One World Romania is currently taking place physically at venues throughout Bucharest (June 11-20) before heading online (June 21-27).

The 14th edition of the Human Rights focused documentary festival features over 60 short and feature films from around the world, including several national premieres. Additionally, the 2021 edition’s wider program centers around the celebration, presentation, and struggles of women around the world. As part of this theme, One World Romania will bring a retrospective of Ulrike Ottinger, focus sections on Delphine Seyrig and the Simone de Beauvoir Center, films across its program focusing on “Women on the Verge of Gender Equality”.

In this month’s special edition of Dok.cetera, we look at five documentaries screening at One World Romania that you should not miss. Of course, there are many films not featured here that are worthy of your time (Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno, Diane Sara Bouzgarrou and Thomas Jenkoe’s The Last Hillbilly, and Nuria Giménez Lorang’s My Mexican Bretzel, amongst them), so make sure you catch as many as you can. It’s the first physical festival happening in Bucharest in quite some time, so what better way to celebrate than with the year’s best non-fiction cinema!

Corporate Accountability (dir. Jonathan Perel) – Argentina
From 1976 to 1983, a military dictatorship ruled over Argentina. This volatile period has been the focus of Jonathan Perel’s entire filmography as a documentary filmmaker.

Perel’s latest documentary, Corporate Accountability, continues his forensic explorations into the consequences and realities of that near-decade timeframe. This time his focus shifts from the small towns of Toponímia (2015) to the omnipresent local and multinational corporations complicit in the junta’s crimes against humanity. Many of these companies continue to exist. They tend to be thriving multinationals – car companies Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and Fiat amongst them. Of course, with such subject matter being detrimental to the all-important “brand identity”, Perel was never once invited inside any. Instead, he films each’s brutal, bleak factory infrastructure through his car’s windshield, applying voice-over descriptions of their atrocities. These descriptions are ripped straight from an official publication that was “adapted” by Perel into the film. That publication, Responsabilidad empresarial en delitos de lesa humanidad. Represión a trabajadores durante el terrorismo de Estado (“Corporate accountability in crimes against humanity: Repression of workers during state terrorism”), describes how these companies were complicit and responsible in the disappearance of many of their workers (mainly union officials) under order from the government. To this day, despite “investigations”, there has been no official recognition from these companies on their alleged domestic terroristic activity, let alone an acceptance of responsibility.

Corporate Accountability is a slow-burn meditation that lies at the intersection of neoliberalism, militarism, and totalitarianism. With its somber tone and billowing smokestacks, we come to (further) realize how much these traditional “isms” are intricately intertwined. Though a snapshot of an era, international corporate structures continue to do the bidding of the respective powers-that-be, whether it be the mighty shareholder, the megalomaniacal technocrat at the helm, or the free market-loving elites who run the countries. From Unilever’s desecration of resources and regions in Africa to Disney’s blind eye turning away from Uyghur genocide in China to the everyday worker exploitation that Capitalism builds itself on, the separation of power between business and government remains as thin as a mosquito’s wings.

Festivals: Berlinale, Cinéma du réel, Dokufest, IDFA, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Viennale

Paris Calligrammes (dir. Ulrike Ottinger) – Germany, France
The latest from One World Romania’s retrospective recipient Ulrike Ottinger, Paris Calligrammes is the German avant-garde filmmaker’s essay on the city she called home through the 1960s.

In Paris Calligrammes, Ottinger’s memories, film clips, and archive footage mix to capture the artistically explosive environment in Paris between 1962 and 1969. During those years, a young Ottinger engages with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Johnny Friedlaender, and more while fully immersed in Parisian bohemia. The title itself is taken from the seminal intellectual location for Ottinger in Paris, the Librairie Calligrammes, where most of its literary treasures had been owned by German-Jewish refugees and left behind in Paris en route fleeing the Nazis.

It is not all idealistic in 60s Paris, of course. Throughout her time (and the film’s), Ottinger remains highly critical of France’s social injustice, income inequality, and colonial legacies. To this day, she can find traces of French colonialism throughout the city as she revisits this seminal location in her creative and personal development some 50 years later. These days, as the city has changed into another example of highly gentrified homogeny (itself a version of neo-colonialism), she wonders if there is still creative energy hiding in its nooks and corners.

Festivals: Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Doclisboa, Moscow International Film Festival

Petit Samedi (dir. Paloma Sermon-Daï) – Belgium
Paloma Sermon-Daï’s Berlinale premiered documentary is a cinematic look at the struggles of addiction. Both intimate and universal, it is a picture of dependence in all its forms. Whether it be substance, family, individual, or social, these dependencies are in all of us.

Gardener Damien Samedi has suffered from heroin addiction for 20 years. Hailing from the rural Belgian village, his ongoing attempts at sobriety continue to strain the close relationship he holds with his mother. This relationship, though volatile, is not fragile. This intrinsically human bond is where the complexities of each manifest together with the maternal dynamics between mother and son. Their “little Sundays” are spent together in frequently tense conversations bordering on negotiations as the picture of addiction emerges. As the reasons behind addiction tend to do, this film paints a different view than the traditional drug user. There is an intimacy that cannot be ignored in Petit Samedi. It provides a tender and restrained portrait of a man many in society would write off for his struggles.

Addiction is also a topic that too few documentaries cover, at least concerning the en vogue topics of social injustice and conflict that permeate the industry. Addiction is, however, one of the defining characteristics of a globalized society where little is valued beyond the material. It is something that no region, social class, gender, race, or religion can escape from. It is a sickness with no cure but empathy, patience, and grit.

Festivals: Berlinale, DocuDays UA, DocAviv

The Earth is Blue as an Orange (dir. Iryna Tsilyk) – Ukraine, Lithuania
One of the most awarded documentaries of the past year, Iryna Tsilyk’s The Earth is Blue as an Orange, has made the festival rounds everywhere from Sundance (winning its World Cinema Documentary Directing Award) to Berlinale.

The Earth is Blue as an Orange is an emotional venture into the heart of a war zone; how a single mother and her four children cope with its destruction and despair. That war zone is Eastern Ukraine, where local forces are engaged in fierce fighting against a Russian aggressor. The film, however, is not your typical life-inside-the-war documentary. In fact, its most powerful moments come when the conflict hovers over its narrative, just out of frame. The film is instead a passionate love letter to the power of cinema and the creative process, as it is filmmaking that ultimately keeps this family together and sane. In their attempts to create a narrative work of their wartime experience, we come to realize this is more than just a way to pass the time; but it is a ticket to life itself. This is particularly true for Mira, the eldest sibling, and director, whose sole wish is to attend film school in Kyiv. As the family develops and shoots their scenes, Tsilyk, in turn, captures the action in cinema vérité, unfolding the necessity of art as an act of survival.

The Earth is Blue as an Orange is a masterfully shot and directed documentary that gently juggles both fiction and reality, creativity and trauma, in ways both personal and grandiose. It shows how the very act of creation can be both a bonding experience and a lifeline when facing the precariousness of life.

Festivals: Berlinale, CPH:DOX, DocuDays UA, Dokufest, Hot Docs, Millennium Docs Against Gravity, Sundance

There Will Be No More Night (dir. Eléonore Weber) – France
Il n’y aura plus de nuit / There will be no more night is more a searing compilation of death than a narrative film. Eléonore Weber’s documentary is a grainy, black-and-white vision of state-sanctioned murder, where killing occurs as casually as playing a video game.

Military helicopter pilots from the USA, France, Britain, and various other “powers” play god in the skies above today’s troubled lands – many such troubles due to these Western powers’ centuries-long geopolitical motivations. Across Afghanistan and Syria, these pilots provide no escape for their target silhouettes, justifying every bomb dropped or bullet fired in the name of “suspicious activity”. For the pilots, there is no risk. They are hundreds of meters away, somewhere in the sky, often completely out of sight. But, for those populating the unfortunate areas where resources directly point to Western profits, it is an air of terror that has been life’s reality for years. Perhaps the most famous example, included in this film, is the WikiLeaks footage of Iraqi Reuters photojournalist Saeed Chmagh’s killing. Along with several others, he was the victim of a nonchalant US-led raid during George W. Bush’s multi-year crime against humanity that was the Iraq War. The reason for Chamgh’s death – his tripod was mistaken for an RPG.

There Will Be No More Night occupies an interesting and unique space in the gamut of anti-war films. Its horror lies in the matter-of-0factness of modern war, where those in control of the technology comfortably call the shots, both literal and figurative. It is a damning indictment of the western military industrial complex and the perverse motivations of the modern soldier.

Festivals: Astra Sibiu International Film Festival, Cinéma du réel, DocuDays UA, IDFA, Ji.hlava

Steve Rickinson

"Came to Bucharest after living in Amsterdam & Brooklyn, among others, Steve is the industry editor for Modern Times Review documentary magazine.