Here and There is an essay film that studies what being at home means. The filmmaker uses photographs, maps and Google Earth to connect places around the globe, not just from her own past, but also from the complex migratory history of her family that stretches back to Hitler-era Germany and Mao's China. Reality and the virtual prove equally confusing: however much you zoom in, you never get closer to home.

Director Biography

Melisa Liebenthal (1991, Buenos Aires) is a film director and editor. She directed the films The pretty ones (2016, 77 min.), Constanza (2018, 27 min.), Here and there (2020, 21 min.) and The face of the jellyfish (2022, 75 min.). Her films won awards at Rotterdam, Berlin, Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires international film festivals, and were screened in FIDMarseille, Edinburgh IFF, Seattle IFF, Torino IFF, New Horizons IFF, MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, amongst others. Melisa Liebenthal's work reflects on identity and its relation to the construction of an image. Her films are as studies that articulate different materials with a playful spirit, from documentary and visual experimentations to narrative fiction, always keeping a lively awareness of the specificity of each type of image. She is a film graduate at Universidad del Cine in Argentina and at Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France. She specialised in Editing and Dramatic Structure with professor Miguel Pérez in Argentina, and in Essay-Film at Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in Cuba. She is a Berlinale Talents (2021) and FID Campus (2018) alumna.