Festival films

Zenon begins his day as usual. Precise and meticulous, as every embalmer should be, he begins preparing a body. His methods are swift and orderly, but the job he has been serving for so many years has something in store for him today. Something “outside the order of things.”

Eva, a young woman and a student of classical singing, decides to meet her father, who is unaware of her existence. Thomas works as a guard in a truck lot. He lives in a container and aspires to nothing. Their meeting will be a meeting of two different worlds and the relationship they develop will be all their own; a relationship beyond easy classification.

30: An important dinner and a shopping list. The last bottle of Tabasco in the supermarket. He has it. She needs it. There is only one way to win this game. 40: The anxieties and sexual fantasies of a 40-year-old woman are “exorcised” through dance. 50: Love gives Jeni a new perspective on monotony. The old clock, the window, the bottles and the elevator make her life exciting. She barely notices the other little inconveniences anymore: her husband and her life with him.

Otilia and Gabita share the same room in a student dormitory. They are fellow students at the university in this small town in Romania, during the last years of communism. One day, Otilia books a room in a cheap hotel. In the afternoon, they are going to meet a certain Mr. Bebe. Gabita is pregnant, abortion is illegal and none of them have gone through anything like this before. The film belongs to a larger project called Tales from the Golden Age – a subjective history of communism in Romania through its urban legends. The project’s aim is to talk about that period with no direct reference to communism, but only through different stories focused on personal options in a time of misfortune, when people had to pretend like everything was normal.

Director’s statement: “Electra is in her early 30s, living in Athens today. She is an artist, but she makes a living working as a babysitter. She is an activist and her boyfriend is a political prisoner. She feels lonely and is struggling to find her place in the world. We follow her as she meets the most important people in her life. Through these meetings, we understand better not only Electra, but also a whole generation of young people who feel stifled in this world. Capitalism, consumerism, globalization are currently being cast into doubt, so I needed to make a film that addresses all these things. What I’m interested in is showing how they affect our everyday life, our small decisions, our intimate relationships.”

Six months after the death of his wife in a car accident, Roberto and his teenage daughter Alejandra set off from Vallarta for a fresh start in Mexico City. Alejandra finds her feet more easily than Roberto but, very soon, she has aroused the baser instincts in her classmates. Alejandra is too ashamed to tell her father about the escalating bullying at school, however her silence ultimately takes a dreadful toll.

In hope of a better life, the Hungarian-Romanian family of circus artists escapes from the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania to the West in the early 1980s. Once there, however, if they want to stay in the ring they have to come up with something exotic. The mother devises a special act: she hangs by her hair from the circus dome. Her daughter Aglaya becomes terribly worried that her mother will fall to her death, and this fear becomes an everyday burden for her to bear. Yet one day – following family tradition – she herself becomes “The Woman with Hair of Steel.” The story is about the members of a refugee family of circus artists, their enforced interdependence, their eventual break-up, and the joy and curse of belonging together, as seen from the viewpoint of young Aglaya.

Aboard a freighter, somewhere in the Indian Ocean, the Danish cook of the ship can’t wait to return home to his wife and daughter. However, his desire is suddenly thwarted when a group of Somali pirates takes control of the ship and demands ransom from the shipping company in Copenhagen. The company’s CEO, with his considerable experience in financial negotiations, decides that he himself should carry out the transactions. Thus begins an exhilarating thriller at two different, co-dependent parts of the planet. On one hand, the helpless crew, imprisoned in the ship’s hold, waiting for help; and on the other, the company’s representatives, stuck in a tiny room and also unable to provide immediate solutions. With its masterfully developed rhythm and parallel narratives, the film conveys all the anxiety and terror, without ever forgetting the most important issue of all: the value of human life.

A short movie about three girls.

A young couple, Radu and Adina, are getting ready for the New Year’s Eve festivities. It is obvious that she is very much in love, while he is unsure of their relationship and his commitment to it. Radu breaks up with her during the night’s celebrations and goes from party to party looking for his ex-girlfriend, Nadia. He is convinced she was the only one who made him happy. Both the film’s narrative and its emotional exposition are honest and straightforward; but most fascinating is its social milieu, rarely explored in Romanian films. Radu belongs to a young generation coming from a comfortable middle class: his friends use American pop culture references, talk about astrology and other light fare, and go clubbing in nightclubs that could be anywhere in Europe. These people are not entirely without charisma, but they also seem relatively disaffected. Radu himself is not just unsure about women; he is unsure about his desires and life in general.

Here. And there. Here, Pedro returns to his village in Mexico and reconnects with his wife and two daughters, who have to get to know him all over again since they haven’t seen him in years. It doesn’t take long for Pedro to feel at home and become familiar again with people and places, and for him and his wife to have a third child, which adds even more to his financial worries. But his love is big. He tries to form a band, to work wherever he can, to spend time with his girls, to be there for his woman. There, stands America, from whence he came and to where, they fear, he might always return. In between places, Pedro’s feeling of being in limbo becomes tangible. Small everyday moments turn into scenes of incredible beauty and humanity, weaving together bonds, emotions and desires. Words are scarce in Aqui y αlla, rhythms are smooth, but their overtone clear.

Taisto sits in a cafe with his father. The father gives Taisto the keys to his convertible and urges him to do something with his life – right before he takes his own. With a broken car top, Taisto drives through snow and bad weather and arrives in Helsinki. One day, he is beaten up and all his money is gone, but he wakes up the next day as if nothing has happened and gets on with his life. Despite his bad luck, he meets the restless Irmeli. “Will you be gone in the morning?” she asks, after their first night together. “No, we’ll be together forever”, he replies and moves in with her and her son. When he comes across one of the men who hurt him, he decides to take revenge – with unexpected consequences.

In a remote place, a young woman receives letters form someone far away. She lives under the same roof with an older woman. A young postman arrives. A stray dog follows him from the very start. The three characters seem to lead separate lives, with no obvious connection between them. Still, as the story unfolds, the sender’s letters seem to interweave the three characters. Is it the sender’s voice or their own voices which they never listened to?

Maria’s last day of class marks the start of a journey: she’ll cross Mexico but doesn’t really know why. What she does know is that it isn’t a fun trip; she knows it’s not something to write home about, it’s something else, it’s a journey that began in the depths of her dreams and in her broken heart.

The story is set in a small harbor in the southern Peloponnese. Iordanis Kyroglou is a man of great power and a preacher in the Masonic lodge. Along with Yatrakos, his collaborator and police chief, he tries to collect information on the arrival of the cargo ship “Naomi”, which is carrying wheat from Panama to Israel. In anticipation of this ship, the stories of the main characters unfold: Abdullah Al Fakir, the leader of the Palestinian commandos; Sarah Ben Sussan, the Jewish daughter of Kyroglou; Kurt, leader of a Neo-Nazi group; the publisher of the local newspaper; and 17 young women who have arrived from the turbulent Balkans in search of a new homeland.

In Iranian Kurdistan, very near the border with Iraq, five brothers and sisters live at subsistence level. The younger boy has a serious illness. The medicine he takes is expensive, and the doctor says he must have surgery soon if he is to have a chance of surviving. Despite the efforts of the eldest brother who takes on lots of odd jobs, the family is unable to pay for the operation. So, the elder sister decides to marry an Iraqi who is prepared to give them financial help for the youngest boy to have his operation in Iraq. In the end, however, the future spouse’s family refuses to let the sick boy cross the border with them. Instead, They give him a horse. The eldest boy goes back to Iran with his brother, but time for the operation is running out...

K. is a doctor and this is the last day before his retirement. His children have moved abroad and everybody in town – his wife, his neighbors and his colleagues – are preoccupied with the riots and demonstrations in the streets. K. resorts to conversations with dead friends of his who comment on his life, since he has to decide what his future will be.

Led mainly by dialogues, the film tells the story of an encounter between three old friends. The darker soundtrack was fully recorded and edited prior to shooting. The title of the film is taken from the title of a poem by Gertrude Stein, suggested by assistant director Imri Kahn.

Beijing, 2012. San Bao is dumped by his girlfriend and fired by his employer, all in the same day. Worse still, his landlord has also kicked him out of the shabby apartment he can barely afford, and his dog, “Lucky”, has left him. In extreme distress, he attempts to end his life by lying across the train tracks and later by eating glass; but he survives both attempts. He ends up in the hospital where he shares a room with a transvestite poet/dancer who is obsessed with plastic surgery. Later, when he is released, he finds that the predicament of his circle of close friends parallels his own. Included in this group of Beijing outsiders are his best friend, a hotel car attendant whose girlfriend has dumped him for a rich guy, a composer/pub singer whose band has dumped her for someone more “connected” and his transvestite poet pal who is “not appreciated in his homeland.” As they struggle with their life predicaments in the glamorous, prosperous, modern metropolis called Beijing, they find solace and support in each other.

1976: Berberian Sound Studio is one of the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed and sharpened in this studio. Gilderoy, a naive and introverted sound engineer from England is hired to orchestrate the sound mix for the latest film by horror maestro, Santini. Thrown from the innocent world of local documentaries into a foreign environment fuelled by exploitation, Gilderoy soon finds himself caught up in a forbidding world of bitter actresses, capricious technicians and confounding bureaucracy. The longer Gilderoy spends mixing screams and the bloodcurdling sounds of hacked vegetables, the more homesick he becomes for his garden shed studio in his hometown of Dorking. His mother’s letters alternate between banal gossip and an ominous hysteria, which gradually mirrors the black magic of Santini’s film. As both time and realities shift, Gilderoy finds himself lost in an otherworldly spiral of sonic and personal mayhem, and has to confront his own demons in order to stay afloat in an environment ruled by exploitation both on and off screen.

A man and a woman, two casual acquaintances, learn that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other. This discovery drives them to do things they didn’t dare to do before. What will prevail—the feeling of jealousy or the passion? What to choose –revenge or forgiveness? The protagonists are looking for something to build a new life upon, but it is not easy: their every action is influenced by the fact of infidelity, and infidelity has its own logic.