20. UNDER|DOX 09-15 OKT 2025

Laos. Dozens of teenagers are living and studying together in Buddhist temples. A young man crosses the river every day to read a text to an elderly woman that serves as a guide for finding one’s way through the afterlife. When the woman dies, her spirit begins a sensory journey towards reincarnation in its next body. To complete the journey, you have to entrust yourself to be carried away by the sound and light.
In this conversation held on the border between life, death and meditation, Lois Patiño continues his exploration of the image as an immersive experience. The cycle of birth, death and reincarnation coincides with the experience of watching. The act of seeing and of telling stories becomes a unique visionary experience that literally leads the viewer into another dimension. – Encounters, Berlinale

At the legendary Belvedere Hotel in Cerbère on the French-Spanish border a group of young people and a director have gathered
together to put on a show, a production that is itself the subject of the play performed in front of an audience and during which the film was shot. Once again, the film and stage director Vayssié explodes the logics of cinematic recording. He stages a silent choreography of bodies, to which the spoken word is added afterwards for the film. This discrepancy between the time of the recording, the body and the spoken word is the ideal space for burlesque and poetic narrative inventions. All today’s topical subjects are grist for the mill of Vayssié and his actors – desire, the fluidity of identities, horizontality and the collective, art and politics, art and the climate catastrophe, art and… so on. What would a political community look like when measured against the yardstick of artistic creation? – Claire Lasolle, FIDMarseille

Ukraine, 1996. 5 months before the moratorium on the death penalty, two old friends, a police detective and a forensic psychiatrist, investigate a murder of their colleague.

In some respects, Sotnychenko’s ”La Palisiada” gives the ultimate answer why so many are interested in ‘90s Ukraine and so many reluctant to speak of it. It is a frustrating answer, because in many ways it tells us we’ll never know the truth. The only answer in the film is its title which is a made-up, portmanteau-word composed from pleonasm ”lapalissade” and ”La Policiada” but being neither. But the film itself is in fact both, police story and lapalissade (a term for the tautological repetition of obvious truth). – Serhii Ksaverov, Fipresci

This cheerfully humdrum rom-com presents a very homemade slice of first-lockdown life. But can its squabbling couple make it through a mysterious pandemic? Co-writers and filmmakers Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan play Kallia and Ram: young lovers
vacationing to New York just as the pandemic unfolds. They’ve already descended into petty name-calling when the travel ban prolongs their trip indefinitely, trapping them in Kallia’s uncle’s apartment.
Semi-improvised and shot on a Hi8 camcorder that Shaw and
Kamalakanthan found during their own real lockdown, its grainy VHS footage nails the frustrations of personal and creative helplessness in quarantine. – Callum McLean, IFF Rotterdam

Wang Xilin, 86, is one of China’s most important modern classical composers. The film exhibits the body and soul of a man scarred by a life of suffering, a ”man in black” who is yet still capable of deep and sincere compassion. With excerpts from his symphonies, he
revisits some of the horrifying events that still live on in his memory, as
testimony to an era that saw the dehumanization of the Chinese nation.

The only way the Chinese party can think of to punish those who think differently is to destroy their body. Destroying bodies is political punishment par excellence. This leaves psychological scars, but it’s always the body that takes the first hit. So I wanted to show the body that had endured all this. I wanted people to see clearly and explicitly what he had suffered. After all, when all is said and done, what else is left but the flesh? – Wang Bing

”Landshaft” sketches the psychogeography of a geopolitically charged landscape and its inhabitants between extractivism, war and displacement. In the form of a journey in eastern Armenia, the film follows human and non-human actors as they make their way through the landscape, from Lake Sevan to the Sotk gold mine, occupied by Azerbaijan since the Karabakh War in 2020.

”The Fuckee’s Hymn” evokes the figure of William Wilkerson, a Vietnam war veteran, a then young helicopter pilot whose decorations served to camouflage a blunder of the US army. The title is taken from one of the bawdy songs the filmmaker’s father liked to hum. But William Wilkerson is no longer there to sing, and it is his son who now recites the song in his inimitable bass voice, deep and scathing: “He stood on a steeple / And he pissed on the people / And the people couldn’t piss on him / Him. Fuck him.” The film attacks the mythification of the veteran, the decorations that turn savagery into heroism, the lethal power of stories that twist the truth of wars and transform them into an inexpiable burden. All that remains for this voice is to wander around woods visited by war images brought home and to disarm these
stories with the heart and with anger. – Antoine Thirion, Cinéma du Réel

“The bigger the fuck-up, the bigger the medal.” – Travis Wilkerson

In an impressive and strikingly impersonal manner, actors Christoph Bach and Cornelius Obonya will talk about crimes against human dignity and life. Their voices will chant an intimidating lullaby composed of the description of atrocities human beings are capable of. This sheer violence they are discussing is not new: we read about it in books, watched dozens of films, and revealed top-secret documentation. But have we learned the lesson that will make up for the trauma and prevent a new catastrophe from happening? Agreeing to watch this film means constantly asking this unpleasant question (whose answer becomes evident once you read the daily news). The time is pressing, and the answer should be given – by each of us individually and as a society. – Elena Rubashevska, Fipresci

A group of inhabitants of a correctional colony for people of small stature raises a riot against the local order. Tired of adhering to the many rules that require good behavior from them, they decide to become bad. Their immediate leader (also a dwarf) is forced to take refuge in one of the premises while waiting for the police to arrive. Meanwhile, the rioters are having fun: they beat dishes and glasses, start a car and eventually break it, kill a big pig, scoff at blind dwarfs living next door, arrange cockfights, set fire to flowerpots with their favorite colors, and so on. – La Cinétek

Founded in 1908, Allensworth was the first municipality in California to be governed by African-Americans. As we pass through the year and around the settlement, elements of this specific heritage also begin to accumulate: “Blackbird” by Nina Simone, “In the Pines” sung by Huddie Ledbetter, Lucille Clifton poems read out by a little girl direct to camera. But these are just echoes in a place that is now a museum, a space for reflection that the film maps out, fragments and amplifies as only cinema can, a place to think about what was, like the graveyard shown in the final shot. But remembering the past is also remembering that not all pasts are equal, and that’s where duration comes into play. Time still needs to be taken. – Forum Berlinale