Editor
Before being employed by the Nazis in what remains the most deadly program of “racial purification”, Eugenics was a very popular concept among scientists in the US and Europe. The science of “good birth”, which aims to create the perfect human being, sets out to achieve this by preventing reproduction of those perceived as weak, sick, disabled, or otherwise “degenerate”. As early as 1907, the US applied the first eugenics laws, which continued to be in force until the 1970s. In Sweden, 63,000 people were sterilized, mostly after WWII. The film switches deftly between the explanation of historians and the testimony of victims who continue to struggle for recognition of the harm they have suffered, which has been erased from the collective memory. From North Carolina to Sweden and Germany, a terrifying journey into this quest for the “best of worlds”.
Editor
The middle-aged titular heroine (Masiero) of this bare-bones, Dardenne-esque debut has certainly fallen on hard times: Living between her car and a storage shed, working a part-time job as a hotel chambermaid, and trying against all odds to obtain public housing, Louise scrapes by on a day-to-day subsistence that’s only a few Euros away from skid row.
Editor
Within one image, another one is always hiding. Wordless and using only archive footage, "Still Life" aims to rediscover and delve into the opacity of images (news, war footage, propaganda documentaries, photos of political prisoners and never seen before rushes) made during the 48 years (1926-1974) of Portuguese dictatorship in order to foster new interpretations.
