IDFA Bertha Fund Collection

It was winter. My father called us urgently. They found his naked body on the floor. There was a crowd of people at his corner. The police separated the curious. My relatives were there. They asked me to go inside and choose the clothes in wich he would be buried. I opened his wardrove, it was empty. When I asked them what he died of they told me: "of sadness". That answer contradicted all my memories of his life. I think my parents made a mistake when they told me as a child: You must not enter your uncle's house. From that moment on, everything he did attracted my attention. Rodolfo was different. He wore flashy clothes, listened to Elvis and danced at every birthday party. The strange thing was that the chair by his side always remained empty. He was the only one among my father's brothers who didn't want to be a blacksmith like my grandfather. In the Paraguay of the seventies, under Stroessner's dictatorship, he wanted to be a dancer. This is the search of the traces of his life and the discovery that he was included in one of the "108 lists", arrested and tortured. Still today in Paraguay when someone calls you "108" they mean "hooker, faggot". For more than one generation, the time Stroessner's dictatorship lasted, men who came under suspicion of being homosexual or against to the regime were the favourite target of the collaborators. When they released him, my uncle hid in his corner until his wounds healed. As the years went by, Rodolfo became invisible to everybody and he couldn't approach the family because to do so, he would have had to change. One night he cried... and disappeared. Rodolfo's story reveals a part of the hidden and silenced History of my country. Renate Costa Perdomo

In the middle of the Algerian desert, in her relay, a woman writes her History. She welcomes, for a cigarette, a coffee or eggs, truckers, wandering beings and dreams... Her name is Malika.

In the middle of the Algerian desert, in her relay, a woman writes her History. She welcomes, for a cigarette, a coffee or eggs, truckers, wandering beings and dreams... Her name is Malika.

Portraits of victims of the riots in Argentina on December 19 and 20, 2001, through interviews with next of kin and archival footage.

Emad Burnat is a Palestinian cameraman who decides to film the struggle against the wall in his village. He documents the strikes on his personal life due to the punishment actions of the Israel side to side to filming his children grow. Daily arrests, night invasions scare his family, his brothers are arrested and sent to prison, his second friend is shot dead, finally he is arrested and even has a deadly car accident that he barley survives due to the construction of the wall. One Camera after another, each has its story. His story is a story of resistance.

In a small city in the far south of Brazil there is a house whose owners died, there is a school where nuns pray, there is a farm where an old man lives, there is a young man being beaten up on the street, and there`s an old lady playing the piano. This is their story, and the story of the places they inhabit. It`s about memory, forgetfulness and finding joy even when you have to struggle and fight for your beliefs.

An aspiring video journalist in her 20s finds herself already facing self-reckoning. Born in Damascus, Syria, Lina starts to report on the events around her until she is compelled to become a war reporter and, later, the unexpected narrator of her own destiny.

August 9, 2006. Three Mexican fishermen are found near the Marshall Islands, more than 5,000 miles away from home, after 9 months and 9 days adrift. They declared, 'We survived by eating raw fish, capturing rain water and our faith in God'. Media from around the world followed their way back. Weeks later a U.S. reborn-Christian book editor signed them on a millionaire contract to make a fiction film of their ordeal, convinced it's a message from God. It seems the months at sea where just the beginning for a longest journey, packed with more sophisticated and less obvious dangers.

When raising a kid as a homeless single mother in Tbilisi becomes too hard, Jana decides to work as a surrogate for foreigners, in order to give her daughter the life she herself never had.

"Something there is that does not love” is rooted in the filmmaker's complex relationship with her camera. A meditation on collective imaginaries, it insists the camera confront its role in producing imperial logics of combat and difference as it celebrates its unique potential as a tool for subversive representation, dialogue and relation.