Men’s Worlds: A Survey of Toxic Masculinities in the International Competition
From TiDF, Stefanie Diekmann surveys the International Competition and finds toxic masculinity as a prominent, and often unexamined, theme in this year’s collection of global cinema.
Whatever else the International Competition at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival will be remembered for, it is certainly an exhaustive survey of very unpleasant male protagonists. The term is “survey”, not “study”, because even more remarkable than the omnipresence of problematic masculinities in this competition is the fact that the majority of the protagonists are observed and portrayed with little or no analytic distance, and that gender-critical perspectives are largely absent from the selected films.
This is particularly true of The Golden Grip (Σωνιέρου 4), Fokion Bogris’ portrait of third- to fourth-rate actor Kostas Stefanakis. A long travelogue along the lower levels of Greek film history, from exploitation flicks of the 1970s to straight-to-video productions in the 1980s, low-budget television in the 1990s, and gonzo filmmaking in the early 2000s, the documentary narrates the career of Stefanakis as the story of one forgotten hero of genre cinema. At the same time, the aspect that the role reserved for women in most of the assembled films, especially those from the 70s and 80s, is to get laid, raped, beaten, mutilated, and killed (often, if not always, in this order) is of very little interest to Bogris; so little, that it is not mentioned or commented upon even once. The director’s focus is on Stefanakis, our old friend from the wilder days of cinema, while, along the way, female characters are slapped, mugged, shot, or dragged offscreen to be shown what happens to girls who do not know how to behave.
Against the blatant misogyny of The Golden Grip, the sexism of other films in the TiDF International Competition may appear less visible. Nevertheless, it is pervasive, for example in the various portraits of would-be world builders like James Dawson’s Derek vs Derek, about two English farmers with neighboring estates and opposing professional ethics, Yulia Lokshina‘s Around Paradise (Im Umkreis des Paradieses), on a community of right-wing preppers in Paraguay, and Sinéad O’Shea’s All About the Money, about the heir to a huge fortune who somehow never manages to make good use of his money. In a sense, all of these films are stories about little kingdoms, and all of them will keep their eye on the little kings and their more or less successful (the Dereks) or failed (the heir, the prepper) attempts to build, maintain, and administer the worlds they are trying to create.
In the meantime, the place of women is in the house, and, within the house, mostly in the kitchen where they await their men when the latter return from their struggles in the outside world. It is true that both Lokshina and O’Shea try to develop a critical perspective on their protagonists and the respective environments. But while Around Paradise never really manages to decide on an approach (all in all, this film is handling too many characters and storylines), All About the Money is too fascinated by its anti-hero and, in the end, too much taken in by his self-pity and ramblings, to clearly show just how destructive a large amount of money in the hands of the wrong person can be. This is regrettable, because O’Shea’s portrait of dropout-entrepreneur-Stalinist James “Fergie” Cox Chambers has every potential to be an instructive study about the strange malaise of extreme privilege.
The model of divided spheres—outside the house for the male, inside for the female figure—is again present in Closure (Bez końca) by Michał Marczak, this year’s recipient of the Golden Alexander award. Over the course of more than two years, Closure documents the efforts of Daniel Dymiński whose son Krzysztof went missing one morning in 2023 and last appeared in images recorded by a surveillance camera on a bridge across the Vistula River in Poland. Along this river, the film follows the field trips of his protagonist who, in an almost grotesquely male performance, employs all kinds of expensive technology (boats, sensors, trackers, metal detectors, various cameras etc.) in search of the missing body, instead of facing the questions that may arise from the son’s decision to either take his own life or vanish without a trace. The fascination for tech gear and the great things you can do with it is clearly shared by director Maczak who is also the film’s cinematographer: All over Closure, you will find impressive long shots of river banks, and only occasionally will the story return to the family home where Dymiński’s wife provides emotional support and the next warm meal.
As a portrait (largely affirmative) of gendered coping mechanisms, Closure also belongs to a third group of films in the International Competition which devote themselves largely to the portrayal of male sensibilities. The Golden Swan pays homage to one not-quite-golden boy who, after various failures, went to India to find himself, ignored all warnings not to travel to Kashmir and, above all, not to venture into the mountain region on his own, and was kidnapped and murdered by a group of guerrilla fighters. Thirty years later, his sister, the filmmaker Anette Ostrø, uses her brother’s letters from the weeks before and in captivity as the background to a visual elegy which is a prime example of the Western gaze, completely focused on the fate of the hapless protagonist.
Male sensibility and male malaise are also the focus of Jukka Kärkkäinen’s The Beauty of Errors (Kappale kauneinta Suomea), Eirini Vourloumis’ The Way Elsewhere (Αλλού ο δρόμος), the coming-of-age portrait Bugboy by Lucas Paleocrassas, and the very annoying Candidates of Death (Kandydaci Śmierci) by Maciej Cuske. Again, the setting of this Polish film is the great outdoors whereto the director accompanies his son and the son’s two friends to shoot yet another episode of the amateur horror-thriller-adventure series that gives the film its title. Boys will be boys; but before and behind the camera, director Cuske is desperately trying to convince his audience that all this (the filming, the field trips, the talks, the routines) should be regarded as something extraordinary, i.e. a monument to friendship and father-son relations.
Among the very few films in the International Competition which are not concerned with the complexities of a male self, the FIPRESCI jury has selected Birds of War (UK/SYR/LBN), the remarkable love story of Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak, told in a montage of video, text, and voice messages, footage from war and conflict zones, webcam videos and much more imagery, all recorded by the filmmakers themselves who are, at the same time, the protagonists, the directors, the cinematographers of this documentary film. Earlier this year, Birds of War received the Special Jury Award for Journalistic Impact at Sundance. Its impact at the TiDF is evident in the fact that it won no fewer than four awards: the FIPRESCI, the Silver Alexander (2nd in the International Competition), the award for Human Rights in Motion, and The Women in Film & Television Greece Award.
Stefanie Diekmann
©FIPRESCI 2026