Careless Crime
Forty years ago, during the uprising to overthrow the Shah’s regime in Iran, protestors set fire to movie theaters as a way of showing opposition to Western culture. Many cinemas were burned down. In one tragic case, a theater was set on fire with four hundred people inside, most of whom were burned alive. Forty years have passed and, in contemporary Iran, four individuals also decide to burn a cinema down. Their intended target is a theater showing a film about an unearthed, unexploded missile. Will past and present meet? More
The Load - Teret
Vlada works as a truck driver during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Tasked with transporting a mysterious load from Kosovo to Belgrade, he drives through unfamiliar territory, surrounded by the consequences of the war. When his job is over, Vlada needs to return home and face the consequences of his actions. More
Wajib
Abu Shadi is a divorced father and a school teacher in his mid-60s living in Nazareth. After his daughter's wedding in one month he will be living alone. Shadi, his architect son, arrives from Rome after years abroad to help his father in hand delivering the wedding invitations to each guest as per local Palestinian custom. As the estranged pair spend the day together, the tense details of their relationship come to a head challenging their fragile and very different lives. More
Malaria - The Vibes of Tehran
A young girl informs her father she’s been kidnapped and asks him to bring the ransom money. Panicked, her father and brothers go to Tehran to look for her. They are unaware, however, that the girl has in fact eloped with her boyfriend and now spends her time in the company of a band of street musicians. Following the arrest of the band leader and full of the love for her boyfriend, the young girl descends an uncertain path. More
Le sommeil d'or - Golden Slumbers
A nocturnal drive along a rural highway into a city at dawn that is somehow moving in the wrong direction. It is only after a while that you notice that the vehicles are travelling backwards, receding back into the dusk of reality. This mysterious metaphor forms the starting point for a journey into the unknown history of Cambodian film. Nearly 400 films were made in Phnom Penh between 1960 and 1975, only 30 of which survive today. The Khmer Rouge burnt them or allowed them to decay along with many of the country’s studios and cinemas. More
Modest Reception - Paziraie Sadeh
Leyla and Kaveh are the instruments of a cruel and bizarre game. The well-situated couple drive through the mountains distributing plastic bags full of money to every poor and unfortunate person they meet. At first everything goes according to plan as they disdainfully “share the joy” with their shocked “neighbors” while documenting the event via cellphone. They encounter those, however, who refuse the strange gift – and others who end up offending the irresponsible strangers. More
Un mundo secreto
‘María, someday somebody will notice you and realise how special you are …’ these are the words that María notes down in her diary. She also writes herself passionate love letters. But nobody notices how desperate she is. How could they? She is such an unassuming girl and hardly ever speaks. Not even to the boys she often allows to sleep with her, just like that. Afterwards she slaps her face hard. She can’t go on like this. More
Highway
A man from Kathmandu and his wife have been trying unsuccessfully to have a child. The man travels to the mountains of eastern Nepal to seek help from a miracle healer. The healer indeed has a magic potion for him but tells the man he must get back to his wife within thirty-six hours for the medicine to work. The bus that winds its way through the narrow streets, hills and valleys of Nepal is full of people who all need to be somewhere else in a hurry – to meet an internet chat lover, bring someone some money for medicine, or to visit their parents. More
Avé
While hitchhiking from Sofia to Ruse, Kamen meets Avé, a 17-year-old runaway girl. With each ride they hitch, Avé invents new identities for them, and her compulsive lies get Kamen deeper and deeper into trouble. Reluctantly drawn into this adventure, Kamen begins to fall in love with the fleeting Avé. More
The Other Bank - Gagma napiri
Twelve-year-old Tedo lives with his young mother in Keto in an isolated hut on the outskirts of Tiflis. Tedo and Keto are refugees from Abchasia. The civil war has claimed everything they ever owned, including Tedo’s and Keto’s hopes for a bright future as an intact family unit. Tedo was just four years of age when they were obliged to flee from Abchasia. At the time, they had to leave behind Tedo’s father – his weak heart made it impossible for him to take on such a strenuous journey. More
Chaque jour est une fête
Three women in a bus in Lebanon. They have the same destination: a men's penitentiary. The first woman wants to visit her husband whom she hasn't seen since their day of marriage. The second one has only one goal: to get her husband who has to serve a long sentence to sign the divorce papers and thus gain back her freedom. The third woman is afraid. She carries the gun that her husband, a prison guardian, has forgotten at home. A straight road seems to be leading them quickly to their destination: from Beirut centre to the Mermel prison in the desert. More
Salt Of This Sea - Milh hadha al-bahr
Soraya, 28, born and raised in Brooklyn, decides to return to live in Palestine, a country that her family was exiled from in 1948. On arriving in Ramallah, Soraya tries to recover the money left in an account by her grandparents but meets with refusal from the bank. Her path then crosses that of Emad, a young Palestinian whose ambition, unlike hers, is to leave the country for good. To escape the constraints linked to the situation in Palestine but also to earn their freedom, Soraya and Emad take things into their own hands, even if this means breaking the law. More
Comrades In Dreams
They live thousands of kilometres apart from one another and yet are chasing the same dream. In COMRADES IN DREAMS, we meet people whose lives revolve around cinema. One of them is Han Jong Sil, the North Korean with the unforgettable smile. She loves life – even one in which she is torn between propaganda, her own dreams and crop reports. She wants to improve the quality of other peoples’ existence by showing them films. Vulnerable, lonely and full of longing, she dazzles like a comet above a sea of uniformity. More
Que tan lejos
Self-discovery journey of two girls in their mid twenties while they travel along the Ecuadorian mountains and coasts. Esperanza (Hope) and Tristeza (Sadness) will not find postcard views or perfect love, but their journey will teach them there’s a world beyond that. More
Siberian Mammoth - O Mamute Siberiano
This film examines the creation and exhibition of the propaganda film I Am Cuba, a Soviet/Cuban collaboration. It follows Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Kalatosov as he travels to Cuba in the early 1960s to make his film, a vignette drama which failed in both countries and was ressurrected in the West in the 1990s when Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese endorsed Milestone Films' 1993 ancillary release. First-time Brazilian director Vicente Ferraz arrives in Havana to track Kalatosov's ambitious 14-month shoot. More
Bombón - el perro
Life is no bed of roses for 52-year-old Juan "Coco" Villegas. He, who has been a gas station attendant for twenty years in Patagonia, finds himself jobless overnight. He first tries to survive by selling knives of his own making. But business is bad and he can't find real work. One day though, after fixing a vehicle on a farm, he acquires a beautiful Argentinian watch dog. From this blessed day on, things start shaping well at last... More
Russkij kovcheg - Russian Ark
A film shot in on shot with no break. On a winter's day, a small party of men and women arrive by horse-drawn carriage to a minor, side entrance of the Winter Palace. The narrator meets another spectral but visible outsider, "the European", and follows him through numerous rooms of the palace. Each room manifests a different period of Russian history, but the periods are not in chronological order. More
El entusiasmo
"El entusiasmo" is set in Chile in 1980. Three young people, Guillermo, Fernando and Isabel meet and become friends during the dictatorship years. Ten years later, Fernando and Isabel are married and have a baby, and, enjoying the new political freedom, they move to another part of the country where they meet Guillermo again. It is the story of the chilean society right after Pinochets military dictatorship. More
No te mueras sin decirme adónde vas
Don‘t Die without Telling Me Where You‘re Going is an extraordinary film by a remarkable director, Eliseo Subiela (Man Looking Southeast, Dark Side of the Heart).This is masterful filmmaking that brings to life an invisible dimension of our world: auras, souls, spirits. William and Rachel have loved each other in various lives. In the life this movie depicts, William is Leopoldo, lives in Buenos Aires, and is working on an invention: a dream collector. While testing his invention, he finds Rachel, who in this life is a soul. More
El viaje
A young man living in a cold southern village in South America, decides to start a trip looking for his father. By doing this he discovers unexpected facts about his Latin American essence. More
Topio stin omichli
LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST is a film about the void. It is a film about despair, about the failure of contemporary society. The prodigal father who figures in almost every Angelopoulos film here has evaporated into his mythical essence - leaving his children to become the wanderers in search of him. In the «chaos», two children appear, little Alexandros and his older sister Voula. In order to exorcise their loneliness, they invent a secret universe for themselves, inhabited by their dreams. More
Those Wonderful Movie Cranks
At the beginning of the 20th century, a film projectionist tours through Bohemian villages and dreams of opening a cinema in Prague. He allies himself with a young cameraman (played by Jiří Menzel), who in turn has a dream: He longs for true-to-life films that deal with the reality of people. Menzel's Those Wonderful Movie Cranks is one of the most beautiful tributes to the pioneers of the silent era, and the film is also a melancholic reflection on necessary concessions. More
I was born, but - Umarete wa mita keredo
Yoshii, his wife and their two sons, Ryoichi and Keiji, move into a Tokyo suburb. The head of Yoshii’s department lives nearby. When he invites Yoshii’s family and all the children in the neighbourhood to a film show at his house, Ryoichi and Keiji are thrilled to discover their father on the screen. But when he starts pulling all sorts of faces to please his boss and thereby – in the eyes of his sons – embarrasses himself in front of everyone, the two boys’ world is in tatters. Upon returning home, they demand an explanation for his undignified behaviour. More