Festival films

When staring at the evening sky, we revere the stars and try read the future, even if we are aware that the light that reaches us comes from stars that are long gone. A genuinely romantic experimental director (and student of Harun Farocki) seems to have as a starting point this charming paradox, as he attempts to imprint on the film’s photosensitive emulsion the movement of the stars in the skies. A sensual anatomy of the medium’s typical attribute – the dialogue between the rays of light and the palpable darkness in the cinematic apparatus – that takes us to another dimension, on the cinema’s eternal star boulevard.

The film approaches in an original way the devastating events of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising in 1973, starting from today.

April 4th, 1968. The Kallimarmaro Stadium is abuzz, with thousands of people gathered and millions listening through their radios. The AEK Athens vs Slavia Prague basketball game has just begun. A girl in love is dreaming of her wedding day, while the future husband becomes more desperate with every Greek ball going through the hoop. An elderly husband and wife remember the home they left behind. A young communist prisoner cheers from his jail cell and a betting shop becomes the place where old and new wounds resurface. Years before this night, three Constantinopolitans decided to create an athletic union that will tell their story. At the end of this night, Greek history will have changed forever.

When Maria, a young pregnant woman, is fired, she goes on a birth strike. A short film about a dream set in Athens, Greece.

Petros is an archaeologist who experiences the naked Greek paranoia in the center of Athens. Either by choice or coincidence, he comes into contact with people who are “different”: An Arab immigrant, who comes to Greece, a land of “infidels,” determined to conquer it by any means; a Greek-French cello player, who is burdened with the agony of her alcoholic mother; a young Albanian pianist, who carries the curse of his own personal genius and divinity; a Greek immigrant, who was repatriated but now has nowhere to call home; a bank director, who believes everything can be bought, even love; a patrolman, who creates his own version of socio-political reality. Petros’ contact with these people is in fact a traumatic experience. For each encounter, he has to pay a price. Sometimes the price is material, while other times it’s emotional. At times it is both. Will the experience gained make up for the loss?

On the 20th of December, 1989, a few days after Ceaușescu’s bloody repression in Timișoara, a father’s quiet evening turns to sheer ordeal as he finds out that his little son has mailed a wish letter to Santa. As the kid understood, his father’s desire was to see Ceaușescu dead...

In the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe on planet Earth, a new form of existence appears.

Auto-destructive Adelaide, prudent Julia, and complacent Carolina are three sisters that grow up under the gaze of their mother, a former winner of the “Miss Portugal” pageant who feels that ageing affects her maternal instinct. When the mother disappears during the celebration of her 50th birthday, the three daughters set off for a fiery journey of self-discovery, accompanied by an unexpected male company: a trip to the unknown that will soon end up in tragedy... A chronicle of one of the most controversial crimes ever committed in Portugal, through the lens of a great new talent.

Eight years after their separation, Abel meets Marianne in a funeral. Marianne has just lost her partner, father of her child, and former best friend of Abel. This tragic loss raises the spirit of Abel, who tries (and manages) to win back his former love. But as the lovers learn one another from scratch, Marianne’s son, Joseph, and Eva, Paul’s sister, who is in love with Paul for some years now, machinate in the background of their affair. A contemporary comedy of manners with utterly loveable, vulnerable people as protagonists, continuing the legacy of the French New Wave.

One hot summer in Buenos Aires, Marcela’s sister suddenly passes away. Now that she is the oldest member of the family, she’s called to erase the traces of the deceased, by purging her apartment and packing family heirloom. When a friend of her daughter’s offers to help, she finds refuge in their unclassifiable relationship, a place to hide from the cynical world and gain time as she tries to make sense of herself. A delicate elegy on the elements of surprise and finitude that give life its meaning, even when provoking a sense of vertigo.

In a yurt on the snow-covered fields of the North, Nanook and Sedna live following the traditions of their ancestors. Alone in the wilderness, they look like the last people on Earth. Their traditional way of life starts changing – slowly, but inevitably. Hunting becomes more and more difficult, the animals around them die inexplicably and the ice has been melting earlier every year. When Sedna’s health deteriorates, Nanook decides to fulfill her only wish: He embarks on a long journey in order to find Ága, their only daughter who has left the icy tundra a long time ago.

When a drowned girl's body is found, the local police start the investigations and come to the conclusion that it was an accident. A subsequent complaint requests the resumption of the inquiries and the new investigators come from Bucharest find that the girl was killed.

Somewhere in the industrial zone of Singapore, the most radically developing country in the world, people’s secrets are buried under the sand dunes of a reclamation site. As a sleepless police investigator follows the traces of a missing Chinese worker, an unexpected, immersive mystery unravels – parallel to the mystery of life of those who lost their sleep but keep dreaming, staying forever temporary in the vast landscape of global inequalities.

Alice, a buoyant and impertinent red-hair teenager is far from the charming little girl her mother adopted as she was unable to have a child of her own. Being an endless source of problems and affected by the specter of her mother’s disappointments, Alice acts with her back against the wall, forging lies and blurring lines between the fiction she designs for herself and the reality of her existence. Until her mother discovers she is pregnant. An affectionate prelude to the deeper process of self-knowledge.

A woman who is raped by a relative of her new boss chooses to heal her trauma with silence: She pretends that nothing has happened and tries to maintain her job and partnership routine, considering she will regain control of her life through reason, without falling into the role of the loser... Uncannily written long before the storm of #MeToo, this powerful story prompts us with disarming lucidity and subtle irony, to think of boundaries – between genders, superficial or inner expressions, our private or public faces – not as barriers, but as fragile fields of negotiating our integrity.

A young man who refuses to take life seriously – as is often told about people without a fixed job and relationship – falls in love with a woman who just moved to Paris. But soon after, his life is brutally interrupted by the sudden death of his sister. Beyond the shock and the pain, he now finds himself alone with his young niece Amanda to care for. The bond between a child that is forced to grow up in one night and an adult who is still attached to his childhood years is only one of the contrasts that move this unique film, which fits in less than two hours all the mysteries and marvels of our fluid lives.

Tony, a Greek immigrant, arrives in San Francisco chasing the “other” American dream.

Under the gloomy sky of a small town in northern China, the lives of different desperate people get intertwined in the course of one single, tension-filled day from dawn to dusk. A lugubrious tale of nihilistic rage, painting a portrait of a society marked by selfishness, leading its members to sacrifice what they value the most..

In the early 18th century, a boy from Africa is sold in Europe as a slave, he grows up in the circles of a countess who turns him into the object of an “ennoblement” experiment, until he ends up in the salons of a noble who forces him to perform stories about his exotic homeland, wearing a costume – a Scheherazade in charge of amusing high society’s ennui. His skin (and its color) will become the physical limit that separates him from his true love, but also the surface where discourses of exclusion and acceptance, memory and silence, and the genealogy of modern slavery will be inscribed.

Angelos, a young homosexual man, handles his diverse sexuality in a discreet way within a hostile and wretched environment. He meets and falls in love with a sailor called Mihalis, who persuades him to move in with him. Mihalis, adopting an attitude which mostly consists of emotional blackmailing, pushes Angelos into prostitution. However, life in the streets proves too hard and Angelos will not endure for long all this violent display of deprivation upon his body. Therefore, with all the love that’s left inside of him, he murders his lover... The film is based on a true event.

A young man from the province of France arrives in Paris to study Filmmaking, and he naturally gets training in all different challenges of art, friendship, love and political idealism. An autofictional – and by no means autobiographical – film made by an experienced director (and Filmmaking teacher) with the urge of a first-timer and reflective nostalgia, as an homage to the Mecca of cinematic mythology in Europe.