Festival films

Caught up in a maelstrom of stress and anxiety, we have convinced ourselves that time equals money. Everything must be executed swiftly and efficiently, without any delay. In our days, rarely do we take the time to take a look around us, to notice all the delicate details that go by unseen. What a waste of beauty! Such is the case of a lovely company of snails that performs a slippery choreography right before our eyes, using an airplane wing as their dance floor. Speed, like everything in life, is a matter of perspective...

An iceberg is cracking, the ice floe is breathing and a sled dog is howling... Electronic music producer Molécule cuts himself off in a hunters’ village in Greenland. He records the sounds of the Arctic to compose music. Inspired by his adventure, -22.7°C VR offers a sensory and introspective trip through the polar regions. Guided by the sounds, the user is in a deep listening state. Through an initiatory journey, they reconnect with Nature and their inner self. Users navigate between an “outer” dimension, where they discover a powerful, majestic but dangerous nature; and an “inner” dimension, where they face their feelings and fears. Little by little, these two dimensions merge and lead the user to a final state of harmony and communion with the universe.

An urban legend has it that a nine-year-old ghost girl occupies foreclosed apartments in downtown Athens and violently attacks real estate agents and prospective buyers. A young couple in love, eager to start their life together, will try to take advantage of the little ghost for their own benefit.

Algeria, 1994, in the midst of the civil war. A road-trip drama that follows two lifelong friends as they head to the Sahara desert in search of the titular terrorist, gradually facing mental breakdown and exhaustion. Reality and fantasy intertwine on the duo’s journey, which is as much metaphorical and emotional as literal, depicting the fragile inner state of two men cruelly accustomed to a life of constant threat, lurking paranoia and palpable terror. An absurdist western, full of striking symbolisms and pinches of surrealism, that reflects upon the corrosive power of war.

“I saw a man who had lost his way, I saw a man who was begging for his life,” describes the narrator, and these words could apply to any of the lonely hearts and lost souls that parade before our eyes, like exhibits in a tatty museum of human curiosities. An oddball comedy of devilish wit, which makes the humdrum seem unique and the mundane otherworldly, offering a sad but tender antidote to estrangement and disorientation. A series of lingering vignettes, in cafés, bars, train stations, apartments, and offices, made up of pale human buoys, yearning for our empathy and understanding.

Samia, a young pregnant woman out of wedlock, has left her village to secretly give birth to Casablanca, with the plan of giving the baby for adoption right away. Desperately knocking on doors, looking for work and help, she encounters Abla, a widowed bakery owner, living her 8-year-old daughter completely withdrawn from the outside world, as young widows are treated as prey by the patriarchal Moroccan society. A tender story of how people who have never met can impact strength and wisdom to one another, even unintentionally. A delicate homage to friendship and solidarity, that tackles aching issues, without wagering on preachy melodrama.

Adam, an erotically inexperienced teenager, visits his sister for the summer, who seems to date her way through NYC’s lesbian community. Introvert Adam struggles to grasp a new world of fluid gender identity and sexual openness, as he tags along behind his sister to queer bars and LBGTQI equality rallies. When he falls at first sight for attractive Glenn, she instinctively mistakes him for a trans male. Flummoxed and infatuated, he haplessly goes along with her false assumption. An offbeat comic tragedy of misunderstandings, of modest tenor and refined aesthetics, which walks down the bittersweet path to self-awareness.

Adam and Evelyn tells the story of a couple from the provinces of East Germany, over the summer and autumn of 1989. Adam is a freelance tailor who has built himself a comfortable niche outside conventions, while Evelyn is waitressing. After she surprises Adam in what she believes is an inappropriate embrace with one of his customers, she storms off. She makes for Hungary on holiday, taking not Adam, as planned, but her friend Simone and Simone’s West German boyfriend Michael. Adam travels after Evelyn. On the way to Hungary, he picks up Katja, who is trying to use the increasingly porous borders to escape to the West. Again and again, Adam opens his eyes, as though trying to wake from a dream.

In a village close to the West Bank border, 68-year-old retired engineer Meir (a fictionalized version of the director’s father) is abruptly falling out of place, as he has been removed from his long-lasting duties as the local festival’s organizer. Meir channels his frustration in an ambitious DIY project, in an attempt to restore his sense of vitality. His energetic devotion is an act of futile rebellion against the betrayal of his body, his injured masculine pride, the fading out of purpose in life. Blurring the lines between reality and fiction, a tender and redeeming portrait of aging and mortality.

Vangelis, a remnant of the rave generation, has reached his 34th year pushing weed and chasing after easy money. His neighbors’ threats force him to leave his house and find shelter at his sister’s home. There he will meet Petros, her fiancée and nightclub bouncer, and his life will take an unexpected turn.

The unbelievable yet true story of four young men who attempted to execute one of the most audacious art heists in US history. The four amateurs and makeshift robbers are not driven by a concrete materialistic motive or a revolutionary impulse. They are merely striving to spice up their dull, predictable and more than ordinary life with an artificial adrenaline injection. Α spirited blend of fiction and documentary elements that blurs the borderline between reality and imagination, proving that the truth, often enough, is nothing more than an illusion, a mere fraud of the mind.

It is deadly quiet on this lazy afternoon. The city seems abandoned, as if a disease has wiped out the population, except for a silent figure sitting on a bench. Old factories and their machinery, warehouses, train lines and shabby buildings in the city of Piraeus, are juxtaposed to ancient statues and moments. Two worlds co-existing and colliding at the same time, a distant past and a fading present. A four-minute poetic meditation on the stillness of time.

Giorgi from Bulgaria and Yuki from Japan, a married couple living in Canada, have traveled to Sofia, where Yuki is trying to get pregnant through in vitro fertilization procedures. When the doctor recommends rest, they decide to spend a few days in the countryside. Their carefree moments in the midst of an idyllic scenery are about to be shattered when a tragic incident, which propels them in a nightmarish world of torment and doubt, takes place. A story that deftly navigates the muddy waters of guilt and responsibility, placing its protagonists at the heart of an aching moral dilemma.

A low-key portrait of a family in emotional turmoil: Edward, suffering an existential crisis, is preparing to leave for a year of voluntary educational service in Africa. His mother and his sister decide to host a family gathering as a farewell party (or maybe as an attempt to talk Edward out of his plans), on a remote Cornwall island. Edward’s estranged father is yet to show up, two family outsiders have been invited, and the unspoken forces of rivalry and resentment bring the family’s buried anger and repressed tension to the surface.

One current question will decisively shape the life and appearance of our cities in 30 years: how much space do we want to give to autonomous vehicles? This VR experience is a journey forward in time to the year 2049, offering a first impression and a feeling for the very different visions of real cities in the future. Through a virtual tour of the cities of Frankfurt, Chicago, and Los Angeles in 2049, today’s users will conceive how deeply and comprehensively computer-controlled mobility will shape our everyday life and understand first-hand that transportation after the completion of digitization will be much more than the mere transport of people and things.

Makis, a peaceful winemaker, lives isolated on a small border island with his daughter. He is taken hostage by a dangerous fugitive. Makis will go beyond his limits in his efforts to prevent his daughter’s involvement with the criminal. Νow he has to face head-on the consequences of his actions.

After many years apart, three sisters reunite under their father’s rustic roof, when returning to their small village in the mountains of Anatolia, each for her own reasons. Between snowy mountain peaks, under their domineering father’s eye, the three women seem to repeat past mistakes over and over again, in a gloomy mesmeric tale that delicately blends Chekhov and the Grimm brothers. Set against a breathtaking unearthly landscape that turns at night into a fearsome land of hidden dangers, life is depicted as an eternal parade of recurring patterns – many scenes even seem to happen twice – which leads inescapably to disaster.

Sara, a single mom in her early twenties, lives in a flat provided by social services, in the outskirts of Barcelona, odd-jobbing and striving to salvage her relationship with her son’s father. One day, she bumps into her own father and her instant reaction is to run for the hills. It’s all about suggestion and what remains out of the shot, in this Dardennesque portrait of a tormented soul: just hints and nuances of a toxic past. A steady-handed naturalistic drama, where the camera sticks to the protagonist like glue, allowing us an inner glance at her redemption journey.

Whether it’s freezing cold or steaming hot, indoor or open-air, stepping on a surface of turf, tartan track, wood or ice, with teammates or all by themselves, a group of distinguished delegates of the animal kingdom engage in all kinds of sporting activities, proving that sports is incompatible with ostracism and discrimination. Taking delight in a delirious variety of sports, ranging from football and archery to table tennis and ice hockey, these beloved wild animals adapt to the circumstances of every challenge, on the basis of their personality and anatomy. A series of tiny short clips function as a sweet reminder that failure can only occur through lack of trying.

2025, Ukraine, in the aftermath of a devastating war. The area is deemed unsuitable for habitation, the environment is irreversibly ravaged, people are drifting like spooks, struggling to eke out a rudimentary sense of living. Sergiy, a former soldier tortured by PTSD, joins a voluntary team that digs up soldiers’ corpses from unmarked graves. The emotionless identification of the decomposed cadavers is intertwined with the brutality of the dystopian landscape of mud, metal and spouting smoke. A post-apocalyptic tale that seeks hope in the hopeless and squeezes out a drop of affection in the midst of a desert-like human wasteland.

Cowboy and Indian have come up with a brilliant gift idea for Horse’s birthday, but their plan backfires and ends up in a complete disaster: they made a tiny mistake ordering fifty million bricks instead of the fifty needed, crushing their friend’s rooftop. This unfortunate event triggers off a series of wacky, often hallucinatory, adventures, in which the trio journeys to the center of the earth, wanders across icy tundra and discovers a strange aquatic world inhabited by oddball beings with pointed heads.