Astra Film Festival in Sibiu, one of the most important documentary film festivals in the country, has recently kicked off its 28th edition. So naturally, we’ve browsed through their program and picked four films, screening offline or online, that we recommend not to miss out on, from aesthetic experiments to impressive pieces of autobiographical cinema. This year’s focus is on films thematically related to climate collapse, but below you can find a more diverse inventory, gathered from three sections of the festival (Romania, Emerging Voices of Documentary, Central and Eastern Europe).

• Man and a Camera (dir. Guido Hendrikx) – A pastiche of Vertov’s Kino-Eye

A guy roams the Dutch hinterlands with a camera in his hand; he captures random moments such as children getting on the swings, adults sweeping their alleys. He doesn’t have an agenda, that’s clear, he goes with the flow and succumbs to whatever reality has to offer at the moment. Moreover, he doesn’t interact with anyone, although those who don’t want to be filmed react in all sorts of ways (they either threaten him or just freeze in front of the camera, shout or knock his camera). The amateur filmmaker remains upright as if he himself were the eye that records reality; as if, as long as he operates the camera, he becomes one with the device, driven by the obsession with penetrating into reality, into the essences of things (from pedestrian structures to plants and, ultimately, people’s homes). Hendrikx plays ostentatiously enough for the cinephile to make a connection with Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera – only that at some point, he leaves behind the Vertov pastiche, and he rather becomes interested in knocking on people’s doors and watching their reactions. At first, it’s exasperating, because people never invite him inside, but the experiment starts to work as it is, without being necessary for Hendrikx to use his words or his own humanity – people begin to trust the camera, they get used to it as if it were always there. In many cases, Hendrikx stays over, he ends up partially living in their houses, he stays with the elders until they fall asleep on the couch, he goes to the bedroom, like in an ad-hoc reality show. The peak of absurdity lies in exactly that; at one point, a man leaves the stranger alone in the house, because he has to take his son to kindergarten. Hendrikx stays put, watches him leave the yard, closing the gate, getting on the bike, and then, weary, he turns off the camera, meaning that there is nothing left to look at.

Man and a Camera is screening at the Astra Film Festival on the 8th and 10th of September and can be watched online on the festival platform between September 11-19.

• For Your Comfort and Safety (dir. Frédéric Mainçon) – How do you imagine a museum guard fills their time?

This fabulous documentary follows the security guards working at Palais de Tokyo, the prestigious modern art center in Paris. They are all invisible immigrants who have their own unique take on the art on display – it’s like I’m watching a movie by Frederick Wiseman. The guards sometimes sit for months looking at the exhibited works and silently observe things imperceptible to visitors; they are art graduates and they all watch over the museum as if it’s their own home. Frédéric Mainçon records their coherent speeches on the differences between Western and African art, as well as the bearing of the ordinary white Parisian, unusual encounters, and the communication boundaries that are set between them and the visitors. The film also highlights several toxic stereotypes that many of us may have had; they are aware they are seen as the Other: “why are all the guards black and the office workers white in a museum? (…) a lady once told me: I have never seen such a black man; he is so black that he seems blue”. Mainçon ruminates on the ways characters spend their time (they’re mostly static, sometimes they do nothing but look around for 12 hours), as well as on their relationship with art. For example, my favorite piece is related to a two-minute happening – a young lady quickly fixes herself in a mirror and rushes on the stairs to water the flowers; there, she briefly runs into a man, and all they say to each other is bonjour. The installation repeats itself over and over, but it always ends at that point – as he keeps looking at it, our guard notices the absurdity of these characters who can’t seem to say to each other more, no matter how much they want to, although it’s clear the attraction is mutual.

The film can be seen at the festival on September 11, as well as online between September 12-19.

• My Uncle Tudor (dir. Olga Lucovnicova) – The victim-aggressor confrontation

This heartfelt twenty-minute documentary is an autobiographical gem about trauma and suffering: director Olga Lucovnicova returns to her childhood home, where she captures various moments such as her family at the table, looking at dusty photos, studying spider webs, and window curtains dancing in the wind. Despite the sensation of time standing still, of a wonderland with carpets hanging on the wall, Olga rarely appears within the frame, but when she does, she shows a slight sadness and remorse. She watches her uncle Tudor from a distance, and the confrontation with him is sudden and shocking. When she was little, he abused her several times, but he mumbles that he doesn’t remember, that it was all just a game. The confessions and discussions between them, caught in voice-over, are shocking – even if Lucovnicova doesn’t offer more space to the discussion, My Uncle Tudor is powerful enough to give an incentive in terms of speaking up and not leaving things unsaid anymore – and is perhaps one of the few films in which the victim ends up directly confronting her aggressor.

My Uncle Tudor can be watched on the 9th and 12th of September, during the festival, as well as between September 13-19 on the online platform.

• Nun of Your Business (dir. Ivana Marinić Kragić) – Romance starring nuns 

Two former nuns recount their experiences at the monastery (the sexual and psychological abuse within the institution, the sleepless nights out of fear), but also the magical encounter that paved the way for their love story – in every generation, at least one of the nuns is a lesbian, they say. By the sound of the title, I was expecting a bombastic, shocking, scandalous film. But Nun of Your Business is far from it, and director Ivana Marinić Kragić doesn’t push on the parts that have a potential for sensational. Instead, she prefers to keep a certain distance and resorts to a structure that combines docu-drama with the aesthetics of a slideshow, thus reminding of La jetée (dir. Chris Marker, 1962). Despite the fact that docu-drama is rather a sidelined genre, the film’s slideshow structure breaks the illusion of spatio-temporal continuity given by reenactments, making it seem incomplete, insufficient – hence the lack of dialogues; for example, the voice-over narrated by the two characters fills these gaps, leaving just a few ambiences here and there to build on the realism of the story.

Nun of Your Business can be seen at the Astra Film Festival on September 10 and will be available online between September 11-19.

Georgiana Mușat

Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.