki City, the location of the university, is undergoing great changes in preparation for the Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai World’s Fair. Previously, the front of Ibaraki station underwent development in preparation for the Japan World Exposition 1970, also held in Osaka. In the same year, shopping complex Socio was constructed in front of the station, followed by the Ibaraki Welfare Culture Center (Oak Theater) in 1981. The city prospered, businesses flocked to it, residential areas underwent numerous cycles of regeneration, and the urban landscape was transformed. In 2024, the Welfare Culture Center closed its doors, soon to be followed by Socio, due to be demolished in 2025.
21-28 February; multiple venues, Chennai
Organised by MARUPAKKAM
Category : International Documentary
Dream to Cure Water
Dir: Ciril Jazbec; 21:54 min; Documentary; Slovenia
Synopsis: Two remote mountain communities in Peru that depend on the water try to fight back against the effects of climate change through innovative adaptation, combining ancestral tradition with state-of-the-art science.
Peru is home to 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers, but 40% of their surface area has disappeared in the last fifty years alone.
The glaciers are a crucial water source in Peru. People are forced to adapt as they disappear.
According to Peru's Natural Institute of Natural Resources, all of the country's 200 glaciers are under threat. It is feared that all of them will be gone soon.
In the Andes, due to glacier melt, rocks are exposed to the air for the first time in thousands of years. The glacial meltwater now carries acid-heavy metal minerals into the rivers. And from the rivers, to the crops and drinking water for livestock and for people.
We Saw Fire
Dir: Santiago D. Risco; 48:00 min; Documentary; Spain
Synopsis: Vitória and her children were forced to flee after their village was violently attacked. They reunite with her son Momade and his family in a camp for displaced people in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique. The little they had was left behind in the flight. Through perseverance, song and love they try to overcome the consequences of years of conflict, psicological trauma and harsh living conditions. Now they have to build a new home together.
Tanya. Summer. Winter.
Dir: Aleksandr Avilov; 01:21:00 min; Documentary; Russian Federation
Synopsis: Tatyana Seminyako learned the language of forest and the philosophy of hunting before she learned how to read and write. From time immemorial, the ancestors of Tatyana and her husband lived on these lands fishing and hunting. When Tanya was very young, she was raised by her grandparents -– the Khanty. She taught her everything. After all, in the forest you do everything yourself. You eat what you caught; you wear what you sewed; you live in what you built. Tanya, her husband and children are Khanty. The Khanty are a small indigenous Finno-Ugric people living in the north of Western Siberia. Population 31,500 people. Documentary film about the life of Tanya and her family.
ECHOES OF DEPARTURE
Dir: Miku Nishihara; 23:05 min; Documentary; Japan
Synopsis: Echoes of Departure was created by students in the Faculty of Sociology, Otemon Gakuin University. Ibaraki City, the location of the university, is undergoing great changes in preparation for the Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai World’s Fair. Previously, the front of Ibaraki station underwent development in preparation for the Japan World Exposition 1970, also held in Osaka. In the same year, shopping complex Socio was constructed in front of the station, followed by the Ibaraki Welfare Culture Center (Oak Theater) in 1981. The city prospered, businesses flocked to it, residential areas underwent numerous cycles of regeneration, and the urban landscape was transformed. In 2024, the Welfare Culture Center closed its doors, soon to be followed by Socio, due to be demolished in 2025.
Meanwhile, Onikuru, a new multi-purpose civic facility designed by architect Toyo Ito, has been opened. Against the backdrop of such change, a university class conducted interviews with local residents and city officials, including the deputy mayor, who candidly recounted their memories relating to their lives in the city. In this documentary film, the student narrator draws from these interviews and other fieldwork to poignantly transpose her own emotional journey upon the changing landscape of the city.
LA LIXEIRA - the invisibles' dignity
Dir: GUIDO GALANTE, ANTONIO NOTARANGELO; 12:00 min; Documentary; Italy, Mozambique
Synopsis: Maputo, the capital city of Mozabimque, has one or may be two million inhabitants. A few neighborhoods have houses or more precisely brick shacks, some paved roads, mostly a wide range of huts without basic sanitation services, where day by day men, women and children scrape food together in slow and quiet despair-the only chance they have to survive.
In Maputo, not exactly in the city centre or even on the outskirts, there is an area called the dump district, La Lixeira. The dump is a metaphysical scenario, metaphor of our world, so aseptically modern, a kind of reversed utopia of our fate.
About 700 families dig their way through these new mines of modernism. La lixeira is the place where the tangible and the intangible waste, the human waste, combine together in a visual short circuit. Man himself is reduced to being rubbish. It is a paradigm of the economical, social and existential topographies of our Earth. A sort of peaceful camouflage of despair, a cruel inhumane condition lived by its protagonists with the levity, fatality and irony which are the features of these almost unworldly people.
Dindigul Diaries
Dir: Annette Danto; 01:07:41 min; Documentary; United States
Synopsis: Shot over a twenty-three year period, Dindigul Diaries is a feature length documentary telling the stories of four women living in the Dindigul region of Southern India.
Dindigul Diaries is about the dignity of labor and the resilience of working women. It addresses human rights topics of girls education, dowry, and cultural restrictions and expectations of females around the world.
PATROL
Dir: Camilo de Castro, Brad Allgood; 01:20:00 min; Documentary; Nicaragua
Synopsis: An emerging crisis in one of the last remaining rainforests in Central America ignites a heroic mission in PATROL. When illegal cattle ranchers decimate large swaths of rainforest, indigenous rangers join forces with an American conservationist and undercover journalists to expose the dark world of conflict beef.
Price of Salvation
Dir: Nikas Kotich; 01:03:00 min; Documentary; Russian Federation
Synopsis: The film tells the story of three persons, whose circumstances forced them to drastically change their usual way of life.
Svetlana went on vacation to visit her parents and never came back. She was diagnosed with a serious illness. Svetlana makes a firm decision to heal by becoming a writer.
Alexey is a yogi in the Sikh tradition, a psychologist, and a family man. He is a former frontman of the popular Moscow emo-rock band called “My Favorite Games”. He was an addict in the past. Every day, he fights the urge for chemical pleasure for the sake of his family’s well-being.
Elena found herself in a state of clinical depression. Medication and volunteer work brought back her interest in life. Is life on pills what Elena was looking for?
In the search for a stable ground, each one of the protagonists has to pay a certain price.
The city moves
Dir: Alfonso Palazón: 19:00 min; Documentary; Spain
Synopsis: We live in timeless cities that are transformed into modern cities that always evoke cities of the past. The buildings, the houses, the people are still there.
We need to continually rediscover the meaning of the city.
The city is many things: memories, desires, sharing, exchanges, places of hope... Cities grow with us like a love poem.
Life continues to breathe and we move forward.
Graciela
Dir: Laura Bermúdez; 19:00 min; Documentary; Honduras
Synopsis: Through a poetic journey into her granddaughter's memory, we discover the story of Graciela Bográn, the first woman in the history of Honduras to become part of a government cabinet.
Killing the Travellers
Dir: Baazir Kaleelur Rahman; 24:00 min; Documentary; United Kingdom
Synopsis: "Killing the Travellers" is a documentary revealing the abductions of travellers on roads to and from Kattankudy during the midst of the civil war in Sri Lanka.
In 1990, the LTTE fought against the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state. Muslims residing in the northeast were tragically caught in the crossfire, enduring immense and unjust suffering. During this tumultuous era, hundreds of innocent travellers fell victim to abductions along the routes to and from Kattankudy. This documentary unfolds the story of the survivors and those who never returned home.
WHO AM I?
Dir: Ryan Kim; 37:39 min; Documentary; Korea, Republic of
I Told You So
Dir: Malak AlSayyad; 26:21 min; Documentary; Egypt
Synopsis: After years of debilitating period pain and unexplained symptoms, Malak finally gets a diagnosis: she has endometriosis, a chronic inflammatory disease that affects 1 in every 10 women and people who menstruate worldwide. Despite being so prevalent, the disease has no known cause, no cure, and is not taken seriously, even by her own mother.
In I Told You So Malak grapples with a tumultuous relationship with her pain, her body and her dreams for the future. On this journey of discovery mired by self-doubt and shame, she enters the world of “Endo Warriors,” patients who have lost their patience, in hopes that she can finally come to terms with the question: “How do I live with this?”
Her Name was Sita
Dir: Heshani H Sothiraj Eddleston; 24:00 min; Documentary; United Kingdom
Synopsis: Her Name Was Sita is a short documentary exploring the concept of a virtuous woman and how shame and honour can lead to self-harm and suicide in Nepal.
Who is a good woman? A young Nepali woman asks this question to herself, school children, university students, sociologists, anthropologists, and medical doctors. Her exploration leads her to understand that in some situations, female suicide is believed to be a response to socially accepted oppression and abuse, which women are subjected to in their families and communities. She discovers that, in low and middle-income countries particularly, suicide is not always a mental health problem. It is a layered issue that can overlap between mental distress caused by stressful situations, conflict, grief, and mental health problems.
In Nepal, suicide is the single leading cause of death among women of reproductive age. It is a serious but neglected public health problem. Research shows that adolescents, youths, and females are the most vulnerable population to die by suicide.
Her Name Was Sita is dedicated to a 16-year-old girl who died trying to prove she was worthy of love.
Hive No. 10
Dir: Anna Anat Gofman Banai; 16:35 min; Documentary; Israel
Synopsis: The wish of her son to raise bees forces the director to deal with her own fragile memories from her childhood.
Out of sight, by the forest
Dir: Nadina Dobrowolska; 01:15:00 min; Documentary; Poland
Synopsis: "Out of sight, by the forest" , directed by Nadina Dobrowolska, is a poignant documentary exposing the brutal reality of Polish fur farms. With extraordinary sensitivity, the filmmakers present the story of three activists - Aleks, Angelika and Bogna - who for years have tirelessly documented the suffering of animals raised for fur. Their heroic struggle against the powerful fur lobby and heartless bureaucracy creates a narrative full of tension and moral challenges.
The film chronicles the unseen actions of the investigators, who have spent a decade exposing the scale of injustice against animals. Together with the activists, we look into the dark recesses of the farms, where foxes, mink and raccoons suffer in cramped cages. The documentary is non-violent, but its minimalist approach to portraying suffering heightens the dramatic overtones, forcing the viewer to reflect on consumer choices and animal rights.
The camera accompanies the activists in their daily struggles, doing justice to their sacrifice and determination. The film avoids easy moralising, instead raising questions about the limits of human responsibility and ethics.
"Out of sight, by the forest" is a call for greater awareness and empathy towards beings who cannot fight for their rights on their own. Nadina Dobrowolska's debut film thus becomes not only an indictment, but also an inspiration for action.
Africa has the world's highest rate of adolescent pregnancy, a factor that affects the health, education, and earning potential of millions of African girls.
The Taste of Honey (2024) Full Version
Dir: Mohammad Rakibul Hasan, Fabeha Monir; 15:00 min; Documentary; Bangladesh
Synopsis: A resilient tiger widow from the world’s largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans (Bangladesh), Shorbanu Khatun, grapples with the relentless impacts of climate change, struggling to provide for her children while preserving the endangered traditions of honey and Gol leaf collecting amidst a world of increasing storms, salinity, and societal ostracism.
Dir: Mohammad Rakibul Hasan, Fabeha Monir; 15:00 min; Documentary; Bangladesh
Synopsis: A resilient tiger widow from the world’s largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans (Bangladesh), Shorbanu Khatun, grapples with the relentless impacts of climate change, struggling to provide for her children while preserving the endangered traditions of honey and Gol leaf collecting amidst a world of increasing storms, salinity, and societal ostracism.
LA LIXEIRA - the invisibles' dignity
Dir: GUIDO GALANTE, ANTONIO NOTARANGELO; 12:00 min; Documentary; Italy, Mozambique
Synopsis: Maputo, the capital city of Mozabimque, has one or may be two million inhabitants. A few neighborhoods have houses or more precisely brick shacks, some paved roads, mostly a wide range of huts without basic sanitation services, where day by day men, women and children scrape food together in slow and quiet despair-the only chance they have to survive.
In Maputo, not exactly in the city centre or even on the outskirts, there is an area called the dump district, La Lixeira. The dump is a metaphysical scenario, metaphor of our world, so aseptically modern, a kind of reversed utopia of our fate.
About 700 families dig their way through these new mines of modernism. La lixeira is the place where the tangible and the intangible waste, the human waste, combine together in a visual short circuit. Man himself is reduced to being rubbish. It is a paradigm of the economical, social and existential topographies of our Earth. A sort of peaceful camouflage of despair, a cruel inhumane condition lived by its protagonists with the levity, fatality and irony which are the features of these almost unworldly people.
Dindigul Diaries
Dir: Annette Danto; 01:07:41 min; Documentary; United States
Synopsis: Shot over a twenty-three year period, Dindigul Diaries is a feature length documentary telling the stories of four women living in the Dindigul region of Southern India.
Dindigul Diaries is about the dignity of labor and the resilience of working women. It addresses human rights topics of girls education, dowry, and cultural restrictions and expectations of females around the world.
PATROL
Dir: Camilo de Castro, Brad Allgood; 01:20:00 min; Documentary; Nicaragua
Synopsis: An emerging crisis in one of the last remaining rainforests in Central America ignites a heroic mission in PATROL. When illegal cattle ranchers decimate large swaths of rainforest, indigenous rangers join forces with an American conservationist and undercover journalists to expose the dark world of conflict beef.
Price of Salvation
Dir: Nikas Kotich; 01:03:00 min; Documentary; Russian Federation
Synopsis: The film tells the story of three persons, whose circumstances forced them to drastically change their usual way of life.
Svetlana went on vacation to visit her parents and never came back. She was diagnosed with a serious illness. Svetlana makes a firm decision to heal by becoming a writer.
Alexey is a yogi in the Sikh tradition, a psychologist, and a family man. He is a former frontman of the popular Moscow emo-rock band called “My Favorite Games”. He was an addict in the past. Every day, he fights the urge for chemical pleasure for the sake of his family’s well-being.
Elena found herself in a state of clinical depression. Medication and volunteer work brought back her interest in life. Is life on pills what Elena was looking for?
In the search for a stable ground, each one of the protagonists has to pay a certain price.
The city moves
Dir: Alfonso Palazón: 19:00 min; Documentary; Spain
Synopsis: We live in timeless cities that are transformed into modern cities that always evoke cities of the past. The buildings, the houses, the people are still there.
We need to continually rediscover the meaning of the city.
The city is many things: memories, desires, sharing, exchanges, places of hope... Cities grow with us like a love poem.
Life continues to breathe and we move forward.
Graciela
Dir: Laura Bermúdez; 19:00 min; Documentary; Honduras
Synopsis: Through a poetic journey into her granddaughter's memory, we discover the story of Graciela Bográn, the first woman in the history of Honduras to become part of a government cabinet.
Killing the Travellers
Dir: Baazir Kaleelur Rahman; 24:00 min; Documentary; United Kingdom
Synopsis: "Killing the Travellers" is a documentary revealing the abductions of travellers on roads to and from Kattankudy during the midst of the civil war in Sri Lanka.
In 1990, the LTTE fought against the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state. Muslims residing in the northeast were tragically caught in the crossfire, enduring immense and unjust suffering. During this tumultuous era, hundreds of innocent travellers fell victim to abductions along the routes to and from Kattankudy. This documentary unfolds the story of the survivors and those who never returned home.
WHO AM I?
Dir: Ryan Kim; 37:39 min; Documentary; Korea, Republic of
I Told You So
Dir: Malak AlSayyad; 26:21 min; Documentary; Egypt
Synopsis: After years of debilitating period pain and unexplained symptoms, Malak finally gets a diagnosis: she has endometriosis, a chronic inflammatory disease that affects 1 in every 10 women and people who menstruate worldwide. Despite being so prevalent, the disease has no known cause, no cure, and is not taken seriously, even by her own mother.
In I Told You So Malak grapples with a tumultuous relationship with her pain, her body and her dreams for the future. On this journey of discovery mired by self-doubt and shame, she enters the world of “Endo Warriors,” patients who have lost their patience, in hopes that she can finally come to terms with the question: “How do I live with this?”
Her Name was Sita
Dir: Heshani H Sothiraj Eddleston; 24:00 min; Documentary; United Kingdom
Synopsis: Her Name Was Sita is a short documentary exploring the concept of a virtuous woman and how shame and honour can lead to self-harm and suicide in Nepal.
Who is a good woman? A young Nepali woman asks this question to herself, school children, university students, sociologists, anthropologists, and medical doctors. Her exploration leads her to understand that in some situations, female suicide is believed to be a response to socially accepted oppression and abuse, which women are subjected to in their families and communities. She discovers that, in low and middle-income countries particularly, suicide is not always a mental health problem. It is a layered issue that can overlap between mental distress caused by stressful situations, conflict, grief, and mental health problems.
In Nepal, suicide is the single leading cause of death among women of reproductive age. It is a serious but neglected public health problem. Research shows that adolescents, youths, and females are the most vulnerable population to die by suicide.
Her Name Was Sita is dedicated to a 16-year-old girl who died trying to prove she was worthy of love.
Hive No. 10
Dir: Anna Anat Gofman Banai; 16:35 min; Documentary; Israel
Synopsis: The wish of her son to raise bees forces the director to deal with her own fragile memories from her childhood.
Out of sight, by the forest
Dir: Nadina Dobrowolska; 01:15:00 min; Documentary; Poland
Synopsis: "Out of sight, by the forest" , directed by Nadina Dobrowolska, is a poignant documentary exposing the brutal reality of Polish fur farms. With extraordinary sensitivity, the filmmakers present the story of three activists - Aleks, Angelika and Bogna - who for years have tirelessly documented the suffering of animals raised for fur. Their heroic struggle against the powerful fur lobby and heartless bureaucracy creates a narrative full of tension and moral challenges.
The film chronicles the unseen actions of the investigators, who have spent a decade exposing the scale of injustice against animals. Together with the activists, we look into the dark recesses of the farms, where foxes, mink and raccoons suffer in cramped cages. The documentary is non-violent, but its minimalist approach to portraying suffering heightens the dramatic overtones, forcing the viewer to reflect on consumer choices and animal rights.
The camera accompanies the activists in their daily struggles, doing justice to their sacrifice and determination. The film avoids easy moralising, instead raising questions about the limits of human responsibility and ethics.
"Out of sight, by the forest" is a call for greater awareness and empathy towards beings who cannot fight for their rights on their own. Nadina Dobrowolska's debut film thus becomes not only an indictment, but also an inspiration for action.
1948 What We Knew
Dir: Jill Daniels; 15:00 min; Documentary; United Kingdom
Synopsis: An autobiographical documentary filmed on a smartphone in London at the start of the Israeli state's murderous attack on Gaza, three Jewish women of European heritage - Ruth, Gail and me, all born in 1948, the same year as the Israeli state - discuss the (fairy) stories of empty deserts and false dreams of Jewish salvation we heard about Israel growing up. 1948 What We Knew paints a compelling portrait of contested Jewish identity.
Part of Life
Dir: Ezequiel Romero; 19:20 min; Documentary; Spain
Synopsis: A group of working class colleagues decide to form a cooperative in 80s Spain to manufacture cork caps and capsules in Jerez, home of Sherry wine. 38 years later the remaining partners are about to retire and they reflect on the adventure of a lifetime and what it meant to be an entrepreneur then vs today. This part of their lives is over and a new one begins.
GIRLS: WOMEN TOO EARLY
Dir: Paolo Patruno; 13:29 min; Documentary; Cameroon
Synopsis: Christine, 17-years-old, got married when she was 15, lost her first child when she was 16, and she is now seven months pregnant. Rose, 16-years-old, is currently breastfeeding first child of five months. Christine dropped out of school in secondary two and Rose dropped out at the end of primary six, both due to a lack of financial availability from their families. Christine and Rose live in a very remote and rural area in the tropical highland forest in Cameroon, making their living through farming cocoa. They represent thousands of teenage mothers in Cameroon.
Dir: Jill Daniels; 15:00 min; Documentary; United Kingdom
Synopsis: An autobiographical documentary filmed on a smartphone in London at the start of the Israeli state's murderous attack on Gaza, three Jewish women of European heritage - Ruth, Gail and me, all born in 1948, the same year as the Israeli state - discuss the (fairy) stories of empty deserts and false dreams of Jewish salvation we heard about Israel growing up. 1948 What We Knew paints a compelling portrait of contested Jewish identity.
Part of Life
Dir: Ezequiel Romero; 19:20 min; Documentary; Spain
Synopsis: A group of working class colleagues decide to form a cooperative in 80s Spain to manufacture cork caps and capsules in Jerez, home of Sherry wine. 38 years later the remaining partners are about to retire and they reflect on the adventure of a lifetime and what it meant to be an entrepreneur then vs today. This part of their lives is over and a new one begins.
GIRLS: WOMEN TOO EARLY
Dir: Paolo Patruno; 13:29 min; Documentary; Cameroon
Synopsis: Christine, 17-years-old, got married when she was 15, lost her first child when she was 16, and she is now seven months pregnant. Rose, 16-years-old, is currently breastfeeding first child of five months. Christine dropped out of school in secondary two and Rose dropped out at the end of primary six, both due to a lack of financial availability from their families. Christine and Rose live in a very remote and rural area in the tropical highland forest in Cameroon, making their living through farming cocoa. They represent thousands of teenage mothers in Cameroon.
Africa has the world's highest rate of adolescent pregnancy, a factor that affects the health, education, and earning potential of millions of African girls.
Comments
Post a Comment