Three DocNomads films presented in Festival dei Popoli, Italy
Tianji Yu´s Ping Pong and Sebastian Molina’s Total Life Forever were presented in the section DOC at Work Future Campus, whereas Jasmijn Kooijman and Wyneke van Nieuwenhuyzen’s film diptych Don't Politicize : Go Hungary was screened in the Young Jury Day of the 67th edition of Festival dei Popoli – International Documentary Film Festival held from 31 October to 8 November in Florence, Italy.
By Jasmijn Kooijman (Sweden), Wyneke van Nieuwenhuyzen (The Netherlands) · 29’ · 2026
Synopsis:
In present-day Hungary, two stories unfold in parallel, depicting three teenagers searching for their place in a situation marked by intense political and social tensions from different perspectives. On the one hand, there is Luca, a 16-year-old girl who attends military school and identifies with nationalist values, even though she is aware that many of her peers think differently. On the other, the twins Nati and Dorka pour their thoughts, frustrations, and desires about the world they’re living in and a future that’s hard to imagine into a visual diary. Don’t Politicize: Go Hungary is a coming-of-age story that shows, with simplicity and a keen eye, what it means to grow up.
In Festival dei Popoli catalogue
By Tianji Yu (China) · 15’ · 2025
Synopsis:
A ping-pong racket, a conversation with a chatbot, the reminiscence of a friend: with just a few, precise elements Tianji Yu makes up a brief, intense film that explores memory and distance. From the conversation with the chatbot emerges, little by little, the account of a youthly friendship, while the story takes on a slightly nostalgic overtone which influences the cinematography and affects the animation work. A ‘small’ story that holds together the intimate and public spheres: the ideological divergencies with a friend who has embarked on a different path are reflected in AI’s inadequacy to answer to the director’s anxieties. The experience of leaving and emigrating is embodied in this alienation, in this effort to understand in order to reconcile. A gaze split between the past and the present, the here and the elsewhere, a deep-felt distance from which emerges a film characterized by an unexpected, delicate beauty.
In Festival dei Popoli catalogue
By Sebastian Molina Ruiz (Mexico) · 19’ · 2025
Synopsis:
An anonymous, cold cityscape. The camera’s gaze sneaks beneath the surface, seeking the cracks through which to perceive the inner worlds of those who dwell there. In a series of carefully composed tableaux, the film outlines brief portrayals of individuals who live far from their country of origin. It zooms into individual stories while at once showing their collective dimension. Sebastian Molina Ruiz creates a cinematic device to explore the experience of migration, the condition of identities split between the here and the elsewhere – the unresolved issue of belonging. Against the backdrop of a Brussels/Europe that is both the point of arrival for global migratory fluxes and the symptom of a bipolar late capitalism, the film explores the immaterial area where dreams roam as if in an intimate space. This holds together identities split between distant selves, times, and places: the only (im)possible form of homecoming.
In Festival dei Popoli catalogue