When Laura was six, her parents got divorced and her father disappeared from her life. The happiness she experienced on her final journey with her father, when he danced with her at a flea market in Brussels, holds a special place in Laura's memory. When Laura finds the shadow puppets her father once bought for her in the attic, these open up a portal to the past for her.
Debuting Iraq-born, Netherlands-based writer/director Ibrahim Selman starts out on docu ground, with a voiceover explaining his objectives and the film’s stand-in location, and recalling Kurdistan before the advent of war. He then shifts into narrative mode, with glimpses of life in a mountain village caught in the conflict between Iraqi military authorities and peshmergas (guerrilla freedom fighters).
Kees Hin’s acclaimed depiction of Berlin in the 1930s. On the basis of recollections recorded on video, Kees Hin and K. Schippers created a ‘theatre of memory’ where former residents of Berlin look back on the downfall of that bustling metropolis and the rise of Nazism, which led to them fleeing.
