Yaguchi capitalises on the recognition comedy effect by in jamming together multiple genres. Survival Family plays on the conventions of disaster, road trip, family drama and coming-of-age movies. There are pastoral scenes of great natural beauty and the road-trip narrative combined with the forced return to a pre-industrial way of life encourages the audiences to appreciate the beauty of what lies beyond the city and hectic modern schedules.

Behind the film lurks the memory of the natural disasters that Japan has faced, not least the 2011 tsunami and the subsequent nuclear breakdown at Fukushima. There are scenes of mass exodus from the cities and potential riots as people let out their frustration on the police. At one point the family meets an army patrol who say they are marching from one nuclear power station to another to see if any of them will work. But this is only a setting and plays no large role in the narrative.

There is not much nuance in this film, but maybe there doesn’t need to be. The acting is exaggerated but humorous, there’s plenty of slapstick comedy and witty lines, and we get simple morals about the value of family life and a more simple, communal way of living. Ultimately Survival Family is a feel-good family movie, the sort you might watch on a plane or have on in the background while preparing dinner – unless, that is, you feel like living for a while without electronics!

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It is a simply-made film: the people interviewed speak straight to the camera and are situated in their homes or familiar places like the local pub or park, all around the country. There is no direct storyline and the audience is not led in any one direction.

“The referendum was a rare opportunity for people to say what they wanted to say,” says one of the characters. In fact, Brexit being as divisive as it is, it is rare to hear people saying what they think in a setting free from prejudice, and that is what makes Brexitannia valuable.

Of course, some of the characters seem to fit the stereotypes. One woman, in her deck chair in a suburban garden, describes how regulations apparently banning curly cucumbers alarmed her about absurd EU bureaucracy and made her want to leave.

There are racists, one man pointing to his white skin and saying, “English is this colour.” Yet there are also surprises: a Polish man who would have voted Leave if he could, a young female UKIP supporter who says she doesn’t trust right-wing media, a middle-aged man who admits to feeling “territorial” and seeing migrants as a “threat” but who voted Remain.

The point is that this part of the film, subtitled “The People”, does not deliberately seek out either the typical cases – white working class Leave voters, or cosmopolitan, young and especially Scottish Remain voters – nor the exceptions.

There were good arguments for leaving the EU, just as there were good arguments to remain. By paying attention and giving people the time to speak, Brexitannia, allows those arguments to emerge eloquently and expressively.

Several people highlight the EU’s lack of accountability: “If your national government cocks up, you can vote them out. If the EU cocks up, you’re stuck with it.” Farmers and fishermen complain of unfair regulation. Nevertheless, these arguments were and are swamped by other issues: saying “Fuck off” to “arrogant politicians”, British jobs for British workers, going back to the days of empire. As one woman says, “It wasn’t even a vote about in or out. It was about immigration.”

These issues still arouse strong emotions and prejudices. In the cinema, I noticed people laughing at some of the less educated people in the film, even as they said, “there are a lot of assumptions made about Leave voters”.

Brexitannia’s “Part II: the experts” locates these divisions in the wider geopolitical context, with views from intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Heidi Mirza. It is striking how abstract their discussion of neoliberalism and hegemonies seems after the personal testimonies of “the people”.

Nevertheless, the forces they identify – the platform increasingly given to right-wing nationalism or the influence of press magnate Rupert Murdoch – are stirring in their own way. Brexitannia is thus an informative film that is emotionally powerful by sheer virtue of the space it gives to opinions.

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Si Tu Étais Dans Mes Images by Lou Colpé, asks what grief means in a digitalised, globalised age. A young woman searches through pictures both from her own life and from the Internet in an attempt to “locate” her dead boyfriend. She explores South America through YouTube, and finds soulful images overlaid with inspirational quotes about “overcoming grief” on Google. Clips from birthday parties and the deep seas are montaged to create a sense of deep dislocation, for despite these images, she cannot bring back her lost loved one.

Giancarlo Rocconi travelled to China to meet the family of his future wif, and in A Chinese Family Portrait we are treated to a slow, generous look at family life in an alien culture. Shot through half-closed doors and from low angles, the film records conversations between as a young woman finds out how her parents met and what their wedding was like in Communist China. Implicitly, she compares it to her own experiences. There is no drama, nor does the film gloss over the repetitions and silences of daily life, and that is what gives it its intimacy.

Tanguy de Donder’s I Am A Monster begins with images of a BDSM chamber. The film appears to be a parody of film noir and it is difficult to know whether to feel disturbed or to laugh when the low voice-over repeats “It was here that I was meant to meet her”, and “she didn’t come”. But our attitude should turn when the voice, now against a backdrop of the city of Liège, says, “when she was young, she was a boy”. The film explores the darkness of being a “creature”, a transgender person, outcast from society.

Juanita Onzaga, takes us to Colombia in The Jungle Knows You Better than You Do, a coming-of-age story as a young man searches for the truth of what happened to his murdered father. It is a film full of ghosts, including, remarkably, a bull representing the father’s spirit, and it is implied that the young man is recovering from drug addiction. It ends without finishing the story, but we have the sense that the young man is more confident thanks to conversations with the people of his land.

In La Mazda jaune et Sa Sainteté, Sandra Heremans traces through photos the story of her father, a Belgian missionary in Rwanda in the 1950s and how he met her mother over smoked fish and foufou. There is spiritual struggle – her father was meant to be celibate, and her mother converted from Islam to Catholicism – and unanswered questions about the daughter’s own identity. Questions of identity in a time of multiculturalism and of loss are important questions for these young filmmakers, and shall be further explored in years to come.

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If there is a tendency for people who have never worked on a fishing boat to idealise fishing, Golden Fish, African Fish leaves no doubt that it is backbreaking work. Though they may sing as they haul their nets (the film has a great soundtrack), fishermen spend long hours exposed to the elements. As one of the Kafountine fishermen says, “the sea enters your bones and your body, that’s why the fisherman gets cold quickly and loses his strength.”

It is not only the catching of the fish that is hard. Porters carry the crates of fish from the boats to shore, where others scale and take the fins off them. Most of the fish are then smoked in earth ovens, and the scales are ground into flour. All of this is done by hand, exhausting physically, while the workers at the ovens get so much smoke in their eyes that they often become partially blind. One reason they have to work in such conditions, Dr Aliou Sall, an expert on the anthropology of fisheries in Senegal and vice-president of Mundus Maris, explained, is that since the colonial era almost all investment in fisheries has been in industrial scale companies. Artisanal fishing has been neglected and people have to fend for themselves.

Paradoxically, it is precisely because of predominance of industrial fisheries elsewhere on the African Atlantic coast that Kafountine attracts migrant workers from across the region – up to 15,000 people, according to Mundus Maris. Huge trawlers that dredge up every living things are often foreign-owned and so leave nothing for the local people. Likewise, the factories that process the fish, turning it into animal or plant feed instead of human food, mean a decline in jobs. Kafountine has so far escaped this fate and so people have come from the Gambia, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and elsewhere to, as one young man says, “struggle and make a living” in a place where there are still jobs.

Kafountine’s model is far from perfect: for example, people are taking wood from the forest at an unsustainable rate to fuel smoking ovens, and furthermore the smoke is toxic. But it is a living community. As one of the workers says, “‘Factory’, here, means ‘death’.” Golden Fish, African Fish shows at once the commitment and the struggle of a life without mass industrialisation.

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Together with Nikolay Oleynikov, he founded the band Arkady Kots, and they are among the most outspoken of left-wing activists and artists in contemporary Russia.

Asked if he was comfortable defining himself as a communist in the light of Russia’s past, Medvedev said that it was only as problematic to be a communist as it was to be European or Christian. All belief and all political systems have some violent or oppressive history. What he wants, through his art, is to reclaim the original ideal of communism: equality between people. Looking at the oligarchical state of Russia and at the increasing inequality under Western capitalism, that ideal still needs to be fought for.

As well as writing his own poems and music, Medvedev runs a publishing house and has translated important left-wing writers like Pier Paolo Pasolini into Russian. Spreading ideas through art is as important as direct political action, he said. It is a risky thing to do, as Russia under Putin is increasingly repressive towards dissenting artists.

In 2012, members of the punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to years in prison after they performed an anti-Putin song. When Arkady Kots went to support Pussy Riot at their trial, they were arrested as soon as they started singing. Earlier this year, five antifascist and anarchist activists disappeared and then surfaced in police custody, where they said they were tortured. Medvedev and Oleynikov dedicated one of the songs they performed at Bozar to those activists of the “Penza Case”, who are still imprisoned.

“There’s nothing beautiful in the future,” Medvedev said, reflecting on the fact that Putin is likely to win again in rigged elections this Sunday. But that is precisely why he and his “comrades” insist on staying in their country and will keep up their activism until it is a decent place to live for the majority of fair-minded Russians.

Oleynikov said that fifteen years ago (not coincidentally, the time when Putin was in his first term as President), people in Russia saw art and politics as diametrically separate. That is changing. Oleynikov and Medvedev insist that they are not propagandists and believe in the true value of art, but they are also subjects in a political situation that cannot be ignored.

So, what about the elections on Sunday? Medvedev and Oleynikov will not vote, since the system is a sham, but they say that what happens will nevertheless be important – for all of us. In fact, Europe is facing many of the same problems as Russia: the rise of far-right nationalism and the capturing of political and economic power by the richest elite.

The shared fate of Russia and Europe is explored in Bozar’s series Russian Turn, which has here shown the activity and energy of dissent in Russia today.

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Filmmaker Ananalisa Piras was granted unprecedented access to Mogherini’s schedule, following her over 2 years. “You can be human and strong at the same time”, Mogherini is quoted as saying at the start of the film, and as we see her at work in her office (an Obama election poster and her children’s drawings on the walls) and in meetings with world leaders like Russia’s Putin, Europe at Sea tries to make that seem true of its subject. Especially in dealing with migration: Mogherini is presented as being emotionally affected by the stories of the many thousands of migrants crossing or trying to cross from Libya. She speaks in the film “as a mother myself” to insist that “if a mother puts her children and herself on a boat in those conditions,” they must be fleeing something terrible.

Nevertheless, Europe’s use of foreign policy to try to stop migration can be criticised. Europe at Sea glosses over the fact that Europe’s priority is cutting migration altogether, not just protecting people from traffickers. It shows EU staff working in Niger to boost security on the premise that this will allow the country to develop economically and reduce migration, but ignores NGOs’ warnings that this means EU development policy is turning towards militarisation instead of helping the poorest. Only a passing reference is given to the controversy surrounding EU collaboration with the Libyan coastguard to stop migrants – a collaboration that the UN Human Rights Commissioner, among others, has condemned.

The picture that emerges from Europe at Sea is incomplete: EU foreign policy has accelerated massively but it doesn’t fully explain what that means. Perhaps this is deliberate: Annalisa Piras admits it was difficult to convey in an understandable way the extraordinarily complex “puzzle” of EU foreign policy, and she had to cut so much that there would be enough material for a second movie. Mogherini, who was present at the premiere at Bozar, said that dealing with problems bit by bit, “putting together the pieces of the puzzle, with no silver bullet” was “a very European way”. Europe at Sea invests a great deal in making its subject seem dramatic (Mogherini, whose father was a film director, herself praised its cinematography). Given the intense pace of change that is justified. But, with the far-right on the rise in Europe, not least in Mogherini’s native Italy, the biggest drama may be yet to come.

Europe at Sea is now available to watch online on ARTE

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Aslı Erdoğan was trained as a physicist and began her career at CERN in Switzerland. Perhaps surprisingly, for someone who grew up facing torture and who recently spent five months in prison for her writing, she says that she found her experience at CERN “frightening”. It was a male-dominated, extremely competitive environment that she did not want to participate in. And so, in the 1990s, she found her way to writing.

It was at that time In her column in the Turkish newspaper Radikal that she recorded the rape of three Kurdish girls and found herself at the receiving end of death-threats. Aslı Erdoğan says that unlike a typical columnist, she does not “bang the table” and make noise: she is a storyteller who prefers to leave open questions and to invite the reader to form their own judgements. So when she wrote that one of the girls had been killed and that a post-mortem had concluded she had been violated with a bayonet, she did not expect to have “a cannonball hit me in the face”.

But as Burhan Sönmez affirmed, it is impossible to be a writer in Turkey and not be in trouble with the government. Since 2016, over 180 news outlets have been shut down in Turkey and it is the country with the highest number of imprisoned journalists in the world. Writers such as Aslı Erdoğan and Burhan Sönmez refuse to be intimidated. Talking about his novel Istanbul Istanbul, based in part on his own experience of jail, Sönmez said that he wanted to “write about happiness in the language of pain”. The result is a book that has been hailed as a testament to the power of the imagination.

Asked whether it is really possible to imprison a writer who can always be free in mind, Aslı Erdoğan quoted Tolstoy: that there is no absolute freedom, and no absolute captivity. She reminded the audience that even in Auschwitz, people had written and had made beautiful works of art. Nevertheless, she agreed with Buhan Sönmez’s insistence that while an imprisoned writer may have the right to say they are still intellectually free, those outside prisons must demand the physical liberty of their fellows. She highlighted the case of Ahmet Altan, sentenced on 16 February to life in prison for allegedly supporting the coup attempt in 2016. Aslı Erdoğan called on the international community to show solidarity with Ahmet Altan. She added that the Foire du Livre had already shown solidarity by making her the guest of honour, and that the Turkish regime would have to take notice.

Sign the petition for the release of Ahmet Altan. Find out more about his case here

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But Tehran Taboo shows the other side of this: prostitutes and drug dealers do business with the very state agents who claim to uphold “morality laws”, fake hymens are on sale to restore the virginity of would-be brides, and corrupt officials offer anything from divorce papers to clandestine abortions in return for bribes or sexual favours. A debut from Iranian expat Ali Soozandeh, the film follows four young people trying to live their lives in a double-faced society, and is a touching story of friendship and the determination to enjoy life as much as it is a cutting indictment of a repressive regime.

Soozandeh’s anger at the hypocrisy of Iranian society is real, unsparingly railing at how something as small as a prank call can result in the threat of exile or execution. But the film’s bitterness does not prevent it taking an understanding and sympathetic approach to its characters. Everyone has a secret in Tehran Taboo, everyone has to lie to avoid being cracked down on by the “Morality Police”. The stories of the main characters become intertwined in ways that might seem unlikely in any other film, but here reflect how an ever-present restrictiveness brings people together and involves everyone in its deceit. The protagonists – a prostitute and her son, two liberal-minded young women, a student musician – find themselves helping each other out, moved by the common desire simply to live according to what they want from life and not what is decided for them.

The expression of that desire is also a resistance to the anonymity that the city threatens. Tehran is a city of over 8 million people, many of whom have come to find work and are instead confronted with violence and a loss of hope. In the animation, we see beggars in the background of almost every scene, and are taken into the alleys where prostitutes and poor watchmen try to make their living. Equally distressing is the sense of entrapment that characterizes even the apparently luxurious apartment block where some of the characters live. Those characters look out over the sprawling city and see birds swirling through the sky – a symbol that in the end becomes double-sided, like everything else in Tehran, expressing tragedy as well as hope.

Tehran Taboo is a daring film, daring in the sympathy it offers its characters as well as its head-on confrontation with a dangerous state. Using rotoscope animation, it presents provocative scenes that would otherwise be impossible to film while maintaining a level of human likeness. It worthy of the Anima festival, proving how animation can tackle difficult themes without simplifying them and with great humanity.

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Silas charts an investigation that eventually revealed how multinational corporations were taking over more than 50% of Liberia’s forests – around 25% of the country as a whole. It is a story of companies forging tribespeople’s signatures and hiring thugs to drive them off their land, of authorities embezzling millions of dollars from funds meant for Ebola recovery efforts, and of a cover-up that is gradually traced back to the heart of the government and the president herself.

Combining filming from the field with United Nations footage, and shot over the course of seven years from 2010, Silas both documents what was happening on the ground in Liberia and is still happening, and examines the country’s history as a democracy. It is also an intimate of its portrait of its hero, taking us into his home to explore the motivations of a man who was awarded the 2006 Goldman Prize (the “environmental Nobel Prize”) and the personal costs of his commitment to often dangerous work, fighting vested interests.

It shows, touchingly, Siakor’s relationship with the communities with whom he works to defend their rights, and the photography in these scenes, particularly, is beautiful. It may one day be a record of a way of life that cared for the forests instead of exploiting them.

Illegal logging and land-grabbing is not just an issue for Liberia, and Silas is currently on a European tour with NGOs campaigning for more EU action to support human rights and environmental defenders.

At the Brussels premiere, Saskia Ozinga from the association Fern said the EU had already acted to stop illegal timber being imported to Europe, but that more needed to be done to counter the damaging spread of oil palm and soy plantations. Siakor said his “Brussels message” was: “support civil society. It is the people on the frontline who record companies’ and governments’ crimes and make fighting corruption possible, and it is they who are most at risk, » he said.

Asked whether he found it “depressing” that corruption was still prevalent in Liberia, Siakor insisted that there “are hopeful moments, and I want to dwell on those.” He added that he had agreed to cooperate in making the film on one condition: that it showed his and his people’s struggles as they really were, with no “movie tricks”. In the end, Silas is just that – an important film of a community fighting and hoping for a better future for themselves and their country.

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This is Ximena Echague’s exhibition “Odyssey”, which tells the human side of forced migration. An Argentinian-born street photographer who has herself lived in multiple cities with “floating populations”, around the world. Echague has collected the testimonies and pictures of people who fled war or persecution and found relative safety in Belgium. The result is a small, but humanly complex work that goes beyond the headlines to explore both personal and shared histories of movement.

At the exhibition’s opening on 24 January, Echague reminded the audience that “we are all migrants”. Her work bears witness to the horrors that the people faced in their countries and on their journeys, but also emphasizes their dignity, “as subjects, not objects”. A number of the people featured in the exhibition were at the opening; among them was Ismail, who escaped the war in Somalia 7 years ago and now volunteers giving guided tours of Anderlecht. His tour route includes the houses of Jews deported during the Nazi occupation. Showing people such sites is not easy, he says, but reflects that “every country has its past”, and that the important thing is to move on.
Ismail says he loves Brussels, where he has opportunities and can live without fear of war. But it is far from easy or even safe for migrants in Belgium these days. Omid, who fled Iran aged 23 after his father, who had worked for the secret services, disappeared, worries that “some people are angry with migrants”. He now works welcoming refugees in Flanders, but because he doesn’t have papers could be deported at any moment.

Also at the opening, Nadia Echadi from the Citizens’ Platform for Refugee Support warned of a humanitarian emergency in Brussels’ Maximilien Park, where hundreds of migrants are without proper shelter or food – and that instead of helping them, the government is set on deporting them.

Meanwhile, Natalia Alonso, Head of EU Advocacy at the charity Oxfam, criticised European policies that block people from moving instead of recognizing that migration, properly managed, can be a “win-win”. “We need a human solution”, she said.
For Ismail, the situation is “complex”. He has had his asylum application rejected three times and narrowly avoided being deported, but he acknowledges that no country can have entirely open borders.

“Odyssey” is a reflection of that precariousness, and also a direct message to governments that seem increasingly hostile towards migrants. But above all, it shows that people who have left their countries are, as Echague says, “human beings, like us, trying their best, and they deserve our sympathy and our support.”

Good to know:

• The Citizens’ Platform for Refugee Support provides shelter for migrants and emergency support for migrants and welcomes donations and volunteers: http://www.bxlrefugees.be
• Oxfam collects donations for refugees and migrants around the world: https://www.oxfam.org/en/emergencies/refugee-and-migrant-crisis

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