Festival films

For twelve years she ignored sneers and mockery and stood up for her relationship. But perhaps that was a mistake.

Originally, there were the words you wrote me to initiate the images, far from here, alone. There, in Seville and Andalusia.

Philippe Cote

In this artful blend of suspense and black comedy, a woman who wants to find out the truth about the murder of her boyfriend finds out more than she ever suspected. When Sean is found dead after attending a particularly uninhibited party, his girlfriend finds it hard to believe that his passing was entirely accidental, and she begins doing some amateur detective work on the matter. In time, she discovers three minor-league public figures were the last to see him alive. The deeper the woman digs into the lives of these three, the more disturbed she becomes about the strange and sordid society that they inhabit, and she’s drawn into a dark netherworld of crime and corruption.

Adalbert’s Dream is a black comedy based on a real story that took place in a Romanian communist factory in the 80s. A work accident is re-enacted, but the re-enacting becomes a new accident, as the worker playing the victim gets his hand cut as well. The film is set in May 1986, the anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party, and the day following a historic Champion’s League football win for Romania. The main character, Iulica, is a technician whose life is turned upside down when he has to show two propaganda films on worker safety at the factory party.

Scenes from Pasolini’s films are intercut with interviews of people who worked with him and knew him, talking about the man and his work. An homage to the cinema and life of a director who was a major influence on Giannaris.

Streets covered with trash, countless bricks, buildings that keep springing up. A country being built from scratch. People’s faces – the people that are still there – reflecting the faces of those who are absent. A neighboring land that remains alien and unexplored.

In the forgotten corners of rural Virginia, Sheryl struggles to balance her work as a housekeeper and raising her two sons, fifteen-year-old Marc and eleven-year-old Stephen. Hoping to meet the love of her life and bring home a father for her boys, she frequents a depressing, weekly mixer for the town’s aging singles set. Meanwhile, Marc is desperate to lose his virginity, and spends his days working at a used car lot. His brother Stephen, in the throes of sexual awakening, becomes infatuated with his school teacher while hoping to win the approval of a group of peers who adamantly detest her. As it journeys with the family through their stagnant summer days, A Little Closer examines the disparate and nuanced states of sexuality, as well as the role familial influence can play within the disconnected landscape of rural America.

As the end of the summer of 1989 approaches, Alois Nebel, a train dispatcher at a remote railway station on the Czech-Polish border, starts to sink deeper and deeper into his memories. The shadows and ghosts from his past start to become unbearable, and Alois is admitted into a psychiatric ward, where he meets The Mute, a man who clings onto an old photograph. Based on a graphic novel trilogy, which was inspired by American comics of the 50s, socialist realism and motifs from traditional paper cut-outs (a form of folk art of the region), Alois Nebel uses the rotoscoping animation technique and black and white photography to enhance the cloudy shades of Alois’s psychological make-up. By using the historically and politically charged geographical location of the Sudenten area at the heart of Europe, and also the symbolisms that a railway station offers (uniting, moving and carrying people, ideas and history itself), director Tomas Lunak creates a dark tale, where tenderness and hope manage to creep into the grey layers of the heavy atmosphere.

Echoing the title of a definitive film in British cinema, A Matter of Life and Death captures an equally definitive reality of British society in the nineties: the scourge of AIDS that cost thousands of people their lives. What’s it like to live and die of a “big illness with a small name”? (segment of Out on Tuesday, a series shot for Channel Four)

A collage of pictures that are absolutely American, absolutely symbolic. The end of a war, the epidemic-like spread of a mentality through images. Only here they’re overturned, cut up, altered. What you feel and what you see don’t go hand in hand.

A road trip through inner America. Sixteen-wheelers, an open horizon, convertibles, the asphalt rushing by. The ultimate American experience. A truly cinematic journey.

Filmed again and again. Images imprinted on the subconscious. The Big Apple, “the city that never sleeps”, so many films. Can you look at New York with fresh eyes? Can you see behind its surface?

Sea and stone. White and blue. Monasteries perched on rocks. Wandering through a Greece that lives outside time, oblivious to the gaze of summer visitors.

From the mountains of Romania to the narrow streets around Omonia Square. Andreu wanders around the square – a city within the city. Wandering. In the real heart of Athens. In the light and darkness. In the gaze of others. In the lens of the camera.

The unflinching tale of Maria, Allan and Steso, who are struggling for survival. Maria is a “pusher frau” (drug mule), wandering restlessly among addicts, abusers and bikers in a relentless search for love. Allan has just returned from an ill-fated trip across the Pacific and must reclaim his life and stay clean, but ghosts from his past return to haunt him. Steso, the intellectual, god-forsaken and prophetic cynic, does his utmost to unite the two polar opposites that give meaning to his life: his girl and drugs. All three try desperately to make some sense of the madness, but how do you find meaning in the chaos that is life? And how do you find love if you can’t recognize it when you see it?

People in big cities. People in Vienna. Lonely people, whose dogs, rats, rabbits and other pets serve as conversation partners, companions, objects to be cuddled, and bedmates.

Athens, gateway to the West and, in the wake of the collapse of Eastern bloc communism, another train arrives carrying economic refugees. Amongst the flood of desperate poor is Panayotis, 18, Albanian and ambitious. Cruising the neon lit streets is Ilias, 35, handsome and solitary, looking for someone to distract him from the emptiness of his life. Against the chaotic backdrop of the modern city, these two characters are separated by race and bound by love, murder and their desperation to find their own place in the sun.

This is a short film about Emma, a deaf and mute girl. Because of her handicap, she lives a secluded life as an artist. One day, during the burial ceremony of her goldfish, she finds an unconscious young man in her backyard. She brings him to her apartment and looks after him. Emma starts to develop a relationship with the unconscious young man, but when he regains consciousness, things do not turn out as planned.

An intellectual is “exiled” as a schoolmaster to a little village in south-west Turkey. A village without roads, without electricity, covered in snow seven months out of the year. Those who persist in living there bear the marks of a continuous struggle against nature which seems eager to destroy them. The hero of the film experiences the inhuman conditions of this reality: the human misery and the impossibility of communication. In order to struggle against this, he must first get to know these highlanders for whom time has stopped somewhere in the depths of history. And then there are the children who, if they do not die by the dozen, are bearers of a wonderful will for survival.