Festival films

“This film was made earlier in 1994. I called home less and less, and somehow felt it was like a duty to do so. One day, after I had just moved to a new apartment, I realized how aging my mother sounded on the phone. Her childhood’s black and white picture and telephone were all I can relate to her here.”

127 Hours is the true story of mountain climber Aron Ralston’s remarkable adventure to save himself after a fallen boulder crashes on his arm and traps him in an isolated canyon in Utah. Over the next five days, Ralston examines his life and survives the elements to finally discover he has the courage and the wherewithal to extricate himself by any means necessary, scale a 20 meter wall and hike over 12 kilometers before he is finally rescued. Throughout his journey, Ralston recalls friends, lovers, family, and the two hikers he met before his accident. Will they be the last two people he ever had the chance to meet?

Aphrodite is 13 years old. Her friends call her Ten Ten. Aphrodite is in love with Lou. Aphrodite wants to grow up.

He would like you to remember him. After a serious motorbike accident, a 37-year-old famous actor dies during surgery. Well, not exactly. There is a small amount of oxygen left in his brain – just enough for one more breath, which he will use to recall the memories of a lifetime... He will tell you all about it, because he really wants you to remember him.

In today’s age of financial insecurity, with young people earning 600 euros a month and so unable to move into a place of their own, Christina, a young store clerk, decides to leave home and rent her own apartment, thus choosing to live beyond her means. This step will distance her from the world she knew up until then and will bring her in contact with a different, more sensitized world, like the one represented by Fotis, the young man who rented her apartment before her, and whom Christina comes to know through the personal belongings which he left behind.

Aardvark is perhaps the first narrative film to star a man blind since birth. In a role inspired by his own life, Larry Lewis plays a solitary man recovering from alcoholism and working towards stability. When he joins a Jiu Jitsu academy, he finds a close friend in his young, hard-partying instructor, Darren. But, as disturbing aspects of Darren’s life are revealed, Larry soon finds himself alone and faced with the consequences of a horrific act of violence.

“A 10-minute color animation depicts the creation of the first man and woman out of dots, circles and lines. The couple has scores of children, distribute the little dots all over the place, and reserve a few to put into their pram. Suddenly, the pram starts to shake violently and there is an enormous explosion. Marek’s face flashes on screen, after which we see him as creator/animator reconstructing the world.”
Alex Gerbaz

Two friends are walking down the street, so deeply absorbed in their newspapers that they are quite unaware of anything going on around them. In front of a fashionable department store, a red-haired beauty appears! Both friends, enchanted and wildly in love, set out to win the girl. Finally, a “third man” arrives. He is the shop-owner who removes the mannequin from the street and closes the store.

Jacob is an idealistic man who works at an orphanage in India. By his own choice, Jacob is a Danish citizen who hasn’t lived in Denmark for 20 years. His orphanage is always in desperate need of funds and when Jorgen, a Danish businessman, contacts him about a large donation, he imposes a condition on Jacob: he must come to Denmark to sign their contract. As it happens, Jacob’s arrival in Denmark coincides with the wedding of Jorgen’s daughter, and Jacob is invited to join the festivities. There, Jacob discovers that the mother of the bride (his benefactor’s wife) is in fact the love of his youth, Helene. The wedding becomes a landmark meeting of the past and the future and puts Jacob before the dilemma of his life.

On New Year’s holidays, Mariana and Rodrigo drive to the remote south Pacific coast of Costa Rica. There they find seven-year-old Karina, who tells them she ran away from home because her uncle touches her. They decide to stay the night and try to find help in the morning. But by dawn, the girl is gone and hundreds of poisonous sea snakes swim out of the water due to unusual cold currents.

As the film opens, a young girl is browsing through a family photograph album. Her childhood memories are brought to life, static pictures begin to move. Memory is transformed into a metaphor for the past, finally turning into dreams of the future.

An ancient manuscript; a well-kept secret; a price no smaller than Mankind itself. When a scientist solves the riddle leading to the discovery of an ancient alchemy which transforms any metal into gold, the mob gets in his way to steal the secret and conquer the world at any cost. Only one man can stop them and destroy the alchemy before it falls into their hands. Both of them are in this death race, in which the runner-up never reaches the end...

The film is comprised of shots of the interiors of houses in the evening. They are all deserted except for one house that is inhabited by a group of young soldiers, played by some teens from Nabua. Two of them impersonate the director by narrating the film.

Annette Frick as a portrait photographer is considered one of the most essential documentarians of Berlin’s underground scene; a trusted participant. In this film, which forms a trilogy together with Det ist erst de Probe and Kranke Welt, her cityscapes become like her portraits: an insider’s perspective.

Harassed during daytime, in the evening he runs away from people and the town. Dreaming brings him infinite, quiet spaces of solitude. At last, he is alone and free! But solitude engenders fear. Αwakening cuts the panic short. A ray of sunshine and the proximity of people. She comes, too. They meet.

John Sayles winds the clock back to 1900 and the US occupation of the Philippines. Sayles finds many parallels behind this little-remembered event in history and current events in Iraq and Afghanistan. As always, he provides a clear, lucid and dramatically compelling portrait and analysis of American colonization and the latent imperialism behind some of its wars. The film revolves around the occupation by a squad of US soldiers of a small, rural village. Headed by a respected elder, whom the Yankees refer to as “Amigo,” the villagers are forced to deal with this foreign presence as rules are set, curfews introduced and small attempts at democracy initiated. But the most significant tension in the film lies in the village’s relationship with a rebel group leading the resistance to the occupation. Amigo’s brother is the rebel leader, and his son runs off to join them, so he constantly finds himself torn between balancing what is right for the village and what this means to his family.

What gives Hollywood prints that special look that non-Hollywood films cannot achieve? A series of tests by Putz demonstrate how, in popular films, the multiple copying necessary to produce thousands of prints affects the visual result.

Where do you fit? Where’s your place and where do you belong? For J. Cody, the task of answering these questions will mean making the hardest decisions of his life. When his mother dies from a drug overdose, he turns to his estranged grandmother for help. He is immediately situated in the middle of a vendetta between his criminal uncles, his manipulative grandma and the police, as an apple of discord that will determine lives. One of the uncles, the unstable Pope, is wanted for armed robbery; his younger brother, the high-strung and unpredictable Craig, is addicted to speed; and the youngest of the family, the naive Darren, tries to follow the criminal ways of his family. On the other side of the rivalry, police office Leckie can tell that J. is different than his relatives and tries to help him escape from their influence. A family thriller that investigates the inevitable collateral consequences – and damages – of crime, with the intensities and the violence climaxing internally and externally in a predefined one-way road, with no signs of an exit.

For the first time in her life, little Annie is faced with a true coincidence. It’s Bo, who has never met a girl before...

Everything’s quiet when you’re in the water. No one can hear you. You don’t have to speak. You don’t even have to breathe. Dimitri, a 23-year-old swimmer, knows too well the liberating isolation of the water and frequently dives to the bottom of a pool to let his thoughts and memories surface. His relationship with Elsa keeps coming back to him and, as Dimitri moves between the past and the present, he remembers details, like the swimming lessons he gave Elsa, or her activism towards saving the dolphins. Her disappearance throws Dimitri’s disciplined life off balance and becomes the starting point for the unfolding of a story about memory, personal and collective responsibility, lost opportunities and love.

In the heart of the historic and multicultural center of Athens, in the midst of summer, three young people with a passion for the arts come together in the musical and visual arts scene. Ilia, front woman of the band Stiletto Scag, is searching for her place in the limelight. Alexandros, a street artist, must deliver a mural to his sponsor. And Andreas, a senior at the National Theater School of Drama, is trying to make ends meet while rehearsing exhaustingly for his finals. Three days are enough for them to disrupt the “social truce”, when their expectations are shattered by the multi faceted “establishment”, whether it be the law or simply mainstream culture.