Festival films

In the town of Saveh, during the seventies, 14-year-old Emkan is torn between his deep, instinctual passion for artistic expression and his parents’ conviction that his creativity is an offence against their Muslim faith. When Maassoum, a girl of his age, moves into the neighbourhood, they strike up a tender friendship which will develop into love. Their relationship feeds Emkan’s burgeoning desires to explore his talents and experiment with arts he has not encountered before--photography and motion pictures. However, his father’s ongoing disapproval and the imminent outbreak of the Iranian Revolution present Emkan with the increasingly difficult task of negotiating the family’s traditions, his own faith, his irrepressible nature and his feelings for Maassoum.

In a monastery outside Montalcino live five young monks from France. The film records their everyday life against a backdrop of the bourgeois society of the small town. "Traveling in Tuscany, I happened to meet a group of monks in a famous wine-producing region... I became good friends with them even before making the film. Usually, after making a film with someone you hate each other, but here it was the opposite. At the beginning they were suspicious and mistrustful, but because I’m a great drinker, my behavior was seen as decidedly Christian, and so I won their confidence."

Ana is a young woman who goes back to Paran_, her hometown, after being away for several years. She meets up with old friends and acquaintances and visits the places she used to go to. These people and places from earlier years gradually bring to the fore memories from her life and reveal, through sudden flashes of images, traces of her past. Meanwhile, it becomes apparent that Ana’s world view is much more sophisticated than that of the others, the ones who decided to stay in Paran_ rather than move on. And yet something has compelled her to come home. In a local paper, she comes across a photograph taken by Mariano, an old boyfriend. This coincidence drives her to look for him with the help of Matias, a little boy she has met by chance. However, the question of whether Ana and her old boyfriend will get back together is ultimately less important than her journey and the self-discovery it brings...

In India, thousands of cases of female infanticide go unreported every year. This practice has led to an alarming fall in the ratio of men to women. The story is set in the village of Matrubhoomi, where there are no women left, and revolves around the frustration of five brothers and their father. They are unable to find a bride, despite the assurances of their family priest-cum-astrologer. In a faraway village, the priest finally finds a beautiful girl called Kalki. Kalki’s father promptly sells her, and she is taken to Matrubhoomi where she is married to the five brothers, all five of whom, including the father, exercise their conjugal rights in turn. The family treats Kalki like chattel. Her only respite is her relationship with the family servant, Raghu, and the kinder treatment she receives from the youngest son...

Hamro is a scoundrel. After years spent in prison and living a dissolute life in Moscow, he returns to the Tadjik village of his birth. Hamro is a rugged, intimidating man, who has only enemies. He never goes out without a rock in his pocket, in case one of his many creditors runs into him and demands his money. Arriving home, he finds that his mother, Halima, is dying. He decides he must sell her house and belongings as soon as possible. His debts are long overdue and the townspeople are as tough as the city crowd he frequented in Moscow. Hamro immediately starts renovations on the house with a view to increase its price but also in order to grant his motherΥs wish for a decorative double gate that will allow her coffin to exit with dignity and not be lifted over the wall in humiliation...

A young man invites a girl to his home to make love and pays money for it. ItΥs a very simple story that tells of the impossibility of loving and it is really a tale about loneliness.

A young man and a young woman pursue each other through the streets of Tbilisi. They keep bumping into men carrying furniture, but they don’t stop. Wishing for some intimacy, they install themselves in an apartment. The electricity, the water and the gas arrive, along with a man who advises them discreetly about their private lives. Suddenly, with the consent of the other inhabitants of the building, the apartment is filled with the furniture. There is now room now for their love; everything is guarded by the annoying presence of a padlock.

China, 12th century. Qiuyoung Feng lives in a hut in the desert. He has never forgotten a beautiful women who has now become his sister-in-law since she married his brother. But she too has never stopped loving the man who abandoned her to go to war. Feng is visited by Huang Yaoshi, who lives secretly in love with the woman whom his friend loves, thus forming the vertex of a love triangle made up by a blind warrior and his wife, peach Blossom...

Rinko is a quiet, reserved woman in her mid-thirties. It is June, the rainy season in Japan. One day, Rinko receives an envelope inscribed "Your Husband’s Secrets". Inside, she finds photos of herself masturbating. Rinko and her husband, Shigehiko, are financially secure and share a peaceful, quiet marriage. Shigehiko is a workaholic and obsessively clean. He spends all his free time cleaning. Rinko loves her husband, but he does not touch her, and because of his obsessive nature they do not share a bed. And then the man who sent the photographs calls Rinko on the phone...

In the winter of 1972 twenty eight year-old Irene is arrested by the military regime for resistance activities and sent to Korydallos prison. Her imprisonment has a devastating effect on her life and the lives of the people close to her and upsets relationships and feelings. For her nine year-old daughter Olga her mother’s imprisonment makes her feel as though she has been abandoned. For her irresponsible and superficial ex-husband Manolis it is the moment when for the first time he shoulders the responsibilities of fatherhood. Irene’s childhood friend Vassia ? the two have always been inseparable ? unwittingly plays a catalytic role in the changing balances. In prison, Irene herself discovers another side of life and of herself. When she is released in August 1973 she finds that nothing is the way she left it. A film about the attempt of four people who love each other very much to prove worthy of their love.

Ah Wah is a small-time gangster. His female cousin Ngor is in town for medical tests and is staying in his apartment. Everytime Wah’s friend Fly gets into trouble, Wah rushes off to help him out. When Ngor returns to the island where she lives, Wah goes to visit her. After a passionate kiss in a phone booth, Ngor decides to spend the night with him. They begin a love affair which, however, is interrupted every time that Wah has to travel back to the city to help out Fly...

Rosa Maria, a young history professor, sets out with her daughter Maria Joana on a cruise through the Mediterranean to Bombay, India. This pleasure cruise allows Rosa Maria to show her daughter, and actually see herself for the first time, places which she talks about in her courses but has never visited. Traveling to Ceuta, Marseilles, the ruins of Pompei, Athens, the pyramids in Egypt, and Istanbul, their journey covers thousands of years of history, through the Mediterranean civilization that marked and still marks Western culture. On the cruise, Rosa Maria meets the ship’s American captain and three impressive women, well-known figures of different nationalities: a renowned French businesswoman, an Italian former model, and a Greek actress. But on the way to the Persian Gulf, a strange threat upsets the cruise, menacing the ship and the life of its passengers...

After the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, girls were once again allowed to go to school. But Noqreh’s conservative father maintains his belief that girls shouldn’t be educated, although he concedes sufficiently to allow her to attend Koran school. Off she goes each morning, pretending to honor his wishes, but after he drops her off she changes her slippers for high-heeled shoes and heads for a newly opened secular school, where girls learn self-respect along with everything else. In a class on politics, Noqreh begins to voice her dream of becoming president of her country, taking former Pakistani president Benazir Bhutto as her inspiration...

Everyone carries something, some burden that weighs him down. Some are crushed, others are freed, others just carry on. Eleven characters cross each others paths, unveiling their fears and desires, during the world weightlifting championship. A thousand kilos story, light as a summer breeze?

A touch of spice is the story of Fanis, a young Greek boy growing up in Istanbul, whose grandfather, a culinary philosopher and mentor, teaches him that both food and life require a little salt to give them flavor; they both require a touch of spice. Fanis grows up to become an excellent cook and uses his cooking skills to spice up the lives of those around him. Thirty-five years later he leaves Athens and travels back to his birthplace of Istanbul to reunite with his grandfather and his first love; he travels back only to realize that he forgot to put a little bit of spice in his own life...

"Not only did "Back and Forth" expand the possibilities of cinematic framing as postulated in "Wavelength"; it actually expanded the parameters of movie narrative as we’d previously recognized them, expanded them even beyond Godard’s bold effects in such films as "Weekend". For, in "Back and Forth", Snow was able to completely suffuse form and content, while not relinquishing the traditional elements of characterization and acting. The relentless back and forth pan stresses similar concepts which Snow had engaged in his sculptures and carries still further with experiments with perception and illusion which began in "Wavelength"." Gene Youngblood, L.A. Free Press

A portrait of the Basque country and people, seen not through their political problems but through an interpretation of their art and life. The film clearly shows the profound cultural autonomy of the region.

A haunting musical theme is heard throughout the film, alternating with the wind, which is both an obsession and a leitmotif. The film is a kind of opera, set against a backdrop of natural scenery, with real extras and protagonists who play their lives and play with their lives.

In the beginning, Laura is alone and doesn’t know what to do with her loneliness. So she tries to fill it with someone; someone nameless. After that, she wanders aimlessly and lonely through the streets. Laura has a sister, Sara, with whom she seems to have a strong bond; a relationship that works. It’s the same with her two children. Laura, her children, her sister: they’re a kind of family. With her husband, it’s a different story. Nothing works with him anymore, except for the things that are painful. Why do we keep on wanting someone we no longer love?

It is almost dark. A few people are waiting for the bus at a stop in the middle of nowhere. It is winter, with snow lying everywhere. They wait. Time stretches on through the fading light and the biting cold. And then an intruder appears. Is he drunk? He tries to get acquainted with a young lady but is chased off by a man in a fur. The woman almost intervenes to protect him. The intruder begins to cry. Everybody huddles around him protectively. There is no sign of the bus.

Esken is a little boy living in a mining village in southern Kazakhstan. It is the years following WWII, and Esken, curious by nature, proceeds to discover the world. On Saturday nights, the villagers get together and dance, while Esken plays his accordion. Life passes by peacefully, despite the fact that the Party watches over everything and arrests anyone considered to be an opponent of the rgime. One day, EskenΥs father is arrested and accused of allowing some Japanese soldiers Πnow prisoners living in the villageΠ to sit at his table...