Julia Ton

The documentary by Mari Soppela focuses on glass ceilings, a metaphor for the invisible borders between men and women in work life. Talk about glass ceilings is usually associated with women’s opportunities to advance to well paid managerial positions, but the documentary connects itself more broadly to the structural problems of work life from women’s perspective. Glass ceilings are long trials about equal pay, having to continually prove one’s skills, and 85-cent euros. The topic cannot be handled without intersectional crossings: what are invisible glass ceilings for some, are solid concrete for others.

The seventeen year old Stach is faced with five impossible assignments he has to complete in order to become king. Things do not go as easily as the boisterous Stach had expected, especially when he is confronted with matters of life and death.

The 27 year-old Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi walked from Romania to Paris in 1903 and 1904 as a preparation and prelude to becoming the most important sculptor of the 20th century. Brancusi leaves his small village of Hobitza, south of the Carpathian Mountains and walks through Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and parts of France to arrive in Paris, the metropolis of world culture for the first three decades of the 1900s. He walks in spring, summer, winter and autumn, treading the landscape away from the beaten track, experiencing sights, having adventures, suffering hardships, looking, touching and feeling the world as a preparation of what is to come for him.