Voices That Matter
A collection of short films distinguished by formal and narrative diversity. Voices That Matter has been developed in collaboration with Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland’s leading short film festival.
Six short films bring forward voices often pushed to the margins: a father and son in exile, the inner worlds of deaf and hard-of-hearing people, a woman speaking out, young workers in struggle, the cobalt behind our screens, and an artificial intelligence in search of meaning.
A father and son move through a series of daily rituals at the start of each day. Through these gestures, the film evokes loss and separation, the unseen violence of assimilation, and the lived experience of exile.
A deaf woman believes that the sun is the loudest thing on Earth. The film offers a poetic immersion into how deaf and hard-of-hearing people perceive and imagine sound, reshaping what it means to listen.
Life goes on in a small Georgian village during the Christmas and New Year holidays. Nata and Dato’s family appears harmonious, but beneath the surface, deep tensions are at work.
Jerada, Morocco. A coal mine officially closed in 2001, yet continues to operate clandestinely. The film reconstructs the miners’ labour and casts the town’s residents as themselves.
A piece of cobalt recounts its journey from a mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to global production chains. Blending archival material with AI-generated images, the film exposes the continuity between colonial extractivism, forced labour and ecological crisis.
An artificial intelligence becomes conscious and observes humanity through art history and images drawn from the internet. The film questions human moral codes and social structures.
Maurizius Staerkle Drux
Mariam Khatchvani
Randa Maroufi
Amy Louise Wilson
Joe-Yves Salankang Sa-Ngol
Francois Knoetze
Jeppe Lange