The Panorama’s documentary and experimental films deal with women’s rights and gender-specific issues under the heading »Invisible«. Because absence also leaves traces. But how can what happens in secret be depicted and made tangible? A 3D camera for a change of perspective, archive material as a historical document, new sounds for the invisible radiation of uranium or the reconstructed model of a place whose horrors one does not want to remember form the foil against which the films are read in the Panorama section.

Six long documentaries are on the programme: Steffi Niederzoll’s Seven Winters in Tehran (DE/FR 2023), which just celebrated its highly acclaimed premiere at the 73rd Berlinale and won several awards. Laura Poitras’ long-awaited new documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (USA 2022) about the activist work of world-famous photographer Nan Goldin, who uncovered a gigantic pharmaceutical scandal in the USA, will celebrate its festival premiere in Dortmund. Nina Gladitz’s Zeit des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (DE 1982), the result of her research into filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s involvement in Nazi crimes, is being revived. Nataša Urban’s essay film The Eclipse (NO 2022) is a multi-layered reflection on collective memory and personal responsibility in the former Yugoslavia, while Adeline Neary Hays processes her own experiences of flight from Cambodia after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime in Eskape (FR 2021). In The Visitors (CZ/NO/SK 2022) by Veronika Lišková, anthropologist Zdenka moves with her family to Longyearbyen, the northernmost city in the world, and encounters a heterogeneous community struggling with both social changes and the consequences of climate change.

In the Recklinghausen training mine, the festival will show the experimental film Sonne Unter Tage (DE 2022) by Alex Gerbaulet and Mareike Bernien in cooperation with Dokomotive, followed by a guided tour of the mine. The discussion series »Formfragen«, which gives special cinematic forms and formats a space, asks this time what it means to work innovatively in film and what questions digital possibilities pose for cinema. The starting point is the 3D screening of the correspondence film A Woman Escapes (CA/TR 2022) by Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik and Blake Williams.

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Film still: Seven Winters in Tehran (DE/FR 2023, D: Steffi Niederzoll)