In 2017, Maria Grazia Chiuri made her debut at Dior as creative director. The statement piece chosen by the designer was a white T-shirt with black lettering that read: “We Should All Be Feminists.” The shirt quickly began appearing on celebrities and soon became an object of desire. This usually happens within the fashion industry, because wearing a garment can communicate values without having to state them explicitly — and in this case, one that the relentless noise of social media seemed to attack constantly: feminism.
Journalists such as Ana Bejarano and Yolanda Ruiz (Colombia) openly speak about and denounce the dozens of attacks they are constantly exposed to on social media simply for being journalists. Or rather, women journalists who do their job well. It almost feels as if The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir were more relevant than ever when it proclaims: “The representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.” And having these kinds of conversations, even when they may seem repetitive, becomes increasingly necessary in times shaped by networks and hatred, so as not to forget the struggles.
With this premise, the idea of visiting the Internationales Frauen Film Fest Dortmund+Köln in 2026 did not feel like a whim, but rather a genuine obligation that transcends gender. The festival functions, then, as an archive: a space that not only gathers images, but preserves the reasons behind them. One that insists, remembers, and unsettles. Because being feminist today — far removed from the printed slogan — continues to be a priority.
“Men are always positioned over women. And I hate that.” The sentence appears almost like a manifesto in Between Goodbyes (2024) by Jota Sosnowski, yet it is enough to condense a structural discomfort that runs throughout the entire film. The documentary follows Mieke through a complex, multilayered journey: a queer Korean woman attempting to reconnect with a culture and a life that were taken away from her through international adoption. Reducing Between Goodbyes solely to a film about adoption would be unfair. Across its 96 minutes, Sosnowski constructs an emotionally devastating narrative that never loses political clarity. Generational trauma, identity, belonging, grief, happiness, memory, and community appear intertwined with a sensitivity that constantly avoids falling into easy sentimentalism.
The film does not seek definitive answers; rather, it inhabits the discomfort of the questions themselves. Where does someone belong when their story was interrupted from the very beginning? What does it mean to return to a country that may also feel foreign? The audience responded in unison. There were tears, long silences, and that rare feeling of collective intimacy that only cinema can sometimes produce. Because if there is one thing Between Goodbyes understands, it is that certain wounds never disappear: they simply learn to coexist with us. And that, many times, community becomes the only possible form of survival. “Blood is thicker than water,” says the film. But perhaps the documentary’s true political gesture lies in questioning that hierarchy and making visible the fact that emotional, communal, and care-based bonds can become stronger than any biological tie.
From an entirely different latitude, Soñé Su Nombre (2025) by Ángela Carabalí exposes a reality that is as terrifying as it remains current.
Forced disappearance in Colombia continues to be an open wound that has accumulated hundreds of thousands of victims and fractured entire generations of families. More than a statistic, it is a prolonged absence stretched through time: suspended lives, griefs that cannot be brought to an end.
Told in the first person, the film follows the story of Esaú Carabalí Brand, father of the director and of her sister Juliana, who disappeared decades ago. But Soñé Su Nombre does not limit itself to reconstructing facts; slowly, it introduces us to a complex Colombia where structural violence, state abandonment, and institutional precariousness transform the search into an endless labyrinth.
Carabalí is not afraid to show vulnerability. The camera remains close to breakdowns, silences, and the emotional exhaustion involved in searching for someone for years without obtaining answers. Through agriculture, the family photographic archive, and oral memory, the director constructs a portrait that speaks not only about her father — a rice farmer known in his region — but also about the dozens of names that appear and disappear around the narrative like echoes of a collective tragedy.
The film seems to understand that forced disappearance does not only erase bodies: it also transforms the relationship with time, territory, and death itself. Within that process, the clash between two worlds constantly emerges: the mysticism of rural and isolated communities confronting the accelerated logic of the city. Rituals, offerings, and certain spiritual beliefs appear, then, as desperate attempts to connect both planes; ways of maintaining a bond with those who remain absent.
Soñé Su Nombre also invites us to listen carefully. Its long silences, voiceovers, and family archive build a kind of intimate diary composed of memories and messages suspended in time, while the endless rice fields and Colombian highways ultimately become yet another character within the film. “Where are they?” the documentary constantly asks. And inevitably, the question spills far beyond the screen.
After the screening, during a conversation with Juliana Carabalí, it was possible to share several reflections surrounding the film and the emotional impact it leaves behind. Although, unfortunately, there are still no recent updates regarding the whereabouts of her father, the documentary has nevertheless achieved something equally important: drawing attention to this ongoing tragedy and giving visibility to the work of Colombian organizations dedicated to the search and identification of victims of forced disappearance.
The next appointment of the day would be with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. And a particularly incendiary one.
Playing with Fire – An Ecosexual Emergency (2025) addresses the wildfires that devastated California in 2020 through a perspective that challenges any conventional approach to environmental disaster.
The situation escalated so rapidly that it forced the artists — partners for years — to hurriedly flee Boulder Creek, the small town where they live. Yet that which once threatened to destroy everything reappears here reframed: fire no longer only as catastrophe, but also as symbol, ritual, and language.
With a disorienting mixture of humor, reflection, mysticism, kitsch, and ecosexuality, Sprinkle and Stephens construct a film that constantly oscillates between absurdity and devastation. Fire acquires multiple dimensions: erotic, spiritual, environmental, and even funerary. One of the film’s most striking sequences follows, in an intimate and almost impossible-to-look-away-from manner, the cremation of Annie Sprinkle’s mother. Wordless.
Far removed from the traditional solemnity of ecological documentaries, Playing with Fire understands that perhaps excess, irony, and performativity are also valid — and even necessary — ways of speaking about contemporary collapse. Because in the face of a world that seems to be advancing toward its own combustion, the film responds with an implicit question: how do we represent disaster without turning it into yet another empty image?
“The world is on fire now!” Stephens declared after the screening. And perhaps few phrases managed to condense the festival’s overall atmosphere better: a constant awareness of crisis, loss, and political urgency. During a brief private conversation, I asked them: “As artists in such violent and disorienting times, are we doing enough?” The duo’s answer was as simple as it was forceful: “Maybe not, but we must do what we can.”
The day would conclude with Sirens Call (2025) by Lina Sieckmann and the directorial debut of Miri Ian Gossing. The film explores queer and trans activism through a hybrid between documentary and fiction that follows Una, its protagonist, under the wandering structure of a road movie. But Sirens Call never settles for a linear narrative; it constantly drifts toward more ambiguous territories, where memory, performance, and fantasy begin to intertwine.
A retrofuturistic aesthetic occupies a central place: neon lights, nocturnal landscapes, and the permanent sensation of watching a future that already happened — or perhaps one that never arrived at all. As the sirens answer the call, the film constructs a kind of visual manifesto about community, resistance, and desire. Real stories intertwine with fictionalized elements until it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish where testimony ends and imagination begins. And perhaps that is precisely where its political force resides: in understanding fantasy not as escapism, but as a survival tool for those who have historically had to invent themselves outside normative structures. Hypnotic, melancholic, and profoundly political, Sirens Call closes the day like a collective trance. A reminder that existing, for certain bodies, continues to be a radical act.
Saturday began with a wedding — or the desire for one. Helma Sanders-Brahms sparked international controversy following the release of Shirins Hochzeit (1976). Public demonstrations outside traditional television channels such as Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) quickly followed, and criticism soon poured in. Voices of protest emerged from conservative and traditionalist sectors, as well as from women and Turkish communities in both Germany and Turkey.
The film closely follows the story of Shirin, who flees patriarchal oppression and arrives in Germany searching for true love. The narrative places at the center of the conversation the communities of Gastarbeiterinnen, part of the migratory wave of the 1950s and 60s that brought workers from countries such as Greece, Spain, and Turkey within the context of the Wirtschaftswunder, the so-called “economic miracle” of postwar West Germany.
And although the subject had already appeared on screen before, Shirins Hochzeit approaches it through a female gaze. Food, celebrations, and Turkish customs intertwine with a distant and detached German society. At the time, critics came to describe the film as uncomfortable, exaggerated, and even accused it of portraying Turkish communities through stereotypes.
Yet one must ask whether Shirin’s story can also be read as a broader reflection of the experiences of many migrant women. Would accusing her of being naive not shift responsibility onto her instead of onto the structures, environments, and institutions that reduce her to labor rather than recognizing her as a subject? In the end, the question remains: we should not forget that in real life, stories are not always exaggerated… sometimes, they are simply worse.
Now it is time to close our eyes. Insects, the crackling of the wood-burning stove, birds, and voices all find a place on screen, while the soundscape takes center stage. Nunkui (2026) is an audiovisual work in the broadest sense of the word. The film follows Nunkui, a 13-year-old girl from the Shuar community in Ecuador, as she moves through adolescence while devastation advances around her territory due to large-scale mining projects. Territory does not appear merely as narrative background: from the very beginning, it is established as a central character.
In an exclusive conversation with Verenice Benítez, the film’s director, and Pascale Marin, its cinematographer, they spoke about the multiple layers composing the work. One of them is the use of the spectrogram throughout the film — a visual representation of sound frequencies and variations. In other words, a way of seeing sound. And it is precisely through sound that we follow Nunkui’s story: everyday conversations blend with the fire from the stove, birdsong, tadpoles, and the flow of the river. Every sound occupies a precise place, just as it does in nature itself.
But the work with the community was also central to the construction of the film. Although Domingo Ankuash was already a recognized and respected figure, the relationship with the rest of the cast sought to remain as horizontal and close as possible. Through play and recreational activities, the actors gradually built, on their own terms, a family constellation that eventually feels entirely organic on screen, even though they were not a real family.
The relationship with territory traverses every aesthetic decision. Pascale Marin explained how many shooting days had to be organized around extremely specific schedules in order to take advantage of natural light, the film’s main light source. But this was not solely a visual decision: once the sun goes down, nobody goes outside anymore. That relationship with time, light, and space also structures the territory’s everyday life. The camera, then, constantly seems to invite us to pause and observe not only what appears on screen, but also what remains outside the frame: complicit glances, shared laughter, silences, and small everyday gestures.
The garden also appears as an element of care and resistance. Its cultivation not only represents caring for the environment, but also a profound relationship between territory, body, and spirituality; a form of connection with spirits and collective memory. In Nunkui, the oppressive practices that exist in the city ultimately reproduce themselves within the territories as well, and it is precisely there that the film articulates an ongoing reflection on the relationship between city and territory.
As Verenice Benítez explained during the conversation: when people leave the territory, they often do so already at a disadvantage. Without access to the same educational or professional opportunities, the possibilities available to them are often reduced to domestic labor or even contexts of exploitation. The film makes it clear, then, that the discussion has never been about “closing off” cultures from themselves. Cultures exist precisely because of exchange: of languages, objects, displacement, and migration. What Nunkui proposes instead is that only a relationship grounded in respect will allow for the construction of a more just coexistence, regardless of the geographical place from which one looks.
Leaving behind the dense jungle, vast mountains emerge to become the setting of God Will Not Help (2025). The film closely follows its protagonist, a woman traversed by grief that she carries with absolute solemnity. Every situation she faces gradually opens unavoidable questions, while pain slowly begins to resignify the elements that enter and leave the screen.
With a firm temperament, the protagonist is subjected to experiences that not only test her grief, but also the place she occupies within a small community deeply shaped by the male gaze and male desire. Perhaps this is also where the recurring symbolism of the flock emerges: a source of prosperity and stability to which, however, only men seem to have legitimate access. And once those dynamics begin to be questioned, the status quo inevitably starts to fracture.
That is where much of the film’s strength lies. The protagonist is not unaware of the structural violence surrounding her; on the contrary, she is fully conscious of it. Yet rather than responding with resignation or passivity, she chooses to act on her own terms, displacing the traditional role that cinema so often reserves for women marked by pain.
And although fiction creates a certain distance, God Will Not Help ultimately constructs the portrait of a woman who looks at herself with harshness, but never with pity. A woman who continues moving forward even when everything around her seems to push her toward silence. Perhaps it was precisely that blunt, uncomfortable, and deeply human force that ultimately made the film deserving of the festival’s main award during the closing ceremony.
The Internationales Frauen Film Fest Dortmund+Köln is not merely a film festival, but an urgent encounter with the female gaze. A space that continues to support new generations of women filmmakers from around the world and that, year after year, brings to the forefront questions that are as uncomfortable as they are necessary in turbulent times such as the ones we are currently living through. The films shown here do not seek to offer easy answers or comforting narratives; on the contrary, they force us to confront the tensions that cross the body, territory, migration, violence, desire, memory, and the structures of power that continue shaping everyday life.
But perhaps one of the festival’s most important reflections also emerges outside the screen. Although the festival creates space for women and historically marginalized communities, male audiences could — and should — still be much broader. Because listening to these stories should not be understood as an act of political correctness or cultural charity, but rather as a real possibility for building a different kind of society. In the end, a society where women and their intersectionalities can exist with greater freedom, dignity, and safety also becomes a fairer society for everyone. Perhaps that is precisely why the IFFF feels so necessary today: because in a present where empathy seems to exhaust itself more rapidly each day, the festival insists on reminding us that looking is also a political decision. And that cinema, when it truly dares to observe, can still unsettle, open wounds, generate questions, and transform the way we understand the world and those who inhabit it.