Curated by CineAgenzia for Internazionale

Palazzo Esposizioni Roma once again gets to grips with the major contemporary issues on the international agenda with a selection of urgent, riveting documentaries chosen by CineAgenzia for Internazionale weekly at the best festivals all around the world and presented in Rome after the journalism fest in Ferrara.

This year’s edition brings the audience face to face, without any attempt at simplification or censorship, with six stories, themes and scenarios in this increasingly unstable and standardised world, yet a world in which the experiences shared by these documentaries offer us a glimmer of hope.

For the first time, the retrospective takes a look at Cuba, to tell the story, in Night is Not Eternal, of the crisis in the country and the struggle for a change of regime that is constantly in danger of being manipulated, while with The Shadow Scholars it probes behind the scenes of the world of academia, exploring the global market of essays and university theses produced in Kenya for the benefit of Western students. We will also be returning to explore two central issues in the contemporary debate: migration, with The Guest, a moving tale of solidarity on Europe’s doorstep, in the shape of an encounter between a Polish family and a young Syrian refugee; and freedom of expression, with The Dialogue Police, a documentary exploring the work of the Swedish police unit tasked with defending that freedom at all costs in an increasingly polarised geopolitical environment. It was also inevitable that we should continue to concern ourselves with Gaza, in The Life That Remains, Arab cinema superstar Dorra Zarrouk’s first film as director, in which she uses the memories and images of a Palestinian family in exile to give us an unprecedented glimpse of the life that existed, and that is still holding out despite everything, in the Gaza Strip. And while envisaging any kind of future may seem impossible in the face of certain tragedies, we are imparted an astonishing lesson in resilience by fifteen-year-old Karla, the Mexican star of Niñxs, who takes us on a journey of self-discovery, addressing her gender transition against a backdrop of the joys and uncertainties of adolescence and of social prejudice.