trigon-film Collection

First presented and highly debated at the 1980 Venice Film Festival, this film became the legacy of the late Glauber Rocha, who noted: "A idade da terra (The Age of the Earth) is the decomposition of the narrative sequence without losing the infrastructural discourse that is supposed to materialize the most representative signs of the Third World. The film offers a symphony of images and sound or is an anti-symphony that puts the essential problems into the background. This film can only be classified in this way: He is my portrait next to the portrait of Brazil." As someone writes on Imdb, the film is not ideal for an audience that is afraid of experimental and controversial works. Anyone who appreciates Glauber Rocha and his radicalism understand this film as a single rebellion that was to become Glauber Rocha's last rebellion: The committed and enraged Brazilian, who had a major influence on "Cinema Novo", died in 1981 from the consequences of a lung infection.

Brazil

152′

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A King and His Movie (1986)

Carlos Sorin

Argentina

103′

The Film of the King is a film within a film. Influenced by travel accounts of his time, the Frenchman Orélie Antoine set off for southern Argentina around 1860. Once there, he had himself proclaimed king of Araucania and Patagonia what led to his expulsion from the country by the Argentinian government. More than one hundred years later, Carlos Sorín turns this absurd venture into the story of a film director who wants to make a film abut it and fails in light of certain circumstantial adversities. Out of the film about the adventurer emerges the adventure of a film.

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A peine j'ouvre les yeux (2015)

Leyla Bouzid

Tunisia

102′

Set on the eve of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, the first feature from director Leyla Bouzid follows an up-and-coming underground band as they are pulled in all directions by creative energy, authoritarian oppression, and rebellion. As I Open My Eyes (À peine j'ouvre les yeux) gives us a look at Tunisian youth on the eve of the Jasmine Revolution as they are pulled in all directions by conflicting forces: disenchantment, fear, creativity, rebellion against dictatorship, rejection of conservatism, and the courage to pursue their desires. Farah (Baya Medhaffer) is a young woman at a crossroads. Her medical-school application has just been accepted, and nothing could please her mother, Hayet (Ghalia Benali), more - but Farah's passion is for music, and her underground band is just beginning to get noticed. Their music blends rock with daring lyrics that have the raw poetry of spoken word. Soon enough, the police are alerted to the band's subversive performances and begin to harass them, and when Farah is detained and interrogated, she realizes that one of her friends is a snitch. (tiff)

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A Touch Of Zen (1971)

King Hu

Taiwan

179′

A lady fugitive on the run from corrupt government officials is joined in her endeavors by an unambitious painter and skilled Buddhist monks.

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Ablakon (1986)

Roger Gnoan M'bala

Ivory Coast

81′

A city with its problems. A gang of abandoned children provide for themselves and pose as heroes. The police are on their backs day and night. They are enterprising, energetic, and full of fresh vitality. Despite the fact they are rejected by their parents and ignored by the world, they form among themselves a powerful example of solidarity. Ablakon is something of a different order. He is an adult delinquent and a swindler. Posing as a businessman, he has deceived a countless number of people. When he and his accomplice return to the village, his extravagant behaviour is mistaken for a sign of success. Following his example many young people leave for the city. But they will soon understand their mistake...

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After the Curfew (1954)

Usmar Ismail

Indonesia

103′

A little-known, passionate tale of a revolutionary hero returning to civilian life after the liberation from Dutch colonial rule that took top honours at Indonesia’s Citra Film Awards, 1955. Lewat Djam Malam (After the Curfew) is a passionate work looking directly at a crucial moment of conflict in Indonesian history: the aftermath of the four-year Republican revolution which brought an end to Dutch rule. This is a visually and dramatically potent film about anger and disillusionment, about the dream of a new society cheapened and misshapen by government repression on the one hand and bourgeois complacency on the other. The film’s director, Usmar Ismail, is generally considered to be the father of Indonesian cinema, and his entire body of work was directly engaged with ongoing evolution of Indonesian society. He began as a playwright and founder of Maya, a drama collective that began during the years of Japanese occupation. And it was during this period when Ismail developed an interest in filmmaking. He began making films for Andjar Asmara in the late 40s and then started Perfini (Perusahaan Film Nasional Indonesian) in 1950, which he considered his real beginning as a filmmaker. Lewat Djam Malam, a co-production between Perfini and Djamaluddin Malik’s company Persari, was perhaps Ismail’s greatest critical and commercial success.

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Akasen Chitai - Street of Shame (1956)

Five fates of women from Tokyo's brothel district in the 1950s are the focus of Kenji Mizoguchi's last film, who devoted the majority of his works to the historical and social situation of Japanese women. The theme is shaped by socio-critical commitment, human sympathy and unspeculative openness.

Japan

86′

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Al asfour - The Sparrow (1972)

Youssef Chahine

Egypt

102′

The Sparrow fascinates with its parallel strands of action. The various ways of encountering a criminal trader, namely by a police officer and a journalist, are ultimately only traces that lead to the tip of an iceberg: the corruption of Egyptian society on the eve of the Six-Day War.

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Al Leil - The Night (1990)

Mohamed Malas

Syria

114′

Mohamed Malas was born in 1945 in Syria's Kuneitra, not far from the border with present-day Israel, which destroyed the important Kuneitra traffic junction in the Six-Day War. Now Malas flashes back to the time between 1936 and 1967. In Al Leil he depicts the childhood of a boy who, as an adult, reconstructs the footsteps of his father, the times of constant absence. One day he hadn't appeared at all after having fought for democracy for years and hardly found time for his family, for his private life. The boy grew up with his mother. Through her, the boy also learns a part of his father's story.

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Alive (2009)

Artan Minarolli

Albania

90′

Twenty-two-year-old Koli is studying at Tirana university. When he hears of his father’s death, he returns to his native mountain village in the north to attend the funeral. During a walk through the countryside of his childhood, someone takes a shot at him. In a state of shock, the young man discovers that he is part of a blood feud sparked by his grandfather sixty years earlier. He goes to see the family to whom, according to custom, he owes his life - and, in doing so, he makes the acquaintance of the murderer whom fate has determined will take it. Away from his modern urban environment, Koli suddenly finds himself in a world of ancient, inexorable rituals, from which he is unable to extricate himself even after his return to Tirana. How deeply entrenched in people are the traditions of their forebears? And to what extent are they able to accept them as part of their modern, superficial lifestyle? How far-reaching is the perception of one’s own destiny and affinity with one’s roots? Director Artan Minarolli dedicated his film drama to the eighty-six illegal immigrants who drowned off the coast of Italy during an attempt to flee their native country in March 1997.

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Alps (2011)

Yorgos Lanthimos

Greece

93′

A Nurse, a Paramedic, a Gymnast and her Coach have formed a service for hire. They stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends, or colleagues of the deceased. The company is called Alps while their leader, the Paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc. Although the Alps members operate under a discipline regime demanded by their leader, the Nurse doesn’t.

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Alyam, Alyam (1978)

Ahmed El Maanouni

Morocco

87′

Set in a small village in the Moroccan countryside, Alyam, Alyam tells a story culled from the lived reality of young men almost forty years ago while still remaining very much of the present day. A young man named Abdelwahed pins his dreams of a better life for himself and his family on travelling to France and finding work there. As the eldest of eight children, he becomes the principal caretaker and breadwinner for his family after his father passes away. He fills out forms and waits for his work permit to arrive. Meanwhile, Hlima, his recently widowed mother who’s reticent to let him go, tries in vain to dissuade him and enlists the help of Abdelwahed’s grandfather too. As the days flow by to the cadence of life in the countryside, marked by the hardships of farming, Abdelwahed waits. All he can do is wait. Straddling fiction and documentary, Alyam, Alyam is Ahmed El Maanouni’s first narrative feature, and the first Moroccan film ever to be selected at the Cannes Film Festival. Recently restored, the film’s splendor and finely crafted editing has become available once again for cinéphiles and new generations to discover.

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Andrej Rubljow (1966)

An expansive Russian drama, this film focuses on the life of revered religious icon painter Andrei Rublev. Drifting from place to place in a tumultuous era, the peace-seeking monk eventually gains a reputation for his art. But after Rublev witnesses a brutal battle and unintentionally becomes involved, he takes a vow of silence and spends time away from his work. As he begins to ease his troubled soul, he takes steps towards becoming a painter once again.

Russia

175′

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Antonio das mortes (1969)

The action of the movie takes place in the sertao, the desertified Northeast backlands of Brazil, that is traditionally beyond the rule of law, and that was the site of some of most enduring folklore. The sertao is the region of myth, encapsulated by the historical world of progress symbolized by the highway. The tale employs the cast of folklore characters: the colonel of the ranch; his mistress; the colonel's sidekick; the colonel's enforcer; local bandits (typical of the gangs that grew up in the region either as enforcers or as rural poor abandoned by a patron who lost a local battle); a group of millenialists (similarly, typical of groups of disenfranchised rural poor); the local teacher, a dependent of the colonel. «Antonio das Mortes» is a character at at war with himself.

Brazil

99′

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Aparajito (1956)

Satyajit Ray

India

109′

The second part of Satyajit Ray's famous Apu trilogy, this Indian drama focuses on young Apu, who lives with his mother, Sarbajaya (Kanu Bandyopadhyay), and father, Harihar (Pinaki Sengupta), near the Ganges River. When Harihar dies suddenly, Apu and Sarbajaya move to a small village to be near relatives. Eventually, she reluctantly allows her son (now played by Smaran Ghosal) to attend school in Calcutta. As Apu acclimates to life in the city, Sarbajaya struggles with his absence.

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Bab el-oued City (1994)

Merzak Allouache

Algeria

92′

Bab El-Oued, a popular district of Algier, in 1989, a few months after the riots. Young Boualem works six nights a week in a French bakery. On the rooftop of his apartment building the fundamentalists have installed a loudspeaker which is now broadcasting the Imam's word and the fundamentalist's hateful propaganda and therefore preventing Boualem from sleeping. Unable to stand the noise any longer, in a fit of madness, he destroys the loudspeaker and throws it into the sea. But he's quickly filled with guilt and apprehension for what he has done. Desecrating the property of the mosque is a sin, and now he finds himself in a relentless pursuit. The blunder is taken as a pretext by the Islamists to put the district under their control...

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Bamako (2006)

Abderrahmane Sissako

Mali

117′

The beautiful woman Melé is a bar singer, her husband Chaka is out of work. The couple that lives in Bamako, the capital of Mali, is on the verge of breaking up... In the courtyard of the house, where they live together with other families, a trial court has been set up. African civil society spokesmen have taken proceedings against the World Bank and the IMF, whom they blame for Africa's woes... Amidst the pleas and the testimonies, life goes on in the courtyard. Chaka does not seem to be concerned by this novel Africa's desire to fight for its rights.

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Banana Pancakes and the Lonely Planet (2015)

Daan Veldhuizen

Lao, People's Democratic Republic

96′

When backpackers visit a small village in remote northern Laos in search of a traditional experience, the inhabitants of the village discover the attractions of the West. Two worlds meet at the crossroads of their respective desire; the one longing for authenticity, the other for modernity. In this micro-cosmos, their encounter leaves no one unchanged and tells a poetic story of friendship and how we relate to each other in a rapidly changing world.

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Banshun - Late Spring (1949)

Yasujiro OZU

Japan

108′

Twenty-seven-year-old Noriko lives with her widowed father, a university professor, in a small house in the tranquil surroundings of northern Kamakura. He is completing a scientific manuscript, aided by his assistant, Hattori. Professor Sonomiya is concerned for his daughter s welfare, and one day suggests she marry Hattori. Noriko only laughs at his suggestion because she is quite happy with her life and knows that Hattori is already engaged. Her aunt Masa, the professor s sister, is the next person to try out her matchmaking skills, and she talks Noriko into meeting Mr Satake. Although Noriko quite likes him, she rejects all thoughts of marriage because she doesn t want to leave her father all alone. When she meets Professor Onodera, an old friend of her father s, in a museum one day and he tells her that he has just remarried, Noriko can hardly disguise her dismay. One of Ozu's favorite themes is the opposing desires of and friction between members of a family even though they feel deep affection and loyalty to each other. Inevitably, these interactions within a family, and particularly the problems which arise between parents and children, will result in some sort of separation. For Noriko it is the separation of marriage, in other Ozu stories it may mean being employed away from home or death. While Ozu is saddened by these events, he also recognizes that they are unavoidable. This awareness of the inherent transience and sadness of human existence is what the Japanese call mono no aware." Beverley Bare Buehrer

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Barravento (1962)

Rocha's film debut: The fishermen in a village in Bahia on the north coast of Brazil have to rent their net from a trader and give up 90 percent of the catch. What's more, the net owner keeps threatening to take their tools away from them. The black community, like two years later in "Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol", does not rebel; they endure exploitation by the white crook in the belief that one day the gods will help it out of their misery. Firmino, a young man with new ideas who has returned from the city to his village, rebels against fatalism. He cuts the fishermen's net, which belongs to the merchant, in order to persuade them to help themselves. Glauber Rocha, in his first work, draws not only the rhythm of his sequences, but also the essence of his narrative from the sometimes calm and sensual, sometimes excited and inexorable play of sea and earth. By describing the simple life of the slave descendants, he anchors his film in reality. The film resembles a free, unleashed poem and still grips today through the charisma of its images.

Brazil

81′

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Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Sergej M. Eisenstein

Russia

49′

The revolution film par excellence, here in the German needle-tone version of 1930: The film presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers. Battleship Potemkin was named the greatest film of all time at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958. In 2012, the British Film Institute named it the eleventh greatest film of all time.

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Behaviour (2014)

Ernesto Daranas

Cuba

108′

Eleven-year-old Chala (Armando Valdés Freire) lives with his addict mother Sonia (Yuliet Cruz). In order to provide for the two of them, he raises carrier pigeons and trains fighting dogs with a man who may or may not be his biological father. School provides a stabilizing force in Chala's life, thanks to his close relationship with his spirited sixty-something teacher, Carmela (Alina Rodríguez). When the boy is sent off to live in a "re-education facility" and Carmela mounts a campaign to have him released, she becomes the target of a witch hunt spearheaded by a school board administrator who regards Carmela's permissive beliefs as incongruent with the new Cuba. But the idealistic, strong-willed woman remains defiant and manages to recruit allies from amongst her fellow teachers, leading to a conflict in which one boy's future reflects the systemic dynamics of contemporary Cuba.

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Black Peter (1963)

Although sixteen-year-old Peter would rather lie by the swimming pool watching girls, he instead has to monitor customers in a supermarket to make sure they don't steal anything. He has problems at work, for example when he sees a suspicious customer in a supermarket but doesn't dare to talk to him. At home, he constantly receives teachings from his pedantic father; his girlfriend has laid eyes on someone else. With amateur actors and Jan Nemecek's poetic camera work, young Miloš Forman captures the authenticity of ordinary summer days in a small Czech town in the early 1960s. At the same time he expresses the feelings of awakening rebellion in the youth of the Eastern Bloc, just a few years before the Prague Spring. A seismographic film and a strong contemporary document.

90′

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Bodhi Dharma (1989)

Yong-kyun Bae

South Korea

137′

Three people live in a remote Buddhist monastery near Mount Chonan: Hyegok, the old master; Yong Nan, a young man who has left his extended family in the city to seek enlightenment, and an orphan lad Haejin, whom Hyegok has brought to the monastery to raise as a monk. The story is mostly Yong Nan's, told in flashbacks: how he came to the monastery, his brief return to the city, his vacillation between the turbulence of the world and his hope to overcome passions and escape the idea of self. We also see Hyegok as a teacher, a protector, and a father figure, and we watch Haejin make his way as a curious and nearly self-sufficient child.

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Borges - Los libros y la noche (2000)

Tristan Bauer

Argentina

79′

To celebrate the centenary of Jorge Luis Borges' birth, Tristán Bauer has created a very stimulating film essay: Skilfully, respectfully and poetically, he mixes archive documents, conversations and photographs of the writer's life, which reflect Borges' political stance, his problems with the Perón regime and his international successes. Tristán Bauer does not limit himself to a historian's work, he subtly reconstructs the writer's world: infinite fountains of the strange library of Babel, numerous corridors, circles, mirrors, stairs and hexagons.

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Melodrama and thriller, social drama and love story in one, the masterly feature film by the Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, made in 1958, is located entirely on the station grounds. The old Madbouli is the owner of a kiosk at Cairo's main railway station. One day he finds a half-starved, poor man at the edge of the tracks. Madbouli feels sorry for the sad-looking, limping farmer Kenaoui and hires him as a flying newspaper salesman. At work, Kenaoui meets the beautiful Hanouma every day, who also earns her living at the station by supplying travellers with lemonade drinks. Kenaoui falls for the cheerful woman and makes it his goal to marry her. Lonely and in obsessive longing, he cuts out lightly dressed women from magazines in his hut at the edge of the train station in the evening, hanging his walls with them. Although he knows that Hanouma is already promised to the suitcase porter and trade unionist Abou Serih, one day he reveals his feelings to her and proposes to her. Her rejection, soaked with mockery and ridicule, drives Kenawi further into a rage-drenched obsession for Hanuma. Restored version.

Cairo Station (1958)

Youssef Chahine

Egypt

73′

Bonus: Why Chahine?

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Che, un hombre nuevo (2010)

Tristán Bauer

Cuba

134′

The latest documentary by Tristan Bauer took 12 years to complete. It is a unique and invaluable historical document — a jewel not to be missed—that offers us a different, more intimate and personal, perspective on the life of Ernesto Che Guevara than other films about him that have emerged recently. Presenting brilliantly edited archival material, including private documents and intimate recordings that have never been made available to the public before (including recordings of Che reading poems by Vallejo and Neruda to his wife, intimate family gatherings on 8mm, a speech given by Che in French), Bauer allows us to see the iconic figure as a hero but also as the larger-than-life passionate and idealistic human being that he was.

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Chevalier (2015)

Athina Rachel Tsangari

Greece

105′

In the middle of the Aegean Sea, on a luxury yacht, six men on a fishing trip decide to play a game. During this game, things will be compared, measured and blood will be tested. Friends will become rivals, but at the end of the voyage, when the game is over, the winner will wear the victorious signet ring: the "Chevalier".

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Cinco dias sin Nora (2009)

Mariana Chenillo

Mexico

92′

Before dying, Nora devises a plan to make José, ex-husband, take care of her funeral. But she misses something-the only flaw in the plan, a mysterious photograph left under the bed, will lead to an unexpected outcome that will remind us that sometimes the greatest love stories are hidden in the smallest places.

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Class Enemy (2013)

Rok Biček

Slovenia

112′

Due to a huge difference in the way they perceive life, the relationship between the students and their new German language teacher becomes critically tense. When one of the students commits suicide, her classmates accuse the teacher of being responsible for her death. The realisation that things are not so black and white comes too late.

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Closely Watched Trains (1966)

The young Miloš Hrma, who speaks with misplaced pride of his family of misfits and malingerers, is engaged as a newly trained station guard in a small railway station during the Second World War and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He admires himself in his new uniform, and looks forward, like his prematurely-retired railwayman father, to avoiding real work. The sometimes pompous stationmaster is an enthusiastic pigeon-breeder with a kind wife, but is envious of the train dispatcher Hubička's success with women. Miloš holds an as-yet platonic love for the pretty, young conductor Máša. The experienced Hubička presses for details of their relationship and realizes that Miloš is still a virgin. The idyll of the railway station is periodically disturbed by the arrival of the councillor, Zednicek, a Nazi collaborator, who spouts propaganda at the staff without success. At her initiative, Máša spends the night with Miloš, but in his youthful excitability he ejaculates prematurely before achieving penetration and then is unable to perform sexually; and the next day, despairing, he attempts suicide. He is saved, and a young doctor explains to him that ejaculatio praecox is normal at Miloš's age. The doctor recommends Miloš to "think of something else" (at which point Miloš volunteers an interest in football), and to seek the assistance of an experienced woman. During the nightshift, Hubička flirts with the young telegraphist, Zdenička, and imprints her thighs and buttocks with the office's rubber stamps. Her mother sees the stamps and complains to Hubička's superiors, and the ensuing scandal helps to frustrate the stationmaster's ambition of being promoted to inspector. The Germans and their collaborators are on edge, since their trains are being attacked by the partisans. A glamorous Resistance agent (a circus artist in peacetime), code-named Viktoria Freie, delivers a time bomb to Hubička for use in blowing up a large ammunition train. At Hubička's request, the "experienced" Viktoria also helps Miloš to resolve his sexual problem. The next day, at the crucial moment when the ammunition train is approaching, Hubička is caught up in a farcical disciplinary hearing, overseen by Zednicek, over his rubber stamping of Zdenička's backside. In Hubička's place, Miloš, liberated by his experience with Viktoria from his former passivity, takes the time bomb and drops it from a semaphore gantry, that extends transversely above the tracks, onto the train. A machine-gunner on the train, spotting Miloš, sprays him with bullets, and his body falls onto the train. With the Nazi collaborator Zednicek, winding up the disciplinary hearing, dismissing the Czech people as "nothing but laughing hyenas" (a phrase actually employed by the senior Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, the implicit retort to his jibe comes in the form of a huge series of explosions that destroys the train. Now Hubička and the other railwaymen are indeed laughing - to express their joy at the blow to the Nazi occupiers - and it is left to a wistful Máša to pick up Miloš's uniform cap, hurled across the station by the power of the blast. (wp)

89′

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Crossing the Dust (2006)

Shawkat Amin Korki

Iraq

73′

The gripping story of two Kurdish soldiers, Asad and Rashid, who celebrate with their comrades the downfall of Saddam on 9th April 2003 before being ordered to take food supplies to another remote part of the country. As they hit the road, they come across a lost 7-year-old arab boy called Saddam crying at the side of a highway. They decide to save him and protect him until they find his parents. In the process one of them gets killed. Crossing the Dust is an absorbing portrait of the societal strains that began to emerge in the aftermath of the quest to topple the Saddam Hussein.

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Daratt (2006)

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Chad

92′

After a forty-year civil war, the radio in Chad announces that the government has decided to grant amnesty to all war criminals. Outraged by the news, Gumar Abatcha orders his grandson Atim (Ali Bacha Barkai), a 16-year-old youth, to trace the man who killed his father and to execute him. Atim obeys him and, armed with his father's own gun, he goes in search of Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro), the man who made him an orphan before he was born. It does not take long before he finds him. Nassara is running a bakery. Unexpectedly, the taciturn Nassara takes Atim under his wing as the son he never had and begins teaching him how to run the bakery. The emotionally conflicted Atim is drawn into the life of Nassara and his pregnant wife (Aziza Hisseine), before a finale that Variety described as "sharp, fast and unexpected."

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Das Mädchen mit der Hutschachtel (1927)

Boris Barnet

Russia

93′

Can you find happiness in the big city? The young hat maker Natascha, who lives with her grandfather in a suburb covered in winter snow, has to commute by train from the village to Moscow to deliver her creations to the extravagant Irene's hat shop. For the administration, Irene claims Natascha to be her subtenant in order to be able to have more living space. The clumsy railway official woos the lovely country girl with his ravishing smile. But she enters into a fictitious marriage with the provincial Ilya in order to get him a room in Moscow. With an apparently worthless lottery ticket, which Irene's husband gives to Natascha, the entanglements become turbulent. Boris Barnet describes the contrasts between city and country and the new living conditions in Moscow in a stylish and socially critical way. Three great acting talents, Anna Stén, Iwan Kowal-Samborski and Vladimir Fogel, form the triangle of relationships. Originally ordered as a vehicle to advertise the State Lottery, the film made the studio rich and the natural talent director Boris Barnet famous as the founder of lyrical comedy.

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Den muso - the daughter (1975)

Souleymane Cissé

Mali

85′

A young mute woman is raped and becomes pregnant, with disastrous consequences within her family. The film also sketches the social/economic situation in urban Mali in the 1970s, particularly in relation to the treatment of women.

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Dersu Uzala (1975)

A military explorer meets and befriends a Goldi man in Russia’s unmapped forests. A deep and abiding bond evolves between the two men, one civilized in the usual sense, the other at home in the glacial Siberian woods. The film won the 1976 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the Golden Prize and the Prix FIPRESCI at the 9th Moscow International Film Festival and a number of other awards.

Japan

136′

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Die seltsamen Abenteuer des Mr. West im Land der Bolschewiken (1924)

Lew Kuleschow

Russia

77′

Travelled to the Soviet Union with many prejudices, the American businessman Mr. West has to correct his view of the Soviets after several adventures at the end of his journey. Silent movie grotesque that ironically glosses the erroneous opinions of the West about the USSR. A film historical document worth seeing. (Dictionary of International Cinema)

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Downpour (1972)

Bahram Beyzaie

Iran

130′

Bahram Beyzaie’s debut feature about a well-meaning schoolteacher in Tehran who's embattled by changes of fortune, was enormously successful in its time, but had fallen out of view in post-revolutionary Iran. This version presents the film as restored in 2011 by the World Cinema Foundation at Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna/L’immagine Ritrovata laboratory, with the involvement of Bahram Beyzaie himself.

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Drunken Angel (1948)

In this powerful early noir from the great Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune bursts onto the screen as a volatile, tubercular criminal who strikes up an unlikely relationship with Takashi Shimura’s jaded physician. Set in and around the muddy swamps and back alleys of postwar Tokyo, Drunken Angel is an evocative, moody snapshot of a treacherous time and place, featuring one of the director’s most memorably violent climaxes.

Japan

98′

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Ecuador (2012)

Jacques Sarasin

Ecuador

75′

In a world of one-way traffic, where the northern countries are exporting their economic and political model worldwide, one country in Latin America has undertaken a profound reform of these models to invent a new type of governance, both pragmatic and humanistic. The country in question is Ecuador. Rafael Correa, an established economist, who came to politics as a man on a mission, was elected President in 2006. Since coming to power, he has transformed a country with archaic structures into a social, independent, ecological and participative democracy. He has given Ecuadorians genuine reason to believe that the rigid structures of the past were no longer inevitable, that ordinary citizens had their word to say, and that, at long last, their voices would be heard. This film is intended for everyone, from rich and emerging countries alike. It suggests concrete perspectives to a new way of living the phenomenon of globalization. It shows that political, ecological and economic alternatives do exist. This film is not a film about Ecuador; rather, is about a political project, where utopia became reality. It is a film of ideas and reflections, suggesting solutions to the current crises besetting the globe. It proposes a real debate on the future of our society

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Eduardo Falú (2009)

Oliver Primus Arno Oehri

Argentina

81′

This documentary is a poetic journey to the unique music of the Argentine maestro Eduardo Falú (1923 - 2013). At the same time it is a vivid portrait of this outstanding musician. Starting from his particular relationship with the landscapes of northwestern Argentina, with his beloved hometown Salta, with the vast plains of the Pampa, the enormous mountains of the Andes with their dramatic canyons, fertile valleys and deserted high plateaus, the film follows the manyfold stations of Falús life and career.

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Ein launischer Sommer (1968)

Capricious Summer is a Czechoslovak comedy directed by Jiří Menzel. It is based on the novel Rozmarné léto (Summer of Caprice) by the Czech writer Vladislav Vančura. It was listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was cancelled due to the events of May 1968 in France. The film depicts a humorous story of three men, a colonel, a priest and a bath-keeper, during rainy summer days.

76′

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El lado oscuro del corazón (1992)

Oliverio is a young poet living in Buenos Aires where sometimes he has to sale his ideas to an advertising agencie in order to make a living or exchange his poems for a steak. One night he meets a prostitute in a bar in Montevideo. Her name is Ana and soon he falls in love with her. Back in Buenos Aires, he accepts a contract with a publicity agencie to get the money for three days of love with her. Will he get what his searching for when his ideal of love's pleasure is literaly going in levitation while making love?

Argentina

127′

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El mudo (2013)

Daniel und Diego Vega

Peru

87′

After a short investigation, the police concludes that the shot that almost killed justice commissionner Constantino Zegarra was in fact a stray bullet. But Constantino, convinced that someone wants him out of the way, re-opens the investigation. This soon leads him to exceed his own powers to prove he is right.

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El otro (2007)

Ariel Rotter

Argentina

80′

Juan Desouza is a 38 years old argentinean businessman, whose life is going to change after a simple business trip: having arrived at the destination, he realizes that the man that sits next to him is dead. Thereupon he decides to adopt the identity of his neighbour, to create himself a new job, find a new apartment and to possibly not return to his own life. Suddenly Juan experiences nature as an adventure, discovering his senses and instincts. And after all new perspectives open up: His previous life suddenly isn't the only possibility anymore...

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El rey de San Gregorio (2006)

Alfonso Gazitúa Gaete

Chile

80′

“The King of San Gregorio” is a story about a pure and simple love. The film talks about the life of Pedro Vargas – who plays himself – a 30 years-old man living in the slum of San Gregorio and presents a physical handicap and a certain grade of mental disability. Nevertheless, none of these factors will stop him from being the protagonist of this beautiful love story with his “princess” Cati, a girl who has a severe mental disability. As any other romantic drama, there are antagonists who do not approve this love. Pedro’s mother, María is hard to accept that her man-son is in love and she is even willing to prevent the relationship. Besides, the frustrated sister of the female protagonist, Marta, fears the sexual arouse of Cati, interfering in her relation with Pedro. Nevertheless, Pedro struggles for being with his princess, entrusting to God and to the wise advices of Juan, an old man who teaches him how to believe in love. • Pedro Vargas - Chief Character Known as “the King” in San Gregorio hood, Pedro Vargas is a 30 years-old man, who presents a certain grade of physical and mental handicap. Nevertheless, he is a very sensitive, romantic and optimistic person. He strongly wishes to live the intense love he feels for his princess Cati, in a place beyond clouds. Cati, the princess – (María José Parga) She is Pedro’s sweetheart. She is a very beautiful green-eyed girl of a naïve aspect. She is 28, but looks younger since she is especially delicate. She presents a severe handicap, because of a poliomyelitis she underwent when she was 3. Due to this illness, she nearly can’t speak and when she does, she uses very short words. She is always laughing and it seems she is always thinking about another thing. The only thing she wants is to be with Pedro and when her sister forbids it, she cries and has violent attacks of nerves. She has a kind of obsession with the Dorothy, the character of the “Wizard of Oz” • María – (Gloria Münchmeyer) Explosive and melancholic, María - Pedro´s mother and his main antagonist - is a 64 years -old widow who works as a domestic servant. Her strong black eyes are her most outstanding feature. She is very over-protective with Pedro, not only due to his handicap, but also because he is her only child. In this context, María emphatically objects his son´s relationship with Cati. • Marta – (Giselle Demelchiore) Marta is Cati´s sister and the second antagonist in the story. She is 34 and in spite of being very pretty, she looks neglected, dark and sad. Due to the mother desertion, Marta takes care of her sister and it is the reason why she has postponed herself deciding to live alone with no boyfriend. She fears for Cati´s relationship with Pedro and especially for her sister sex life. • Juan – (Andrés Rillón) He is Pedro’s mentor and he is the one who will help Pedro to achieve his goal of being with Cati. He is 73, bald, with a neglected face and he moves in a noisy and old wheelchair. He is hypochondriac and has an ironic sense of humor.

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En el nombre de la hija (2011)

Tania Hermida

Ecuador

102′

En el Nombre de la Hija tells the story of a nine-year old girl whose name is in dispute. Manuela has been named alter her socialist-atheist father, but her catholic-conservative grandmother insists she should carry the name the first daughters of the family have carried for generations: Dolores. The story takes place in a Valley in the Ecuadorian Andes, during the summer of 1976. Manuela and her little brother, Camilo, are spending vacations with their cousins and grandparents at the family's farmhouse. Eager to defend her father's ideas, Manuela confronts her cousins and grandparents, but an unexpected encounter leads her to confront herself instead. Hidden in the family's abandoned library, schizophrenic uncle Felipe is devoted to setting words free from the constraints of dogmas. His wisdom sets Manuela free from her own dogmas and forever changes her relationship with words, including her own name.

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Eternity And One Day (1998)

Eternity And A Day traces the final days of Alexandre (Bruno Ganz), a celebrated Greek writer as he prepares to leave his seaside home forever. While packing, he finds a letter from his long-dead wife, Anna (Isabelle Renauld), who wrote about an enchanted summer day they spent thirty years ago. From that point, Alexandre embarks on a mystical journey through his past and present. Realizing that after spending his entire life chasing after the words of poems and novels, Alexandre wants one final chance to capture the lost precious moments of true happiness, even if only for one day.

Greece

133′

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Finye (1982)

Souleymane Cissé

Mali

105′

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Firemen's Ball (1967)

A volunteer fire department throws a party for their former boss with the whole town invited, but nothing goes as planned.

73′

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Fireworks Wednesday (2006)

Asghar Farhadi

Iran

102′

The film portrays three couples on the eve of Nouruz, the Iranian New Year. Rouhi, a young woman who is about to get married, takes a small job as a cleaner in an apartment in northern Tehran to finance her marriage. When she arrives in that apartment, she finds herself in a heated dispute between Mojdeh and Morteza. Mojdeh suspects her husband Morteza of cheating on her and her neighbour Simin, and obliges Rouhi to shadow them. Rouhi gets more and more between the fronts of the fighting couple.

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Fish & Cat (2013)

Shahram Mokri

Iran

135′

A group of students decides to camp on a desolate Caspian region which runs a competition of kite flying during the winter solstice. Not far from the camp, live Babak and Saeed, two grim cooks. Armed with sharp knives, they roam the forest in search of meat to serve the decrepit restaurant they run nearby. The second feature film by Shahram Mokri (premiered in Venice), "Fish & Cat" is inspired by the true story of a restaurant that served human flesh and its aesthetic proposal is a tour de force: a film shot in a single take (by the director of photography, Mahmoud Kalari), combining formal experimentation and suspense horror film with a sense of humor that is rare in Iranian cinema.

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Frenzy (2015)

Emin Alper

Turkey

119′

Istanbul is in political chaos. Armed groups have taken control of the shantytowns. The police response is brutal. In the midst of this, two brothers are drawn into the violence. Kadir is released after a 15-year prison term and goes in search of his younger brother Ahmet. Meanwhile, Istanbul is in the grip of political violence. Hamza, a high-ranking police officer helps Kadir find a job as an informer. He collects garbage, checking to see whether it contains material related to bomb-making. Ahmet works at the municipality as part of a team responsible for destroying stray dogs. When Ahmet shuts himself up in his house to care for a wounded dog, Kadir thinks he is being threatened by terrorists. Kadir relays his concern to Hamza, who sends the police to investigate.

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Fukushima - No Man's Zone (2012)

Toshi Fujiwara

Japan

105′

A man wanders through the 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the stricken nuclear reactors at Fukushima. The cherry trees are in bloom and the natural surroundings make an idyllic impression. Radiation is invisible, yet a gaping emptiness looms where the tsunami engulfed streets and houses. The man is wearing normal clothing, just like the people still toughing it out here, for the time being at least. He occa- sionally encounters white "ghosts" in protective clothing, performing strange tasks. As in Tarkovsky’s STALKER, the zone in Fujiwara Toshi’s NO MAN’S ZONE is both a place and a mental state. A gradual disintegration began long before the destruction and devastation, a process defied for the most part by the old people our "Stalker" encounters. A voice accom- panies the filmmaker’s wanderings, that of Armenian-Canadian actress Arsinée Khanjian, a voice from a place of exile, unfamiliar and sympathetic. NO MAN’S ZONE is a complex reflection on the relationship between images and fears, on being addicted to the apocalypse, on the ravaged relationship between man and nature. For the zone to be decontam- inated and returned to the people, nature itself will have to undergo an amputation.

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Gion Bayashi - A Geisha (1954)

In the post-war Gion district of Kyoto, the geisha Miyoharu agrees to apprentice the 16 year-old Eiko, whose mother was a former geisha who had just died. After a year of training they have to find a large sum of money before Eiko can debut. Miyoharu borrows the money from the tea-house owner, Okimi, who in turn obtains the money from the businessman Kusuda. Kusuda fancies Eiko himself and wants to give Miyoharu to Kanzaki in order to close a large business deal. However both geishas have minds of their own and, going against tradition, want to be able to say no to clients.

Japan

85′

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Gito (1992)

Léonce Ngabo

Burundi

87′

Gito is a Burundian student who lives in Paris. When he finishes his studies, he decides to go back to his country and promises his French girlfriend that he will call for her when he becomes a minister, something that he is convinced will happen. However, he loses gradually his ambition as he's confronted with the country reality and starts going out again with his childhood love. Nevertheless, he will make the best of a bad deal, with the help of the two women of his life. A delicious comedy.

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Golden Slumbers (2012)

Davy Chou

Cambodia

100′

A nocturnal drive along a rural highway into a city at dawn that is somehow moving in the wrong direction. It is only after a while that you notice that the vehicles are travelling backwards, receding back into the dusk of reality. This mysterious metaphor forms the starting point for a journey into the unknown history of Cambodian film. Nearly 400 films were made in Phnom Penh between 1960 and 1975, only 30 of which survive today. The Khmer Rouge burnt them or allowed them to decay along with many of the country’s studios and cinemas. Most of those involved in the film industry became victims of the genocide. Director Davy Chou, the grandson of one of the most important film producers of the Golden Age’ of Cambodian cinema, uses his film to reconstruct the country’s cinematographic legacy. He goes about his work like an archaeologist, recognising how impossi- ble it is to actually speak to survivors about a life’s work destroyed but not forgotten. LE SOMMEIL D’OR undertakes a painstaking search for fragments of memory in the present, whether in the form of lobby cards, songs on YouTube or a visit to a karaoke bar housed in what used to be a film studio, and gradually coalesces into a strikingly vibrant memorial.

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Gorod Zero (1989)

Karen Schachnasarow - Shakhnazarov

Russia

97′

Karen Shakhnazarov, the director of Anna Karenina (2017) belonged to the young talents of the cinema of change in the former Soviet Union during the 1980's. The comedy Gorod Zero (Zerograd) is one of the best examples of those years. The film is refreshing in that it thinks through the absurdities of the Soviet everyday life and it shows that the path that was called perestroika back then, has to be a long one. Moscow engineer Alexey Varakin visits a small town on a business trip, where his adventures begin. He meets a naked secretary at a local factory, a prosecutor who wants to commit a crime and other strange characters. The film was selected as the Soviet entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 62nd Academy Awards.

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Half moon (2006)

Bahman Ghobadi

Iraq

108′

Renowned old musician Mamo has been granted permission to perform a concert in Iraqi Kurdistan. His faithful friend Kako will drive a school bus and help gather together Mamo's ten musical adult sons, scattered throughout Iranian Kurdistan. Mamo is determined to make this trip across the majestic landscape despite all obstacles. The old Kurdish musician has waited some 35 years for the chance to perform freely again in Iraqi Kurdistan. Mamo even ignores his son's premonition that something awful awaits him before the next full moon. Mamo is convinced that the essence of the upcoming performance is the celestial voice of a woman. He has chosen Hesho, who lives in a mountain retreat with 1334 other exiled female singers. Old Mamo must persuade reluctant Hesho to join them, because her self-confidence and voice have been weakened by oppression. Since women are forbidden to sing in front of men in public in Iran, Hesho must be carefully concealed in the bus. The journey of Mamo and his musical group is not without difficulties. But persistent Mamo guides everyone toward adventure, emotion and magic ...

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Hana Yori mo Naho (2006)

Hirokazu KORE-EDA

Japan

128′

The time is 1702. A young samurai, Aoki Sozaemon (Okada Junichi) has left his countryside hometown, and is now living in Edo (now Tokyo), in search of Kanazawa Jubei (Asano Tadanobu), the man who killed his father. He is living in a dilapidated tenement house, in the poor quarters of the city of Edo. His neighbors in the so-called "row houses" are all good, solid folk who can never even hope to rise out of the squalor of their surroundings. Sozaemon, the provincial samurai, becomes friends with a variety of characters including a habitual drunk, an unsuccessful would-be petty official, a ragman, a perky girl, a doctor, and a scrivener. As the relationships between the characters unfold we are led deeper in the blossoming love story of Sozaemon and the beautiful widow, Osae (Miyazawa Rie). Although he has never forgot his task to find his father's enemy and to succeed in his vengeance, being around Osae and her son, Sozaemon feels a warm feeling inside, which leads to doubts about the entire act of revenge. However, to walk away from the "revenge-act (ADAUCHI)", could actually bring his entire family down, not only without the reward from the Shogun, but also, as a samurai, to be unsuccessful on revenge would be an act of cowardice, and a disgrace to the entire family name. Sozaemon, still not being able to decide on if he should take the act of revenge, goes on with his everyday life, teaching the neighborhood children mathematics, reading and writing. He wonders whether he can ever enjoy life without the specter of revenge and swordplay. With the discovery of the rich meaningful life rather than the meaningless death of a warrior, Sozaemon, together with his strange friends at the tenement row house, decides to plot an act of the lifetime...

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Herencia (2001)

Peter travels from Germany to Buenos Aires to find the woman he fell head over heels in love with some time ago and who wants to live with. But he doesn't know much more about her than her name, an address that is no longer true, and the memory of enchanting moments. He meets Olinda, who runs a local restaurant and was herself stranded in Argentina half a century ago in search of her great love.

Argentina

92′

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Highway (2012)

Deepak Rauniyar

Nepal

72′

A man from Kathmandu and his wife have been trying unsuccessfully to have a child. The man travels to the mountains of eastern Nepal to seek help from a miracle healer. The healer indeed has a magic potion for him but tells the man he must get back to his wife within thirty-six hours for the medicine to work. The bus that winds its way through the narrow streets, hills and valleys of Nepal is full of people who all need to be somewhere else in a hurry - to meet an internet chat lover, bring someone some money for medicine, or to visit their parents. But the travellers are obliged to stop again and again on account of general strikes, traffic jams, breakdowns and angry villagers. Some of these obstacles are overcome by the passengers themselves, who get to know each other during the trip - they even dress up as a wedding party in order to be allowed to keep moving. Meanwhile, at home, everything has changed ... Deepak Rauniyar’s first feature-length drama is a road movie that is full of surprises and passion; it is also an unflinching portrayal of life in Nepal today.

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Histoires drôles et drôles de gens (1983)

Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa

Cameroon

84′

An African storyteller, humorously and kindly, talks about how some of his fellow countrymen are emulating the habits of white people and "Their stuff". He thus presents several cases to prove his point. In one of them a supposed to be planter and businessman who underpay an employee gets framed by his own folks. A young boy jumps from a high tree with an open umbrella to copy the way the parachutist do in the city. A few other examples are as pathetic or comical. At the epilogue our storyteller finds himself being laughed at, at a bistro in Paris. The way he deals with the situation is kind, and again humorous.

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Hombre mirando al sudeste (1986)

Man Facing Southeast is a drama-science fiction film fro Argenina, written and directed by Eliseo Subiela. It was selected as the Argentine entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 60th Academy Awards.

Argentina

109′

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Honeymoons (2009)

Goran Paskaljevic

Serbia

92′

In hope of a better life, two young couples leave their respective countries. Melinda and Nik leave Albania by boat for Italy, in order to be able to live out their forbidden love. Vera and Marko leave Serbia by train for Austria, traveling through Hungary. Marko, a talented cellist, has the opportunity to enter the renowned Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. But upon their arrival at the border, and even though their visas are in order, their problems begin. Despite the fact that they have nothing to do with a serious incident that took place the night before in Kosovo, and because of unfortunate coincidences, they are arrested. Their hope to realize all their dreams in Europe, synonym for the Promised Land, disappear. As is often the case with young people from the Balkans, they are paying for the previous generations' mistakes.

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Hope (2014)

Boris Lojkine

Nigeria

92′

The hope of a better life in Europe comes at a high price. Nigeria is separated from the gateway to Europe on the Moroccan coast by more than 3'000 kilometres. During a journey organised by smugglers through the Sahara, Hope, a young Nigerian, meets Cameroonian refugee Léonard. Although snubbed by him, Hope remains at his heels. She knows that Léonard is the only chance she has of surviving this journey. Director Boris Lojkine shot this award-winning drama on location along the world’s most frequented migration route, and uses the story of its two protagonists to make tangible the tragic fate of many refugees.

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Hyènes (1992)

Djibril Diop Mambéty

Senegal

111′

In Colobane, people expect the return of Linguère Ramatou, a former local girl now rumored to be richer than the World Bank. But her generosity has its conditions: she offers a check of ten billion for the death of Dramaan Drameh who refused to admit that he was the father of her child 30 years ago. "Life made made me a whore, now I'm turning the world into a brothel" she tells the citizens of Colobane.

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Idiot (1951)

The Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky wanted to show a really good person in his well-known novel "The Idiot". Ironically, he chose an idiot. The Japanese Akira Kurosawa realized his obsession with the film adaptation of the book: The depiction of the necessary failure in an unjust society. It is an adaptation in the best sense, as the filmmaker transfers the material to the cold Japanese island of Hokkaido. The eponymous hero returns home after an absence and fails because his naivety prevents him from defending himself against the intrigues.

Japan

166′

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If Only They Ain't Had Them Bands & Audition (1963)

Bonus: Audition - Talent Competition

34′

The first part leads us to the rehearsals of a small town brass band. Its authoritarian bandleader commands the collection of amateur musicians. Among them is the young, shy trombonist Vlada, who is thinking of sneaking away from the upcoming festival because he wants to see a motorcycle race taking place at the same time. The second part follows a group of young singers applying for the Semafort Theater. Hundreds of young girls have come, some of them talented, some not, some beautiful, some less. Some are very shy, others very ambitious. Among them is a girl named Vera, a semi-professional singer who should have no difficulties.

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Ikiru (1952)

Kanji Watanabe has worked in faithful service at a municipal complaints office and looks forward to retirement when he learns that he suffers from stomach cancer and has only a few months to live. The news makes him realize how much he has wasted his life on bureaucracy and how little his own son cares for him. Kanji Watanabe finally wants to enjoy his life as well as he can. He dives into the nightlife, drinks, plays, dances and realizes that all this makes him no less lonely. One day, Watanabe remembers some women from a poor neighborhood who had applied for a playground for their children. Now he wants to help realize the playground, and he fights against the resistance of that bureaucracy, which he himself has helped to shape throughout his life in order to give his life a meaning.

Japan

137′

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Ivans Childhood (1962)

The background of Andrei Tarkowski's first feature film is the Second World War, with the 12-year-old boy Iwan at the centre. As part of the official programme of films, it is still astonishing today how the Russian managed to shoot a film that stood across the system and showed the war from the perspective of a boy. Iwan seems totally hardened after losing his family and escaping a camp, he sees little prospects and quite simply wants to avenge the death of his loved ones. Tarkowski shows his masterly skills in cinematography in this early oeuvre. Using simple means, he tells the story in incredibly strong black-and-white tableaux.

Russia

91′

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Ixcanul Volcano (2015)

Jayro Bustamante

Guatemala

91′

María, a 17-year-old Kaqchikel Maya, lives with her parents on a coffee plantation at the foot of an active volcano. She is set to be married to the farm’s foreman. But María longs to discover the world on the other side of the mountain, a place she cannot even imagine. And so she seduces a coffee-harvester who wants to escape to the USA. When this man leaves her behind, María discovers her own world and culture anew. Director Jayro Bustamante grew up in the region of the Kaqchikel Maya in Guatemala and returned there to make his film. He held workshops, asked people to tell stories from their own lives and examined the current living conditions of the Maya at close range. In doing so, he learnt about the special connection the women there have with the rituals of their mothers and grandmothers. The plot picks up the rhythm of a life defined by ancestral beliefs and traditions. An unfamiliar daily routine awaits the audience, far from the globalised world. IXCANUL is not a film about Indigenous culture but one that was developed from within it.

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Jiri Menzel - To Make A Comedy Is No Fun (2016)

Robert Kolinsky

In 1968, Czechoslovakian director Jiří Menzel wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film with CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS - his first feature film ever. Only one year later his next film LARKS ON A STRING is banned by the government. But Menzel decides to stay in socialist Czechoslovakia and continues working as director and actor for theatre and film. His comedies and costume dramas are a commercial success, gently testing the boundaries of authorities with his well hidden political messages. Today, filmmakers like Miloš Forman, Ken Loach, Emir Kusturica or István Szabó are amongst his admirers and friends. JIRÍ MENZEL - TO MAKE A COMEDY IS NO FUN tells the story of this exceptional filmmaker for the first time.

79′

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Journey to the Sun (1999)

Yesim Ustaoglu

Turkey

109′

A story of friendship, courage and a politically naive man’s transformation into someone painfully aware of the social realities in contemporary Turkey ... Mehmet and Berzan, two young men from different regions of Turkey bond together as lower - class citizens in Istanbul. When Mehmet is unjustly arrested, his frightened roomates evict him and he loses his job. Mehmet’s loyalty to Berzan will eventually force him to disregard an uncompassionate bureaucracy and embark on a journey eastward across Turkey.

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Ken Bugul (2015)

Silvia Voser

Senegal

64′

Ken Bugul is a Senegalese writer who lives in Africa, where her soul is anchored. She has had an exceptional life. Silvia Voser’s film shows her as an iconic figure of the female condition and of relationships between Africa and the West. Ken Bugul is considered one of the most brilliant writers in Senegalese and French of these past decades. Over the years, thanks to her great command of the French language and the uncompromising care she takes with the wording of the meaning of Wolof vocabulary, her mother tongue, her novels have become absolute references in the realm of linguistic studies. "What you read in French in my novels is how we think and speak in Wolof in my village". Ken Bugul’s personal story is overshadowed by Africa’s turbulent history. She was born in 1947 in an isolated village in Senegal, at that time a French colony. Her father was 85 years old and her mother left them before Ken turned five. This was a fundamental event in Ken Bugul’s life. In spite of lacking a mother’s love, she was full of energy and a yearning for freedom, and she received an exceptional education for a village girl of that time. In 1971, she left for Europe to go to university and there she met people from the upper middle class and discovered new ideologies and liberties, modern art, drugs, alcohol, loneliness, incomprehension and disdain, and prostitution to relieve her need for affection. As she says in "The Abandoned Baobab": "For twenty years all I had learned was their thoughts and their emotions. I thought I’d have fun with them, but I ended up even more frustrated. I identified with them, but they didn’t identify with me." She came back to Senegal, a broken, lonely and penniless young woman. People thought she was crazy and she was rejected by her family and society. For two years, she slept in the streets of Dakar, hanging out with outcasts, beggars, prostitutes and artists. Dirty, hungry, almost naked, she started writing her first novel, "The Abandoned Baobab". Worn out, she decided to go back to her family. And there, in her mother’s village, she found refuge with the Serigne (marabout), a wise and much respected man. He took her as his 28th wife, enabling her to re-enter society, and he supported her in her desire to write and to be free. He died in 1981, a year before the publication of her first novel, "The Abandoned Baobab", which was an immediate success. Ken Bugul was invited to present her book all over the world. She met a doctor from Benin, married him and moved to that country, where she gave birth to their daughter Yasmina. Her husband passed away four years later. For the past thirty years, novel after novel, Ken Bugul has painted a picture of her life as a woman, of her loves, of the relationship between her continent and the West. "To write", she says, "is to dazzle the senses, and the senses are colourless." Silvia Voser leads us gently into the secret, tormented world of an artist whose writings show an understanding of the world that is rarely achieved.

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Khook - Pig (2018)

Mani Haghighi

Iran

108′

Hasan is full of rage. He's been blacklisted and hasn't been allowed to make a film in years. His star, a woman he adores, is impatient and wants to work with other directors. His wife seems to have fallen out of love with him, and his mother has become old and is slowly losing her mind. Worst of all, film directors across the city are being murdered one after the other, but the serial killer is inexplicably ignoring him. Hasan's feelings are hurt: isn't he the most accomplished filmmaker in town? So why is he being neglected? All these frustrations come to a head when, through a series of bizarre misunderstandings, he becomes the prime suspect in the serial murder case. Social media are abuzz, Hasan has to come up with an ingenious plan to restore his reputation.

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Kick Off (2009)

Shawkat Amin Korki

Iraq

81′

Director Shawkat Amin Korki uses a new method to tell the story of the tragedy of war. Inside a beat up stadium in Kirkuk, Iraq, lives many refugees trying to escape Sadam Hussein’s administration. Asu lives with his younger brother who has lost his legs from a landmine. Next door lives Hilin, who has not been able to express her feelings. One of the only sources of happiness for these people who live amid fear of poverty and bombings is soccer. Asu gathers together the Kurdish, Arabs and Turkish in order to hold a soccer match. Although they are of different races, they become close neighbors. The beat up stadium in the film plays just as important a role as the plot itself. It is a living space, a playing space, and also a place to teach children. It is literally a small society. In addition, this sad and peculiar image of space plays a large role in creating a more dramatic tragedy.

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Kosh ba Kosh (1990)

Bachtiar Chudonasarow

Tajikistan

92′

Mira, a young woman from Russia, comes to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, to visit her father, a player who often loses and finally even has to give away Mira to an old man. But Daler, a young player, falls in love with Mira and simply abducts her into his rather weird world. Daler is the boss of the local, thoroughly rotten aerial cableway. Its faded yellow cabins are suitable for every cargo: tourists as well as for hay, beer crates, stolen goods and even as a love-home for a clandestine rendez-vous. For Mira, Daler arranges a romantic picnic, floating between heaven and earth. And so begins the love story of Mira and Daler. When the movie ends (but not the love), Mira will have got to know a strange, sometimes exotic world. She will have seen a civil war. She will have accompanied her father to his death and Daler on the way to a new life.

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L'exilé (1980)

Oumarou Ganda

Niger

78′

Based on a traditional African tale. A king has the habit of listening to the wishes of his people whilst walking in disguise on the streets of his kingdom. One day he overhears two brothers daydreaming of marrying the king’s daughters, even if it meant being beheaded one year later. The weddings take place and one of the brothers is decapitated one year later. The other one escapes at his wife’s insistence. On a long journey full of surprising incidents our hero becomes king of a village, with wives and subjects. But his earlier promise haunts him, and in order to save his family he accepts to be sacrificed.

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La Flor (2018)

Mariano Llinás

Argentina

835′

A film that pays tribute to the history of cinema, via six episodes inspired by the different forms of cinematic art. Each episode has a genre. The first episode could be regarded as a B movie, the kind that Americans used to shoot with their eyes closed and now just can’t shoot anymore. The second episode is a sort of musical with a touch of mystery. The third episode is a spy movie. The fourth episode is difficult to describe. The fifth one is inspired by an old French film. The last one is about some captive women in the 19th century who return from the desert, from the Indians, after many years.

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La historia oficial - The Official Story (1985)

Luis Puenzo

Argentina

114′

1983. Alicia, the mother of an adopted 5-year-old girl, teaches history in a Buenos Aires high school. Both in her profession and in her private life she has always accepted the "official version," until one day when the regime's façade and that of it surroundings begin to fall to pieces around her. In the crevices of this enormous lie Alicia suspects that Gabi, the girl she has adopted, might be the daughter of a "desaparecido." It is then that she begins a painful and inexorable journey towards truth - a journey in which she might lose everything. All of these individual adventures are part of a dramatic larger one: Argentina itself, a society which, bordering the abyss, tries to reconstruct its future, examining its wounds, recognizing itself in its victims and their executioners.

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La hora de los hornos (1968)

Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism, Violence and Liberation" is one of the symbols of cultural and political resistence in the 60-70s generation. The film is a reflection essay on the socio-political situation of Argentina between 1945 and 1968. It was filmed clandestinely in Cold War times in a Latin America rules by pro-American oligarchies and military dictatorships. The work is a four-hours-long trilogy divided in chapters and united by the themes of dependence and liberation. The first part, Neocolonialism and Violence, was conceived to be broadcasted in all kinds of circuits. The second and third parts, "Act for Liberation" and "Violence and Liberation", make up the first historical chronicle of Peronismo and the workers’ resistentes that followed. His proposal is an open cinema to promote debate and incorporate new sequences of future fights. The Hour of the Furnaces is one of the most awarded films in Argentine cinema: It was forbidden by all dictatorships, gave rise to a parallel circuit of political cinema and it was disseminated in over 70 countries.

Argentina

88′

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La mirada invisible (2010)

Diego Lerman

Argentina

93′

Marita is a supervisor at the Colegio Nacional in Buenos Aires, the establishment that trains the country’s future elite. She is 23 and wants to do things right. Mr Biasutto, the head supervisor, immediately sees in her the zealous employee that he has been waiting for and teaches her to become the vigilant eye attentive to everything but that avoids attracting the attention of others: the invisible eye. Marita then throws herself into the relentless surveillance of this tiny, closed world, imagining, detecting, pursuing...

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La muerte de un burocrata (1966)

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Cuba

84′

The story begins with the death of a model worker, who is buried with his labor card as a badge of honor. However, his widow is told she needs that card to claim the benefits she is entitled. The story then takes several surreal turns, as the family of the dead man try to recover the precious card from the grave.

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La nación clandestina (1989)

Jorge Sanjines

Bolivia

126′

In this newly restored Bolivian classic, a man remembers his life while on a journey which will help him expiate his sins and which will result in his death. The focus on the story is on a man who has betrayed everyone he knows. He is planning to perform an ancient ritual dance which will end with his life being taken. He journeys from where he was living back to the village where most of the people he wronged still live. As he journeys, carrying his distinctive dance costume, his story is told in flashbacks. Once he gets there, he gets involved in the affairs of the villagers once more.

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After working as a babysitter for a French family in Dakar, a young Senegalese woman is invited to come to France as a governess. But in the West she is only "the black girl" for everyone. Deprived of her freedom, her dignity and her identity, she sees only a radical last act of resistance. Ousmane Sembène's feature film debut was one of the very first African feature films and is based on a newspaper report about the suicide of an African housemaid. From this, Sembène formed a parable about neo-colonialism and the new slave trade.

La Noire de... (1966)

Sembène Ousmane

Senegal

59′

Bonus: Borom Sarret

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La nostalgie de la campagne (1995)

Dang Nhat Minh

Vietnam

112′

Seventeen-year-old Nhâm lives with his mother, little sister and sister-in-law Ngu in a remote village in Vietnam. His father died in the war, his brother moved away to find work elsewhere. The three work day after day in the rice fields. Between Nhâm and Ngu evolves a quiet, deep relationship. But the beautiful Quyen, who has lived in the USA for years and now returns to her native village even if only for a short time, turns Nhâm's head. Quyen seems to be only marginally aware of Nhâm's growing admiration and not at all aware of Ngus' wordless jealousy. At the same time she meets her former homeland and her idyllic memories with melancholy, but also with increasing distance. Filmmaker Dang Nhat Minh opens our eyes to his Vietnamese homeland in a beautiful way and in the form of a gently told love story, in which after decades of war the normal everyday life of peace returns and ordinary relationships are formed.

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La Pantalla Desnuda (2014)

Florence Jaugey

Nicaragua

92′

The Broken Screen is about a very special friendship, which turns into obsession for one of the characters and leaves him to use technology, and social networks as a weapon to destroy a love story that stands between him and his friend. The story takes place in northern Nicaragua, land of traditions, coffee farms and cattle raisers. Octavio, a young student from a poor family, makes friends with Alex, the charismatic young son of one of the region’s wealthiest families. Octavio’s fascination with his new friend makes him want to sideline anyone who comes between the two of them. But Alex is in love with Esperanza, a university classmate, and to have a memory of their passion, he uses his cell phone to film them making love. Octavio ends up with the phone and spreads the video all over town. From that moment on, nothing will be the same and the life of the two lovers will be devastated.

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La vida es silbar & Schwerelos (1998)

Bonus: Schwere-los - La vida es silbar am Eiger

Cuba

106′

Three different characters in a Havana, that always seems to be like today, must choose between clinging to their self-restricting beliefs, or getting rid of them to live more freely. Ballerina Mariana has recently promised God celibacy, if she gets the main role of "Giselle"; Social-worker Julia always faints after hearing a certain word, like other people do in the streets to different words; and percussionist Elpidio was abandoned by his mother named Cuba quite some time ago and has not yet gotten over the loss. Now he fells in love with an northern activist. BONUS: Als Zugabe gibt's den Bergsteiger-Dokumentarfilm mit Daniel Anker, der in den 1990er Jahren eine neue Route durch die Eiger-Nordwand gelegt hat und sie als Liebhaber des Films «La vida es silbar» nannte. Sie erfreut sich bei jenen, die gerne Klettern, als beliebt.

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La Yuma (2010)

Florence Jaugey

Nicaragua

84′

This is the story of Yuma a strong-willed and rebellious girl from the poor neighborhoods of Managua who dreams of being a boxer. Managua, today. Yuma wants to be a boxer. In her poor neighborhood, gangs fight for control of the street. In her home, lovelessness is the name of the game. She dreams of the ring, energy and agile feet and hands. They are also her only options. A street, a theft, a chance encounter: Yuma meets Ernesto, a journalism student from the other side of the city. Despite their differences, they fall in love, attracted to each other by their shared desire to find their own space in the world.

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Landscape In The Mist - Topio stin omichli (1988)

LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST is a film about the void. It is a film about despair, about the failure of contemporary society. The prodigal father who figures in almost every Angelopoulos film here has evaporated into his mythical essence - leaving his children to become the wanderers in search of him. In the «chaos», two children appear, little Alexandros and his older sister Voula. In order to exorcise their loneliness, they invent a secret universe for themselves, inhabited by their dreams. Every night they go to a train station to watch the departure of a train to Germany, where they have been deceived by their mother (herself an off-screen presence) into believing that their absent father is living. One night they finally dare to get on the train. But their voyage turns out to be hazardous and pointless and disappointing. They confront suffering, physical and moral illness, jealousy, evil and death, if also love - as many ordeals and rites as initiations. Evading the half-hearted pursuit of the police and uncaring relatives, sneak onto trains, hitchhike in vans and lorries, and suffering poverty, rape and exploitation, take a dangerous leap of faith, an eerie plunge into liberation and danger. The familiar Greek landscape - the cafes, the depopulated towns and deserted beaches - are played for a strangely harsh fairytale quality, seen through the eyes of two children whose introduction to the real world borders on the surreal. The film is filled with extraordinary, unforgettable moments that are at once real and hallucinatory and contains intriguing references to other Angelopoulos' films. The children even encounter the Travelling Players now, thirteen years later, without a stage to act on, their costumes put up for sale. At the end Alexandros tells Voula the same story from Genesis that she told him at the start: «In the beginning there was chaos.» The children do finally reach the border, but of course there is no border with Germany and perhaps the river they cross is actually the Styx and perhaps their whole journey was a search for order in a chaotic world.

Greece

120′

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Las aventuras de dios (2001)

Cinema is the art of remembrance and Eliseo Subiela is one of the most gifted artists of remembrance in cinema. In this film, which particularly reconnects with his first films, Subiela makes us float between realities, between the inside and the outside, between here and beyond, between love and abandonment. Subiela describes it as a "metaphysical thriller", the story of this man in the company of a woman who both are prisoners in a dreamlike space; they are trapped in an apparent dream taking place in the labyrinthine corridors and strange rooms of a seaside 1930s hotel. The man knows nothing about his past or how he ended up in the hotel, but is accused by two men of having committed a crime at some previous point in his life. Every time he falls asleep, the man is tortured by a recurring nightmare of living in an impoverished apartment with a woman and a baby. Gradually, the man and woman fall in love as they try to figure out what has led to their imprisonment, and together they resort to extreme measures to break out of the dream. Eliseo Subiela invites us on a wonderful journey into philosophical spheres.

Argentina

82′

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Le grand voyage (2004)

Ismaël Ferroukhi

Morocco

103′

Reda, summoned to accompany his father on a pilgrimage to Mecca, complies reluctantly, for he's preparing for his baccalaureat and, even more important, has a secret love relationship. The trip across Europe in a broken-down car is also the departure of his father: upon arrival in Mecca, both Reda and his father are not the characters they were at the start of the movie. Avoiding the hackneyed theme of the return to the homeland, the film uses the departure to renew a connection between two generations.

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Le prix de la liberté (1978)

Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa

Cameroon

94′

After refusing the sexual advances of her village chief and her father’s authority, a young woman runs away from home and goes to town. There she meets several members of her family and tries to start her life from scratch. She enrolls at a high school and makes new friends. However, she realizes that social relations in town also depend on sexual favors and that around her everyone has given in to that practice. When she loses the only man she loved, the girl returns to her village and in a fit of rage sets it on fire.

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Le serviteur de Kali (2002)

Adoor Gopalakrishnan

India

88′

Kaliyappan is the executioner of the Maharajah of Travancore. He lives on the edge of a small village in the magnificent countryside of Kerala. For generations his family has lived on the benefits granted to the Maharajah after every execution. But these are becoming increasingly rare, and Kaliyappan's family lives in misery. Paradoxically, the old executioner, tired of fulfilling a mission that had become a curse, has also become a healer. Adoor Gopalakrishnan is one of the central figures in Indian cinema and one of the outstanding filmmakers from Kerala, whose film culture he and Shaji Karun have a major influence on. His film "Le serviteur de Kali" is a fable based on real facts. The first shot shows an old executioner looking at his hands. He feels guilty about the last execution and is afraid of the next one. When he again receives the order to execute the sentence, Kaliyappan feels miserable, staggers around and drinks to forget his remorse and misery. As if the alcohol could lift the responsibility and replace the executioner. The son will execute the sentence, the curse threatening the family cannot be averted. In the end, the shadows of the procession are the dark shadows of an endless succession of mourning, unless they are the shadows of the cave. A hidden pearl of cinema.

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Lerchen am Faden (1969)

Larks on a String is a Czech film directed by Jiří Menzel. The movie was banned by the Czechoslovak government. It saw release in 1990 after the fall of the Communist regime. Menzel tells the stories of various characters considered bourgeois by Czechoslovakia's communist government in the 1950s, who have been forced to work in a junkyard for the purposes of re-education.

94′

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Limite (1931)

Mário Peixoto

Brazil

118′

An astonishing creation, Limite is the only feature by the Brazilian director and author Mário Peixoto, made when he was just twenty-two years old. Inspired by a haunting André Kertész photograph on the cover of a French magazine, this avant-garde silent masterpiece centers on a man and two women lost at sea, their pasts unfolding through flashbacks propelled by the music of Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and others. An early work of independent Latin American filmmaking, Limite was famously difficult to see for most of the twentieth century. It is a pioneering achievement that continues to captivate with its timeless visual poetry.

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Liverpool (2008)

Lisandro Alonso

Argentina

82′

In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Farrel asks the captain of the freighter he works on for permission to go ashore once they reach the port of Ushuaia, the southernmost town of Argentina. Farrel wants to return to his birthplace and see if his mother is still alive. For the past twenty years he has worked as a seaman. He drinks to oblivion, pays the women he sleeps with, has no friends. Having reached the cluster of snow-covered houses where he grew up, Farrel discovers his mother is indeed still living but someone else has become part of the family.

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Lluvia (2008)

On a chaotic Friday in Buenos Aires, Alma and Roberto meet in the pouring rain. In the middle of the traffic chaos, the door of Alma's car opens. Roberto gets in, injured and wet to the bones. "Please close the door! As soon as this is all over, I'm getting out." Without knowing why, Alma does what Roberto asks her to do. They have no idea that this sudden and unexpected encounter will change their lives. Alma made aimless rounds in the city in her car before, and Roberto wanted to find himself. None of them know what to do or how to progress in their lives. Alma and Roberto - excellently played by Valeria Bertuccelli and Ernesto Alterio - are people like all of us, vulnerable and therefore grow close to our hearts.

Argentina

106′

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Los herederos (2008)

Eugenio Polgovsky

Mexico

86′

At early age children begin to work in the Mexican countryside. The Inheritors is a portrait of theirs lives and their daily struggle for survival. These children work farming, sculpting and painting alebrijes, shepherding, making bricks, weaving cloth, looking after their little siblings, collecting water, harvesting tomato, chili, maize, and laboring in a myriad of other activities. They have inherited tools and techniques from their ancestors, but they have also inherited their day-by-day hardship. Generations pass and child workers remain captive in a cycle of inherited poverty.

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Los silencios (2018)

Beatriz Seigner

Brazil

90′

Nuria, 12, Fabio, 9, and their mother Amparo arrive in a small island in the middle of Amazonia, at the border of Brazil, Colombia and Peru. They ran away from the Colombian armed conflict in which their father disappeared. One day, he reappears in their new house. The family is haunted by this strange secret and discovers the island is peopled with ghosts.

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Love And Honor (2007)

Yoji Yamada

Japan

122′

Shortly after assuming his post as food taster, Shinnojo loses his eyesight. The fish that was given to the head of the clan was poisoned. Prior to this, Shinnojo had held an inferior position in the ruler’s entourage. Realising that not only will he remain blind until the end of his days, but he must now relinquish his position and will need assistance for rest of his life, Shinnojo becomes dejected and melancholy. His wife, Kayo, is the only one able to prevent him from committing suicide: "I can’t imagine life without you. But, go ahead and kill yourself. If you do so, I will follow you immediately", is her response. Touched by her loyalty, Shinnojo gives up his plan to take his own life. Shortly afterwards, Shinnojo’s uncle advises him that, since he is no longer able to work, Shinnojo should ask Kayo to go to Shimada, the influential steward of the estate, and ask for his help. As time goes by, Shinnojo begins to get used to being blind. But then one day his aunt Ine tells him of a rumour she has heard about Kayo’s infidelity. Madly jealous, Shinnojo, who loves his wife and had always trusted her, orders his old servant, Tokuhei, to follow Kayo. Tokuhei discovers that the rumour is true. Having noticed that she was being watched, Kayo admits to having committed adultery with Shimada, explaining that the steward demanded her body in return for supporting Shinnojo. Throwing his wife out of the house, Shinnojo prepares himself for one last battle.

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Loves of a Blonde (1965)

The head of a shoe factory persuades the army to hold manoeuvres nearby: So his workers can meet men at a ball. But the pot-bellied reservists are anything but attractive. Utilizing a brief hint of freedom, The Love of a Blonde throws an undisguised, humorous and tender look at Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and the ridiculousness of its functionaries.

80′

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Lucia (1968)

Humberto Solás

Cuba

161′

In Lucía, Humberto Solás has interpreted the theme of the hundred years' struggle in an entirely novel way to create an epic in three separate episodes: each centred around a woman called Lucía, which takes place in a different period of Cuban history, corresponding to the three stages of Colonialism, Neocolonialism and Socialist Revolution. The three episodes also present us with "Lucías" of different social classes. According to Solás: "Women's role always lays bare the contradictions of a period and makes them explicit: Lucía is not a film about women, it's a film about society".

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Madagascar (1994)

"I dream exactly what I live every day," a professor, bored with her mundane life, tells her therapist. But the visual evidence on screen at the start of "Madagascar" suggests that dreams are never that banal. Bicyclists crowd the street, riding to work in slow motion in a haunting, shadowy blue dawn. The 50-minute "Madagascar" has the resonance and eloquence of the best poetry, as it deftly turns an adolescent's search for identity into a metaphor for post-revolutionary Cuba. Laura is a professor at a shabby, stultifying college. Her daughter, Laurita, stops going to school, wishes to move to Madagascar and quickly races through several phases. One day, she looks like a heavy-metal fan, another like a bohemian who weeps at poetry and art. Slowly, she crosses the line from ordinary adolescent confusion to intense neurosis and beyond, finally becoming so obsessed with religion and good works that she brings 10 homeless children into the cramped house she shares with her mother and grandmother. The film's director, Fernando Perez, creates graceful scenes linked by the merest narrative thread. His compressed episodes make it clear that Laura and Laurita, pre- and post-revolutuonary women, share a desperate search for some purpose in life. When Laura looks wistfully at a photograph of herself in May 1969, it is a rare reference to her political dreams, yet Mr. Perez has created an extraordinary meditation on the lost promise of youth and revolution. (Caryn James, in The New York Times)

Cuba

48′

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Malaria (2016)

Parviz Shahbazi

Iran

89′

A young girl informs her father she’s been kidnapped and asks him to bring the ransom money. Panicked, her father and brothers go to Tehran to look for her. They are unaware, however, that the girl has in fact eloped with her boyfriend and now spends her time in the company of a band of street musicians. Following the arrest of the band leader and full of the love for her boyfriend, the young girl descends an uncertain path.

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Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Cuba

99′

Following the revolution, Sergio, an upper middle-class Cuban from Havana finds himself alone when his wife and the rest of his family flee the island to settle down in Miami. Struggling to adjust to the new situation, to the seclusion and the new class relationships, he continues to live his life, goes through a few pathetic love stories, yet is unable to conceal the background that seems so much at odds with the new order.

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Memories on stone (2014)

Shawkat Amin Korki

Iraq

96′

Movie director Hussein would like to shoot a film in his homeland of Iraqi Kurdistan about the Anfal military operation of the 1980s that led to the murder of more than 182,000 Kurds. The viewer follows the entire crew’s efforts to achieve the goal of making the film despite the numerous problems that accompany the shoot. They are forced to struggle with inadequate financing, the mistrust of the local inhabitants, the exaggerated and inappropriate demands of a nationally-adored movie star, and to fight the disapproval of Sinur’s father, even though the young woman would love to take on the starring role.... Memories On Stone is a visually sophisticated movie in which the director gently and effortlessly brings together the Kurdish past and present, while investigating with sincerity and gracious humor the traumatizing events suffered by his nation. Korki entirely avoids sentimentality, offering instead a personal and vigorous look at Kurdish history and mentality.

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Modest Reception (2012)

Mani Haghighi

Iran

100′

Leyla and Kaveh are the instruments of a cruel and bizarre game. The well-situated couple drive through the mountains distributing plastic bags full of money to every poor and unfortunate person they meet. At first everything goes according to plan as they disdainfully "share the joy" with their shocked "neighbors" while documenting the event via cellphone. They encounter those, however, who refuse the strange gift - and others who end up offending the irresponsible strangers. Gradually, the amoral game (part of which involves inventing a vast array of stories) begins to turn against the cynical manipulators.... This darkly comic parable seeks to critique modern society’s penchant for squandering resources, energy, and emotions in artificially constructed pranks. The dramatically terse, minimalistic narrative is intensified by the lead actors’ restrained performances, and by the gorgeous natural backdrop where the film plays out over the course of 24 hours. The picture took the NETPAC Prize at the Berlinale 2012 for Best Asian movie.

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Mother (1926)

Wsewolod Pudowkin

Russia

72′

In this film, the mother of Pavel Vlasov is drawn into the revolutionary conflict when her husband and son find themselves on opposite sides during a worker's strike. After her husband dies during the failed strike, she betrays her son's ideology in order to try, in vain, to save his life. He is arrested, tried in what amounts to a judicial farce, and sentenced to heavy labor in a prison camp. During his incarceration, his mother aligns herself with him and his ideology and joins the revolutionaries. In the climax of the movie, the mother and hundreds of others march to the prison in order to free the prisoners, who are aware of the plan and have planned their escape. Ultimately, the troops of the Tsar suppress the uprising, killing both mother and son in the final scenes.

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Muna moto (1975)

Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa

Cameroon

90′

Ngando and Ndomé are in love. Ngando wishes to marry Ndomé but her family reminds him that the traditional dowry must be settled. Unfortunately, Ngando is poor and unable to fulfil the tradition. Ndomé is pregnant and bears his child. According to the village tradition, she must take a husband, at least one who can afford to pay the dowry. The villagers decide that Ndomé should marry Ngando’s uncle, who has already three sterile wives. In despair, the young man kidnaps his daughter upon the day of the traditional feast. An African Romeo and Juliet story.

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Music Room (1958)

Satyajit Ray

India

99′

The Music Room shows the end times of a decadent landlord in Bengal and his efforts to maintain his family's reputation even in economically difficult times. The landlord, Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas), is a just but unworldly man who likes to spend time listening to music and setting up spectacles instead of managing his lands devastated by floods and the Indian government's abolition of the Zamindari system. He is challenged by a simple man who has gained wealth through business, spectacle and musical festivals.

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My Name is Salt (2013)

Farida Pacha

India

92′

Year after year, for an endless eight months, thousands of families move to a desert in India to extract salt from the burning earth. Every monsoon their salt fields are washed away, as the desert turns into sea. And still they return, striving to make the whitest salt in the world. The desert extends endlessly - flat, grey, relentless. There is not a tree or blade of grass or rock. But there is one thing in abundance: salt. Salt is everywhere, lying just beneath the cracked, baked surface of the earth. This is the Little Rann of Kutch, 5000 sq kms of saline desert. And for eight months of the year, the salt people live here - laboriously extracting salt from this desolate landscape. They have been doing this for generations. Year after year, they migrate from their villages, 40,000 of them, to live on this bleak land without water, electricity or provisions. Arriving just after the monsoon, Sanabhai and his family will live here from September until April. Their nearest neighbour is a kilometre away. They communicate by flashing mirrors in the sunlight. Sanabhai’s wife Devuben walks across the bare, trackless desert to chop firewood. They buy the family’s water supply from a private tanker that comes once a week. Sanabhai has taken a large loan from the salt merchant in town as an advance on his salt harvest. He needs money to dig a well to reach the saline water 70 feet below ground, and to buy the diesel for the pump which draws the brine into the salt pans. Over the next few months, the only sound to break the silence of the desert is the mechanical drone of the pump’s engine. It takes eight months for the brine to crystallise into salt. Knee-deep in the brine pond, under the blinding glare of the sun, Sanabhai and his family trample the ground to prevent the salt from congealing. Once the brine has evaporated enough to allow the salt to be handled, they gather it with heavy wooden rakes until large crystals have formed. Their labor is rhythmic, a dance that mirrors the dance of the mirages on the burning horizon. The white crystals are as sharp as glass. Only two of them have rubber boots. Several times in a day Sanabhai inspects the quality of the salt crystals and keeps a close watch on the level of water in the salt pans. Two of Sanabhai’s children - a boy and a girl aged eleven and eight- go to a school recently opened by an NGO. Everyday at 11, after their morning’s work at the salt pans, they cycle off to school - just another hut in the vast emptiness of the desert, but with one difference: the children have planted paper flowers around it. In April, the salt merchant sends his man to inspect the salt. No good, he says: the crystals are small, not white enough. He cuts the price agreed with Sanabhai at the beginning of the season. Sanabhai is downcast, but he shrugs his shoulders: what can you do? The next salt season will certainly be better. Meanwhile, somewhere at the edge of the desert, mountains of salt lie next to the railway tracks waiting for transport to the city. The season is over and the monsoon is on its way: the heavy rains will soon wash the family’s salt fields away. The desert itself will not remain a desert anymore, but will turn into a sea. And the only way one can cross it is by boat.

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Naked Youth (1960)

Nagisa Oshima

Japan

96′

Makoto Shinjo, a teenager who is a little lost in search of experiences, sometimes agrees to take "little tricks" with strangers in the car. One day, she meets Kiyoshi Fujii, half student, half offender, who saves her from an overly enterprising motorist and takes money from her at the same time. Having become friends during a walk, Kiyoshi, listening only to his desire, raped her. However, Makoto decided to leave his parents to live with him. To live, they will practice the scam and blackmail to which the indelicate motorists who have been enticed by Makoto will be subjected. "It's the story of young people who only manage to express their anger in a deviant way. By showing the tragedy of these young people, I expressed my own anger at the situation facing the current youth." Nagisa Oshima

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Night Train (2007)

Yinan Diao

China

91′

From the 2008 Beijing olympic games to the avant-guard art scene, new chinese talent is heating up audiences around the world. Wu Hongyan, woman executioner in her thirties, works at the court in the province of Shaanxi in China, where she executes women condemned to death only. In spite of her macabre job, Wu Hongyan travels every weekend to a town nearby to join parties organized by a marriage bureau. The result of her dating is mediocre, until she meets the mysterious Li Jun. But she is thousands of miles away of imagining that Li Jun’s wife is the last of the women she executed. Electrifying!

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Nostalghia (1983)

Andrei Gortchakov, a Russian writer, travels through Italy in the footsteps of a fellow composer to write his biography. With great sensitivity for the emotions of those who are far from their country, Andrei Tarkovski, supported by his Italian co-writer Tonino Guerra, draws a meeting of cultures and periods.

Italy

126′

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Offret - Sacrifice (1986)

In Offret, the last film by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, an apocalyptic catastrophe breaks out over an actor's birthday party. Former actor Alexander (Erland Josephson) celebrates his birthday with his family and some friends in his house on the coast. It's a beautiful day until the radio announces a catastrophe that threatens the whole world. In order to keep everything as it was the day before, Alexander wants to make a sacrifice, but will that help?

Russia

149′

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Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (2011)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Turkey

151′

Life in a small town is akin to journeying in the middle of the steppes: the sense that "something new and different" will spring up behind every hill, but always unerringly similar, tapering, vanishing or lingering monotonous roads...

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Opera Java (2006)

Garin Nugroho

Indonesia

115′

Inspired by the famous story “The Abduction of Sita” from the great classic of ancient Indian and South East-Asian literature the Ramayana, OPERA JAWA is a musical like no other in cinema. It tells of a passionate love triangle that leads inexorably to conflict, violence and death. Setio and his wife Siti, run a pottery business in a small village where Ludiro, a powerful and ruthless butcher, controls all the trading activities. When the couple’s business collapses, Ludiro, who has always been in love with Siti, seizes his chance, abducts and tries to seduce her. Inevitably the two men begin to fight over Siti...

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Ouaga Saga (2005)

Dani Kouyaté

Burkina Faso

89′

In the capital of Burkina Faso, a band of young people tries to survive and thrive vis-a-vis the thousand and one temptations. Adventures of a band of youngsters, living in a stripped district of Ouagadougou, who seek hopes. The easy way and ingeniousness compensate for the money which often is lacking. Sadness is banished of a resolutely optimistic way of life. Plunders and odd jobs constitute the daily newspaper of this struggle for life. The ones will succeed modestly, the others will fail more or less, but a great solidarity of group remains...

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Paraiso (2009)

Hector Galvez

Peru

89′

Five teenagers, three boys and two girls, live in a refugee neighborhood south of Lima paradoxically known as Los Jardines del Paraíso, the gardens of paradise. Together with their parents, their share memories of wartime massacres between the army and the Shining Path. Despite their trauma, they yearn to move on with their life. But in an isolated world without opportunities, they have little hope of succeeding.

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Pequeñas voces (2010)

Jairo Eduardo Carrillo

Colombia

67′

PEQUEÑAS VOCES is a unique and powerful hybrid documentary with computer animation which tells the real life stories and experiences of displaced children in Colombia. PEQUEÑAS VOCES is an animated documentary based on interviews and drawing workshops with a new generation of children (8 to 13 years old) who have grown up in middle of violence and chaos in Colombia; the interviews show how they perceive their reality. Those stories are illustrated and animated using the original drawings by the children.

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Piravi (1988)

Shaji N. Karun

India

108′

An ageing father waits, in vain, at the bus stop for his son Raghu, a student at the University of Trivandrum, who is supposed to be coming home for the holidays. The elderly Chakyar’s eager happiness slowly turns to disappointment and then anxiety. After several days with no news of Raghu, his family learn that the police have arrested him for singing revolutionary songs at the university’s annual fête. Chakyar goes to the capital, hoping to find support from the Minister of Internal Affairs, and is soon joined by his daughter, who does not, however, share his optimism. When it becomes clear that Raghu cannot escape a jail sentence, the old man gradually loses his reason … In Piravi, Shaji N. Karun denounces not only the corruption that exists within the establishment, but also focuses on the impotence of the individual in the face of an oppressive system. By keeping Raghu off-screen, the director conveys a sense of absence and uncertainty with a rare intensity.

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Pizza Bethlehem (2010)

Bruno Moll

Switzerland

84′

Bethlehem is a neighbourhood in the city of Bern where immigrants from over 30 nations have settled. At the centre of this film is the junior team of the Bethlehem Football Club. In this team, the majority are immigrants between 15 and 16 years old. The film also portrays - along with football - their everyday lives at school, vocational training and leisure time. It questions the protagonists about their self-image, their dreams, worries and fears, asks them about what connects them and what divides them, about what it’s like to be a foreigner in their former homeland and how they get along in another foreign environment.

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Pyaasa (1957)

Guru Dutt

India

143′

Unemployed Vijay is the youngest in his family consisting of his widowed mom, and two brothers. His passion is poetry - frowned upon by his brothers - who want him to find gainful employment instead. Vijay's poems are quite radical in which he laments about the poor, the destitute, and the arrogance of the rich after the departure of the British from India. His efforts to get them published are in vain. He takes to drinking, gets in trouble with the law, is disowned by his brothers, ends up at a brothel and befriends a prostitute named Gulabo. Gulabo is sympathetic, listens to him as he pours his heart out, and decides to assist Vijay. Watch what happens when Gulabo approaches some of her affluent clientèle to assist Vijay and try and get his work published, without revealing that they are written by an alcoholic, disheveled, homeless man. (imdb)

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Que tan lejos (2006)

Tania Hermida

Ecuador

91′

Self-discovery journey of two girls in their mid twenties while they travel along the Ecuadorian mountains and coasts. Esperanza (Hope) and Tristeza (Sadness) will not find postcard views or perfect love, but their journey will teach them there’s a world beyond that.

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Quiereme y veras (1994)

Daniel Díaz Torres

Cuba

53′

As in Alice in Wonder Village, Díaz Torres creates a world of his own, where fantasy and reality intermingle. Alice was banned from Cuba three years ago after winning the Silver Bear in Berlin. It resembled reality too much. Despite this, Díaz Torres is one of the few directors who have been able to make a film in his country since the political crisis. In Love Me and You’ll See . . . , Juventino and two of his friends are robbing a bank when the Cuban revolution explodes. Thirty-five years later, Juventino picks up a bag from a beautiful woman who resembles his first love. The bag is filled with money, and Juventino begins a relentless search to find the woman. It is not an easy task, and he has to resort to a clarivoyant. With an excellent performance from veteran Reinaldo Miravalles as Juventino, Díaz Torres entertains us while constructing a unique universe that is both imaginative and moving. (Sundance Institute, Patricia Cardoso-Reneau)

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Rashomon (1951)

Rashomon is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made: Three men take shelter at one of the gates leading to Kyoto, waiting for the rain to stop. We are under the Heian era (9th - 12th centuries). To pass the time, they discuss an event that took place recently: the discovery of the body of a samurai, probably killed by the bandit Tajomaru. The three men were in fact called to testify at the trial. They each report what they said at the trial, and what they saw. Four versions are opposed, the widow - who was allegedly raped by the bandit - also having her own. So what happened?

Japan

88′

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Rusalka (2008)

Anna Melikian

Russia

114′

Once upon a time ... is the best way to tell the incredible story of the adventures of the mermaid’ Alisa in the Russian capital Moscow. There was a time when Alisa lived by the sea. Her life was nothing out of the ordinary. She dreamed of one day dancing in a ballet; she sang in a children’s choir and attended a special school, because, at the age of six, she suddenly stopped speaking. None of which would be noteworthy, were it not for the fact that Alisa possessed a remarkable gift: the ability to fulfil wishes. At the age of 18 she leaves her coastal town for Moscow, where her destiny soon takes hold and she meets him ... a man whose desire to be saved and protected is pretty much written all over him. Alisa takes him by the hand - and this changes her life. This film by Azerbaijani director Anna Melikian is a modern fairy tale in which age-old myths and youthful imagination are merged in a surreal urban romance. The dream-like storyline is mirrored by the visual approach Anna Melikian has chosen to recount the adventures of a mermaid’ who finds herself washed up inland.

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Salt of this Sea (2008)

Annemarie Jacir

Palestine

105′

Soraya, 28, born and raised in Brooklyn, decides to return to live in Palestine, a country that her family was exiled from in 1948. On arriving in Ramallah, Soraya tries to recover the money left in an account by her grandparents but meets with refusal from the bank. Her path then crosses that of Emad, a young Palestinian whose ambition, unlike hers, is to leave the country for good. To escape the constraints linked to the situation in Palestine but also to earn their freedom, Soraya and Emad take things into their own hands, even if this means breaking the law. In this quest for life, we follow their trail through the History of a lost Palestine. Annemarie Jacir is telling not only or simply the story of a woman that comes to visit a region where her grandparents lived («here!»), no, the palestinian filmmaker is taking us as viewers deep into that, what facts and figures could never describe. It is this strong atmosphere, she has been creating, that touches us, it's the images of a well known situation, but again, not only the images in the photografic sense, she reaches in the way she's telling this little journey a level of inside view, that has in it's silent, feverish and constantly instabile way breathtaking and heartstopping moments. SALT OF THIS SEA is one of those movies, that give us an inner view of a situation that we all know somehow and where we run out of words to discribe. And this seems to me today much more important then to repeat what we know. Annemarie Jacirs movie is touching, because it goes under the surface even by simply showing surfaces, it goes under the surface by having a wonderful actress who is able to speak not only in words. And it goes there because she did put together so many little visible and invisible elements, without pointing them out: They are simply there, from the first moment, and they speak for themselves each of them and all together. The filmmaker created a kind of soft explosive that is not blessing but touching.

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Sanjuro - Tsubaki Sanjûrô (1962)

In this sequel to Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), the aging, lazy and disloyal samurai Sanjuro happens to witness nine young samurai preparing a revolt against the allegedly corrupt chamberlain of their provincial prince. He makes it clear to the naïve youngsters that they have been mistaken and that their supposed ally, the administrator, wants to capture them, as he has already captured the chamberlain. Sanjuro liberates his wife and daughter and then creeps into the enemy camp to find out the plans of the samurai Hanbei, who is in the service of the steward, and to save the chamberlain himself.

Japan

95′

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Sansho Dayu - Sanshi the Bailiff (1954)

Sansho Dayu is a film about a couple of children from a rich house at the end of the 12th century who fall into the hands of the bailiff. He owes his reputation as an exemplary feudal lord to the merciless exploitation of his slave army. Mizoguchi fluently tells this old legend of need and revenge in beautiful pictures.

Japan

124′

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Scandal (1950)

Kurosawa's favourite actor of the early years was Toshiro Mifune. Here he plays the famous painter Ichiro Aoye, who spends his holidays in the mountains and meets the young singer Miyako Saijo. They live in the same hotel and spend some time together. Two reporters photograph them together and publish the pictures in a tabloid magazine - in revenge for Saijo's refusal to give them an interview. The scandal was there, and the painter's lawyer is bribed by the editor-in-chief of the magazine to get money for his seriously ill daughter. Kurosawa puts characters in situations in which it is difficult for them to make a decision. Akira Kurosawa: "After the war Japan experienced something new: freedom of the press. Of course, it was quickly abused. A relevant mass press thought it had to arouse readers' curiosity and trigger scandals with shamelessly vulgar articles. This tendency had to be stopped, that gave the impulse to my film."

Japan

105′

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Seclusion Near a Forest (1976)

During an excursion, a family from the big city discovers an old farmhouse. They spend their holidays there and would love to buy the house. The owner, an old farmer, seems to agree, only he wants to determine the time of the sales himself. In the meantime, the two children become friends with the old farmer. Tom Milne writes in Time Out: "After five years of political disgrace, Jiří Menzel was still cautious and skilfully avoided any dangerous engagements or interpretations in Seclusion Near a Forest. It is a feather-light comedy about the difficulties of living as a city family in the countryside (...). The excellent camera work casts a shimmering, summery haze over the fine mixture of tenderness and humour with which Menzel typically observes human weaknesses - making the film a magical conjuration of a lost, simpler and more relaxed world."

96′

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Shanghai, Shimen Road (2011)

Haolun Shu

China

84′

Xiaoli, a 16 year old Shanghainese boy, has recently turned 16, in the summer of 1988. His life revolves around his one-room apartment in a beautiful brick house in the picturesque Shikumen neighborhood of Da Zhongli which he shares with his grandfather. Xiaoli's grandfather was brought up in this neighborhood, and was one of original owners of the houses, built in the 1930s by British architects. The houses were confiscated from their original owners by the government during the Cultural Revolution and made to share with lower-income families. Xiaoli's father died in prison during the Cultural Revolution and his mother immigrated to the United States in the hope of obtaining a green card for her and her son. Xiaoli yearns to graduate from high school and open a photo shop as he is numbed by the routine of his life: his boring political education classes, his English study, the sternness of his grandfather and the lack of comforting parental figure. At the same time, he is wary of the idea of following in his mother's footsteps to America. His interest lies in his blossoming next door neighbor, a girl of twenty named Lanmi. Lanmi failed her college entrance exams and works in the Shanghai no. 2 Toothbrush Factory. She lives in the adjacent apartment with her mother and step-father. She comes from a lower class income family and was relocated in Da Zhongli with her father and mother, before her father was sent off to labor prison were he also eventually died. Lanmi does not get along with her mother and stepfather and new born sibling, and yearns to get out of Da Zhongli, if only she could afford it. She turns to Xiaoli for comfort, albeit of a different kind than Xiaoli is looking for. While Xiaoli looks at her for a mix of motherly figure and teenage lust, Lanmi plays with him. She flirts with him, arouses his senses, and yet has no interest in pursuing their relationship any further, thus giving false hopes to Xiaoli. She starts leading a double life, one which Xiaoli does not even know exists. One day, as she is delivering toothbrushes to a hotel, she is hired to work there for one of the 'sisters'. To Xiaoli, her job oddly consists of going to dances or accompanying foreign businessmen, as Shanghai progressively opens up to foreigners, foreign exchange notes and coca-cola. Xiaoli slowly becomes suspicious of Lanmi's new job yet gives her the benefit of the doubt. Until one day when Lanmi dispappears down south in search of a better life. In Lanmi's absence, Xiaoli turns to Lili who is more of his age but never looses interest in his deviant neighbor. When Lanmi comes back two weeks later, the student demonstrations start monopolizing everyone's life in the spring of 1989. They offer new opportunities to Xiaoli and Lanmi, depending on how each one looks at the events. Xiaoli becomes absorbed by the new developments and slowly looses his naivesness about the country he is living in and his interest in his next door neighbour's Lanmi turns to drugs and alcohol as an escape to her everyday life. When the situation gets so bad that Xiaoli's grandfather urges Xiaoli to leave for America, Xiaoli agrees to and flees.

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Sheherazade (2011)

Nacer Khemir

Tunisia

81′

The collected work known as "One Thousand and One Nights" survived for centuries through generations of Arab storytellers, and is now recognized as an integral part of world literature. In this filmed performance, storyteller/filmmaker Nacer Khemir sits on chair in the middle of a dimly lit stage and deploys the magic of words to take us on a journey of the imagination. This simple set-up may not seem like much, but it offers the listener an extraordinarily colorful experience and brilliantly emphasizes the oral nature of the work. As we listen to the expertly told stories, we are equally charmed by their intricacies and entranced by their interconnectedness. Even though Khemir illustrates some of the stories with beautifully filmed sequences, the audience's ability to listen is paramount here. Sheherazade used words to avoid impending death, Khemir uses the art of storytelling to breathe a new life into this ancient masterwork.

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Shiraz (1928)

Franz Osten

India

106′

Shiraz is based on the true story of the 17th-century Mughal ruler Shah Jahan, his queen and the building of the world’s most beautiful monument to love, the Taj Mahal. Shot entirely in India, it features lavish costumes and gorgeous settings, including the extraordinary fort at Agra. Himansu Rai (also the film’s producer) stars as the humble potter Shiraz, who follows his childhood sweetheart Selima (Enakshi Rama Rau) when she is sold by slave traders to the future emperor. Newly restored by the BFI National Archive, and looking better than it ever has, the film also features a new score from world-renowned sitar player and composer Anoushka Shankar.

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Shizukanaru Ketto (1949)

At the end of the war, doctor Fujisaki is wounded during an emergency operation in the hospital. A little later he notices that the patient is suffering from syphilis and that he has infected himself. Fearing to pass on the disease, he breaks up with his fiancée after the war and silently fights his illness with the means available at the time. His former patient, however, lives carelessly and marries; his deformed child is born dead. The "Arztfilm" was a popular genre in the post-war years, especially in Germany. Kurosawa, who had already focused on a doctor in Drunken Angel the year before, adapted a successful play here.

Japan

95′

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Shortcuts - Postriziny (1981)

Brewery owner Francin lives in a happy marriage with the all too beautiful Maryška. His life is turned upside down by the unexpected visit of his eccentric brother Pepin. Maryška finds a kindred soul in Pepin and falls into the modernization pull of the 1920s, to which she can't help but give in. Shortcuts, the film adaptation of a story by Bohumil Hrabal, became very successful with the audience in Czechoslovakia.

98′

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South (Sur) (1988)

South is a film by Fernando Solanas about a forced exile - here it he talks about the return of imprisonment - and a painful reunion in the midst of political turmoil. It is a story about the healing power of nostalgia. The story is set in 1983 just after the fall of the military dictatorship and the restoration of the democracy. Floreal is released from prison and returns in the evening, but rather than returning straight home to his wife Rosi, he decides to wander around to gather his thoughts and sort through his mixed emotions concerning not only the deaths of his closest friends, but also the lonely, long-suffering Rosi's affair with Floreal's best friend Roberto.

Argentina

122′

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Stalker (1979)

In an undetermined country where desolation reigns, the Zone is a mysterious and dangerous region, where only the Stalkers, smugglers, dare to venture. One of them tries to take a writer and a scientist inside this Zone, to a room where their dearest desires can be fulfilled... After Solaris, Andreï Tarkovski returns to science fiction to illustrate a world that no longer has faith in anything. He signs a timeless masterpiece with inexhaustible potential.

Russia

155′

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Storia probabile di un Angelo - Fernando Birri (2017)

Paolo Taggi Domenico Lucchini

Italy

76′

A journey into the world and the work of the great master of the South American cinema, Fernando Birri. As Birri said, it’s his "spiritual kino last will".

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Stray Dog (1949)

He is still young, the actor who should become known around the world with masterpieces like "Rashomon" or "The Seven Samurai". Here, Akira Kurosawa has created a thriller against the background of the recent and completely unprocessed Japanese war past, of which many of the characters, whether woman or man, talk. "Stray Dog" plays during the sultry hot summer in Tokyo in 1949. The young and completely inexperienced inspector Murakami (Toshiro Mifune) gets his loaded service weapon stolen from his jacket pocket in an overcrowded bus. Murakami is beside himself. He fears the worst consequences for his still young career. Together with his older colleague Sato from the theft department, he sets out on a search for traces of the thief. While we roam about the Japanese post-war setting with him, he gains experiences and learns to keep calm from the old and experienced colleague Sato. Women who are involved in what is going on are also snarling at him as a greenhorn. An impressive milieu study by Akira Kurosawa, in which the master proves himself in the genre film and shows us what he is capable of in narrative, atmospheric and visual terms. Walter Ruggle

Japan

122′

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Suite Habana (2003)

It might take two viewings to grasp fully what Fernando Pérez is doing in "Suite Habana," an elusive but intermittently beautiful tone poem on film. There is virtually no dialogue. There are no story lines that build to a climax, no documentary-style voice-overs. There are just snippets from a day in Havana, so disjointed and seemingly random that it takes a while to realize that Mr. Pérez is focusing on 10 specific individuals, tracking them through 24 hours in their painfully ordinary lives.

Cuba

86′

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Take Off (2013)

Bruno Moll

Ghana

93′

Ghana is considered a model country in West Africa - democratic, open, ambitious. Ghana's government is proud and likes to refer to good governance: to the best rule of law in West Africa and above all to stable economic growth - despite the global financial crisis. The government is determined to achieve faster socio-economic development, especially by expanding the industrial sector. Ebenezer Mireku comes from a Ghanaian jungle village. He made some detours to obtain his doctorate at the University of St. Gallen in 1988 and then returned to his home country to apply the knowledge he had acquired as an entrepreneur. For several years he has been passionately fighting for the realisation of his major project: the construction of a new section of the Ghanaian railway. The railway line is intended to stimulate the development of the entire region. His future-oriented, gigantic railway project was at the centre of the film project and is the leitmotif of Bruno Moll's film Take Off. The film narrative follows Ebenezer Mirekus' biography and experiences with the railway project, documenting encounters with Ghanaians. Questions about development, growth and progress are of specific interest.

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Tangos - el exilio de Gardel (1985)

In the sorrow of exile, a group of Argentinians in Paris seek solace and connection to their culture by staging a set of tangos. The film alternates between their vibrant rehearsals and their circumscribed lives in low-rent apartments, underemployed, fitfully communicating with families back home, trying to make do with what they hope are only temporary arrangements in a foreign land. Director Fernando Solanas had to spend several years in exile, some of them in Paris. There he tells us the story of people from Argentina spending their time in Paris and longing for Buenos Aires. One of the strongest movies about living in exile.

Argentina

120′

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Tanna (2015)

Martin Butler Bentley Dean

Australia

104′

In a traditional tribal society in the South Pacific, a young girl, Wawa, falls in love with her chief’s grandson, Dain. When an intertribal war escalates, Wawa is unknowingly betrothed as part of a peace deal. The young lovers run away, refusing her arranged fate. They must choose between their hearts and the future of the tribe, while the villagers must wrestle with preserving their traditional culture and adapting it to the increasing outside demands for individual freedom.

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Tatsumi (2011)

Eric Khoo

Singapore

96′

Tatsumi celebrates the life of Japanese comic artist, Yoshihiro Tatsumi. As he becomes successful, he redefines the manga landscape with an alternative genre for adults-and his work plunges into the darker aspects of life.

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Terra em transe - Land Entranced (1967)

El Dorado, a fictional country. Paulo, a poetry-writing intellectual, oscillates between the political extremes. First he devotes himself to the right-wing conservative Diaz, until he sees through the latter’s pseudo-religious fascism. Then he takes the side of Vieira, the populist reformer who wants to free the country of its misery. But Paulo’s true love is for Sara, the communist who works for Vieira. Paulo is forced to realize that both are interested only in power, not in change, and that they are willing to use any means to achieve their end. Disappointed and despairing, he sets off on his own path as a revolutionary, a path on which Sara is no longer able to follow him. He is shot and dies a lonely death, with a gun in his hand, sending a signal for others to take up arms. The lasting relevance of this masterpiece lies in the scene of long agony before Paulo dies. Sara calls out the question to him, “What does your death prove?” And he answers, “The victory of beauty and justice!” Glauber Rocha trusts in culture’s power of survival and connects it with the necessary struggle for social justice.

Brazil

108′

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The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

A young executive hunts down his father's killer in director Akira Kurosawa's scathing The Bad Sleep Well. Continuing his legendary collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa combines elements of Hamlet and American film noir to chilling effect in exposing the corrupt boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan.

Japan

151′

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The Beekeeper - O melissokomos (1986)

In THE BEEKEEPER, alienation and despair have so mestastasized in the film's central figure that he's virtually one of the walking dead. Spyros, a man soured by a secret, incestuous love for his daughter, on the day of her wedding, gives up his position as a schoolteacher, his wife, his home and his city to take up again the profession of his father and grandfather before him traveling across Greece to the town in which he was born and first learned to tend the bees, following the traditional beekeeper's route, looking for flowers that will produce the best honey, a wanderer obsessed by his job. Like a bee returning to its hive after searching for food he visits his old friends and his childhood home looking for threads to bind him to the present. He drives from town to town revisiting his old haunts and comrades relighting and reliving his history in his memory, trying to reconcile his past ideals with a swiftly changing nation that makes him feel uncomfortable. At some point he picks up a promiscuous young hitchhiker who sporadically tags along with him during his journey and seems to represent a new generation without memory and unconcerned with the past, drifting from one place to the next, flitting between the blinking lights of motor vehicles, gas stations, diners, cheap hotels and traffic signs along the dark, wet glistening roadways of present-day Greece. He becomes obsessed by her. She both irritates and entices him. What he seeks in her is a contact with the future. But for her the future is a casual encounter with the next moment. In the impossibility of their relationship there is a profound despair of a man without a future. He senses a rupture, but it's not the traditional one of the conflict of generations. It's really a rupture of language. He cannot communicate, even with love, with the body. From that comes his crisis of despair. Toward his end, he takes refuge in an abandoned cinema called the Pantheon. There, mocked by the sterile white screen above him, he tries - and fails - to bring himself to life in an attempt to connect sexually with the young hitchhiker but there can be no connection between these people from different worlds, either physical or emotional. For Spyros the past is everything, for her it is nothing. In Angelopoulos' words, «It's the conflict between memory and non-memory.» In the long run she only reminds him of his loneliness and isolation. Unable to come to come to terms with the present, betrayed by the past, wary of the future, Spyros falls back into silence and isolation and returns to his hives, abandoning himself to the stings of his bees.

Greece

117′

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The Coat (1926)

Grigori Kosinzew Leonid Trauberg

Russia

80′

A minor clerk, Bashmachkin, replaces his threadbare overcoat with one made from the finest materials he can afford. Then one evening ruffians beat him up and steal his cherished new garment. The actors’ highly stylized gestures border on modern dance, and Bashmachkin’s world, especially as he begins to lose his grasp on reality, is powerfully rendered with looming shadows, oblique camera angles and eccentric architecture.

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The Color of Pomegranates - Sayat Nova (1969)

Sergej Paradschanow

Armenia

80′

An absorbing portrait of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova which is brimming with metaphors and dreams. Parajanov created a melting pot based on the Armenian and Georgian cultural traditions with their rich religious symbolism and the expressive powers of cinema, the modernist folk art of the 20th century. This classic by Parajanov is not a dramatised portrait of the poet Arutyun Sayadyan, better known as Sayat-Nova (the King of Songs’), but an associative portrait full of metaphors and dreams, arabesques and still lifes. It is a film designed like an oriental tapestry: quirky and unpredictable in line and colour, but at the same time expressive of great aesthetic harmony. The Color of Pomegranates is also a statement about the Messianic role of the artist, in this case the filmmaker Parajanov, who regarded this film as his finest.

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The Cranes Are Flying (1957)

Michail Kalatosow

Russia

91′

Veronika and Boris come together in Moscow shortly before World War II. Walking along the river, they watch cranes fly overhead, and promise to rendezvous before Boris leaves to fight. Boris misses the meeting and is off to the front lines, while Veronika waits patiently, sending letters faithfully. After her house is bombed, Veronika moves in with Boris’ family, into the company of a cousin with his own intentions.

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The Dove's Lost Necklace (1991)

Nacer Khemir

Tunisia

90′

This fairy tale tells the story of Hassan, a young man who is taught calligraphy by his master. One day he runs across a portion of an old text which convinces him that it holds the secrets to love. With the help of an impudent young boy and the boy's monkey (whom the boy thinks is an enchanted prince), Hassan sets out to find the rest of the manuscript. What he finds instead is the beauteous Aziz. Despite their being separated by war, they are soon reunited. This film takes us in the midst of a time when djinns and visions were still, real. In its world we discover the peaceful coexistence of different cultures, religions and forms of life.

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The Goddess of 1967 (2000)

Clara Law

Australia

119′

A Japanese man searches the internet looking for his dream car, a 1967 Citroen DS (in French: Déesse, or "Goddess") . He locates one in Australia and travels there to buy it. Upon his arrival he finds the seller dead. A 17 year-old blind girl tells him she can take him to find the real owner. Together they embark on a strange and erotic journey into the arid Australian desert, populated by abandoned mining towns - a desolate land and a dark haunting past. Before long, their separate quests become one: a shared desire to transcend the past and find redemption, achieved under the benevolent eye of the Goddess.

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The Last Friday (2012)

Yahya Alabdallah

Jordan

89′

Since gambling away everything he used to own, Yousef has lived alone in humble conditions, working as a taxi driver. In order to scrape together the money for an upcoming operation at the hospital, he turns to his boss for help and re-establishes contact with his son and now wealthy ex-wife after a long period of estrangement. Much is therefore in motion on the eve of the surgical procedure. A Knight of the Mournful Countenance in the city of Amman: Yousef deals with everyday adversities with silence and stoicism. He secretly steals his electricity from a neighbour. He reacts to getting a parking ticket with a shrug of his shoulders. He endures his employer’s degradations and double-dealings. When female customers talk of their annoyances regarding their fiancées or other men, he simply doesn’t listen. He’s also come to terms with being the only one around without a mobile phone. It is only the impending operation and his concern for his truanting son which leads him to take control of his life. This carefully photographed film casts a laconic and occasionally humorous gaze on the relationship between father and son, men and women, rich and poor and stagnation and change.

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The mirror - Zerkalo (1975)

Alyosha, a 40-year-old filmmaker, falls seriously ill. He remembers his past and collects the memories that marked his life: the house of his childhood, his mother waiting for the improbable return of her husband, the poems of his father, his wife and his son that he has not seen for a long time, the tumult of the Second World War.

Russia

107′

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The Orator (2011)

Tusi Tamasese

Samoa

110′

While The Orator's status as Samoa's first feature film makes it a native landmark, writer/director Tusi Tamasese's deft command of atmospherics, tone, and rhythm transforms it into a genuinely noteworthy achievement. Primarily employing first-time actors to bring this delicately wrought tale to life, Tamasese centers his film on Saili (Fiaula Sagote), a diminutive pariah who lives with his wife Vaaiga and her wilful daughter at the outskirts of a remote jungle village. When Vaaiga's estranged family suddenly demands her return, Saili must settle the dispute through the Samoan tradition of oration. While frequent silent passages lend The Orator a meditative air, they also offer an opportunity to admire the resplendent cinematography of Leon Narbey (Whale Rider) and the subtlety with which Sagote evinces his character's remarkable transformation. Scene by scene, we witness a sense of self-worth being instilled in Saili, lending him the resilience necessary to fight for what he holds most dear. And when the climactic war of words erupts, we find ourselves hanging on every heartfelt word that leaves his lips.

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The Other Bank (2010)

George Ovashvili

Georgia

89′

Twelve-year-old Tedo lives with his young mother in Keto in an isolated hut on the outskirts of Tiflis. Tedo and Keto are refugees from Abchasia. The civil war has claimed everything they ever owned, including Tedo’s and Keto’s hopes for a bright future as an intact family unit. Tedo was just four years of age when they were obliged to flee from Abchasia. At the time, they had to leave behind Tedo’s father - his weak heart made it impossible for him to take on such a strenuous journey. Tedo is now an apprentice at a car repair shop and Keto is working as a sales assistant. Tedo gives the few pennies that he earns to his mother so that she no longer has to be nice to strange, unfriendly men. It pains the young boy agreat deal that he cannot earn more of a living for them; moreover, his mother’s moral conduct begins to weigh heavily on him. One day, when he discovers that she has a lover it becomes all too much for him and he decides to return to his father in Abchasia. Perhaps he will find the solution to all his problems there. Tedo meets many people on his journey - and suffers many a blow. He is by no means welcome everywhere. As his journey comes to an end he has acquired many an insight - such as the realisation that the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side.

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The River Titash (1973)

Ritwik Ghatak

India

157′

A fisherman, Kishore, marries a young girl accidentally when he visits a nearby village. After their wedding night, Kishore's young bride is kidnapped on the river. On losing his wife, Kishore becomes mad. Meanwhile, his young bride fights with the bandits, jumps into the river and is saved by some villagers. Unfortunately, the young bride knows nothing about her husband, she doesn't even know her husband's name. The only thing she remembers is the name of the village Kishore belongs to. Ten years later, she attempts to find Kishore with their son. Some residents of Kishore's village refuse to share food with her and her son because of the threat of starvation. A young widow Basanthi helps the mother and child. Later it turned out that Kishore and Basanthi were childhood lovers. Director Ghatak appears in the film as a boatman, and Basanti's story is the first of several melodramatic tales.

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The Sixth Part of the World - La sesta parte del mondo (1926)

Dziga Wertow

Russia

74′

Dziga Wertow, who rejects the old "cinema drama" as literary coquetry, has for the first time clearly formulated the essence of film, which is detached from all other arts. In contrast to the feature film, which forces the camera to copy the human eye, one has to consider that the cinema eye sees differently and more precisely than the "unarmed eye". Wertow's downright mystical belief in the creative power of film language tolerates no obstacles, no walls of distance and boundaries of time. Thus Entusiazm combines images from the European and Asian parts of the USSR into a "song of the world" that confronts socialism with capitalism. The extraordinary magic of his films lies in Vertov's ability to unite the two origins of the medium - the reproduced reality and its re-creation through montage - in the highest tension. (Vienna Film Museum, H.T.)

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The Sleepwalkers (2019)

A woman, Luisa, and her 14 year-old daughter, a sleepwalker in the teenage awakening. A marriage at the edge of a silenced crisis. A ritualistic and endogamic family: grandmother, siblings, and cousins. Summer, sweat, alcohol. Naked bodies, bodies in transition and their gazes upon those new bodies. A New Year’s celebration in the family’s ancestral country home is the necessary trap to awaken the sleepwalkers.

Argentina

107′

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The Song of Mary Blane (2019)

Bruno Moll

Switzerland

86′

The painter from Solothurn (CH) Frank Buchser was sent to the USA in 1866 to paint a large painting of the "Heroes of the Civil War" for the future Council of States Hall in Bern. Initially Buchser was busy portraying politicians and generals in the spirit of his clients. More and more, however, he became interested in the Indians expelled to the reservations and in the living conditions of the slaves who had just been freed. Years earlier, fascinated by Moorish culture, Frank Buchser rides disguised as a Turkish sheikh to the Moroccan town of Fez, which is forbidden to Christians under death penalty. The Swiss filmmaker Bruno Moll (Pizza Bethlehem, Tunisreise) tells the two adventurous journeys of the rebellious and controversial artist. The film narrative begins with film documents of the riots in Charlottesville in August 2017 and the diary entries made by Frank Buchser in 1869, when General Lee was his model for the portrait. In a large flashback the film tells Buchser's story of his stay in Andalusia and Morocco in 1858, returns with him to his homeland and closes with his North American adventure.

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The Street of Love and Hope (1959)

Nagisa Oshima

Japan

62′

Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses) is probably the most famous figure in the Japanese cinema of the 60s. He made his debut in 1959, exactly the same year as his French colleagues in the Nouvelle Vague, with his feature film Ai to Kibo no Machi (The Street of Love and Hope), only to double with Seishun Zankoku Monogatari (Naked Youth) a year later. In The Street of Love and Hope, Oshima tells the story of a boy who lives in poverty and has to sell his dove. It is also the story of a fraud. Because the dove returns and can be sold again and again. He sells the dove to a rich girl who starts to take an interest in him. An overcoming of the class differences seems possible. But the girl notices the fraud and is disappointed. She buys the dove again to kill her.

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The suspended step of the stork (1991)

While working on a story in the border area, a young journalist discovers a divided town bisected by a river which is also the national frontier. He observes a surreal wedding in which the bride and her family stand on one shore and the groom and his relatives on the other, lost under a cold sky: figure in a landscape who only delude themselves that they are masters of the earth and their destiny The town, a remote ghost town, almost forgotten at the end of the world, has been named «waiting room» by the locals because most of its inhabitants are refugees from different countries many of whom have crossed the border illegally at some time or other and are now waiting for their turn to leave and start life anew «somewhere else.» In the course of his investigation he also comes upon an aging, reclusive refugee, who lives there cultivating a field. But the young journalist believes he is a famous Greek politician who disappeared years before, leaving behind him many unanswered questions. The man's identity is never resolved but the hapless refugees and divided village allow the reporter to understand his despair over the human condition. Theo Angelopoulos weaves yet another poetical allegory on the great open questions of our turbulent age. The film is very contemporary in its treatment of borders, refugees and a changing world since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. «Being a refugee is an internal condition more than an external one, says one of the characters in the film. And later on he also says, «We've passed the borders but we're still here. How many frontiers do we have to pass to get home?» Do politicians really care? Does anyone? Finally, there is the image of the stranger standing on the bridge poised over the dividing line between the two countries. He has one leg suspended in mid air, like a stork. «If I take one more step I am... somewhere else, or... I die.»

Greece

136′

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The Travelling Players - O Thiassos (1975)

The Travelling Players is a film of epic proportions. The action takes place during the years 1939-52 and is seen as a series of individual, often inexplicable events or tableaux, commentated by monologues, by slogans written on the walls, or by songs. It reveals the period's turbulent history while focusing on a travelling company of actors who spend those fourteen years wandering through provinces, cities and villages, performing, in increasingly threadbare circumstances, a 19th century pastoral melodrama, Persiadis' Golfo the Shepherdess. They never get to finish the play and the tranquil sheep painted on their back cloth gaze down upon generations of anguish and bloodshed. The passage of history reverberates in individual incidents or is summarized in symbols. These sad, shabby, often hungry folk, whose relationship is based on the family of the House of Atreus, are of varying political hues - from active collaborators with the Nazis (Aegisthus), to opportunists (Chrysothemis), to centrist Greek patriots (Agamemnon), to the apolitical (Clytemnestra), to left-wing idealists (Electra), to communist guerillas (Orestes). And they fill these roles as much as they do the mythic ones of wandering general, faithless wife, betrayer or vengeful son. As they travel amid the constant wartime convulsions, they begin, unconsciously, to enact parallels to Aeschylus' tragic cycle.

Greece

222′

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The Voyage (El viaje) (1992)

A young man living in a cold southern village in South America, decides to start a trip looking for his father. By doing this he discovers unexpected facts about his Latin American essence.

Argentina

133′

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Theeb (2014)

Naji Abu Nowar

Jordan

100′

In the Ottoman province of Hijaz during World War I, a young Bedouin boy experiences a greatly hastened coming of age as he embarks on a perilous desert journey to guide a British officer to his secret destination. In 1916, in the Hejaz Province of the Ottoman Empire, the young Bedouin Theeb (Jacir Eid) is learning from his elder brother Hussein (Hussein Salameh) the skills for everyday survival in their harsh environment. Immersed in a way of life that has endured for centuries, the brothers are unaware of the tremendous upheavals taking place at the fringes of their world: the First World War is raging in Europe, the Ottoman Empire is coming undone, the Great Arab Revolt is brewing, and the British officer T.E. Lawrence is plotting with the Arab Prince Faisal to establish an Arab kingdom. When British officer Edward (Jack Fox) and his Bedouin guide Marji (Marji Audeh) stumble wayward into their tribe's camp, the two brothers' destiny is forever changed. Abiding by the Bedouin custom that guests cannot be refused aid, Hussein is assigned to accompany the two strangers to their destination - with the uninvited Theeb, eager for adventure, following close behind. The ensuing journey, filled with danger and hardship, will result in Theeb's greatly hastened maturation in a culture where a man's honour and righteousness determines his inclusion or expulsion from the community.

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Those Wonderful Movie Cranks (1978)

At the beginning of the 20th century, a film projectionist tours through Bohemian villages and dreams of opening a cinema in Prague. He allies himself with a young cameraman (played by Jiří Menzel), who in turn has a dream: He longs for true-to-life films that deal with the reality of people. Menzel's Those Wonderful Movie Cranks is one of the most beautiful tributes to the pioneers of the silent era, and the film is also a melancholic reflection on necessary concessions.

89′

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To the Ends of the Earth (2019)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Uzbekistan

120′

Yoko (Atsuko Maeda) hosts a popular global travel show yet is cautious and insular like many young Japanese. But she has a bigger dream. On assignment in Uzbekistan, Yoko and her small TV crew attempt to catch a mythical fish but fail. They also film segments in Samarkand but feel it’s lacking. Indifferent to her job, Yoko prefers texting her boyfriend in Tokyo. At night, she comes across a tied up goat and suggests releasing it on camera. The plan goes awry and Yoko feels indignant and naive. The team move to Tashkent where Yoko wanders into an opulent theatre, fantasizing she's on stage. She confides her ambitions to her cameraman but admits her heart's not ready. While filming, Yoko's timid nature inadvertently gets her in trouble with the police. At the station she hears of a disaster in Tokyo and realizes how important human communication truly is. Some of the team return to Japan but Yoko stays. As she ventures into the mountains she sings from the heart and her spirit is freed.

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Tokyo Family (2013)

Yoji Yamada

Japan

146′

In this film director Yoji Yamada bows down before his teacher and role model. Yamada was assistant director on Yazujiro Ozu’s «Tokyo monogatari», a moving family portrait set after the Second World War. In his remake, Yamada has made very few departures from Ozu’s masterpiece in order to update the story of ageing couple Shukichi and Tomiko to present day Japan. Once again, the pair decides to leave their quiet lives in the country to pay a visit to their children and grandchildren in Tokyo. Once there, they discover that neither their oldest son, a doctor named Koichi, nor their eldest daughter Shigeko - who runs a beauty parlour - has time for them: both are too busy attending to their everyday concerns. Even the youngest son went his own way. The old couple feel lonely and bewildered in the fast-paced metropolis. Adopting Ozu’s quiet observations of the family, Yamada’s version loses nothing of its topicality and, even sixty years after the original was filmed, the generation gap is still palpable. In fact, today’s young people are struggling to assert themselves in a far more confusing world, and this in a country where the scars of the 2011 tsunami still inform everyday life.

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Tokyo Sonata (2008)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Japan

120′

TOKYO SONATA is a portrait of a seemingly ordinary Japanese family. The father who abruptly loses his job conceals the truth from his family; the eldest son in college hardly returns home; the youngest son furtively takes piano lessons without telling his parents; and the mother, who knows deep down that her role is to keep the family together, cannot find the will to do so. From the exterior, all is normal and the same. But somehow, a single, unforeseeable chasm has appeared within the family, only to spread ever so quietly and quickly to disintegrate them.

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Tokyo Story (1953)

Yasujiro OZU

Japan

137′

The Hirayamas travel from their hometown of Onomichi to Tokyo to visit their adult children. But the younger generation make them feel more in the way than welcome. It also emerges that their son’s career as a doctor and their daughter’s as a hairdresser are nowhere near as successful as the couple were led to believe from afar. The only one who really makes an effort to spend time with them is their daughter-in-law, Noriko, the widow of the Hirayama’s son who went missing in the war. On the journey home, mother Hirayama is taken seriously ill and the couple have to make an unscheduled stop in Osaka, where another of their adult children lives. In a succinct, objective and non-judgemental manner, Yasujirō Ozu uses images which are as simple as they are magnificent to tell the story of family estrangement and the isolation inherent in modern society. Ozu himself considered Tōky ō Monogatari his "masterpiece" and the 1963 Retrospective of the Berlin International Film Festival, the "film-historical screenings", was dedicated to him. This is the international premiere of the digitally restored version made by Japanese production company Shochiku.

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Toula ou le génie des eaux (1973)

Moustapha Alassane

Niger

72′

The gods have declared the drought of the country. There seems to be no hope. A holy man summoned by the king requires the sacrifice of a young woman to put an end to their anger. A young man in love decides to go in search of water to save the girl from a tragic end, but when he returns with good news it's too late: the genie had his satisfaction and Toula has already disappeared in the holy swamp.

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Trans-Cutucu, back in the rainforest (2009)

Lisa Faessler

Ecuador

92′

The mountain massif of Cutucú in the south of the Amazon region in Ecuador was a kind of defense against the environmental destruction for the native population but in the same time an obstacle. The people had no access to the modern world outside. The road through the Cutucú now allows mobility in order to exploit the fossil resurces but it grants the natives a way to reach the so called civilized world. The process happens in an unspectacular way. Where progress starts it cannot be stopped anymore: Escavating, digging, shovelling, grubbing, selling and buying: everyday madness. Excerpts from the film «Shuar, People of the Sacred Waterfalls» (1986) recall us, how in the traditional culture of the Shuar nature was an integrated part of life and mobility was achieved in the hallucinogenic ecstasy with no bounds. Today the natives are transporting wooden boards with horses to civilization. Wood is the fastest business, other products must first be created. Now the jungle disappears in everyday madness.

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Bonus: Interview with Alicia Schwerson

Turistas (2009)

Alicia Scherson

Chile

105′

Carla duda. Tiene 37 años, está casada, posiblemente embarazada y debería estar feliz mientras viaja hacia las vacaciones de verano con su marido y una moto de agua enganchada al auto. Pero quizás no quiere estar ahí. Quizás preferiría estar en la carretera con algún mochilero noruego, yendo a un hermoso parque nacional donde podría caminar entre grandes árboles y hablar sobre pájaros y viejas canciones pop con el guardaparques. Sí, quizás eso sería mejor.

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Ugetsu monogatari (1953)

In his masterpiece Ugetsu monogatari the Japanese Kenji Mizoguchi tells the story of Genjuro, a potter, and his brother-in-law, the farmer Tobei. The two live with their wives in a small village in the middle of a war-torn area. And they have ambitions that take advantage of the turmoil of war. Genjuro wants to travel to the city with his pots and earn a lot of money as quickly as possible. Tobei wants to achieve fame and honor as a Samurai. Both risk everything - and lose. The pursuit of money and fame, Mizoguchi makes clear here, inevitably involves the loss of inner values. Genjuro and Tobei set out on a path that leads them further and further away from themselves, following their dreams and phantoms and not the traces of reality. On the way, on that grandiose boat passage, death drives past them like a phantom - they don't know how to interpret the sign correctly. And so death becomes reality. Genjuro later pursues a love that he considers to be more genuine and stronger than that of his own wife left at home. Love, however, turns out to be a phantom, the ghost of a long faded princess.

Japan

97′

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Ultimas imagenes del naufragio (1989)

Robert is an insurance employee and has been unhappily married for many years. He dreams of becoming a writer. One day he saves the mysterious Laura from suicide. At first this proves to be a real stroke of luck for him: not only does she provide him with stories from her life, which he can put on paper, she also has everything he needs for his happiness. Robert falls head over heels in love with the beautiful woman, unaware of what this will bring him.

Argentina

130′

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Ultimos dias en La Habana (2016)

Diego and Miguel are both in their mid-forties. They are living in a dilapidated apartment in central Havana without running water or any modern amenities. Miguel earns his money washing dishes in a privately run restaurant; he, his family and neighbours also care for Diego, who is bedridden on account of his HIV infection. While Diego tries to maintain his joie de vivre, Miguel becomes increasingly withdrawn. Only the two of them know about Miguel’s secret: he is planning to emigrate to the USA and is just waiting for his visa. When Diego’s condition deteriorates he is forced to go into hospital and leaves his room to his niece Yusi. When Miguel’s visa finally arrives it’s time for some surprising decisions - and not just for him. Writer, documentary filmmaker and director Fernando Pérez has based his screenplay on the lives of the inhabitants of a tenement building. The resulting film presents a vibrant kaleidoscope of emotions. Unfolding in tranquil images, this story of an unusual friendship also provides an insight into a culture in transition that requires constant flexibility and incredible optimism. A declaration of love to the Cuban capital and its inhabitants.

Cuba

93′

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Ulysses' Gaze - To vlemma tou Odyssea (1995)

A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film. His real reason for coming back, however, is to track down three long-missing reels of film by Greece's pioneering Manakia brothers who in the early years of cinema traveled through the Balkans, ignoring national and ethnic strife and recording ordinary people, especially craftsmen, on film. Their images, he believes, hold the key to lost innocence and essential truth, to an understanding of Balkan history Thus he embarks on a search that takes him across the war-torn Balkans, a landscape of spectral figures and broken dreams, right to the heart of darkness: a damaged film archive in Sarajevo where his quest ends. Like a latter-day Ulysses he finds his «Ithaca», the missing, undeveloped film and is at last united with the work of the Manakia brothers... his gaze communes with theirs and another journey begins.

Greece

169′

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Un amor (2012)

Does love at first sight exist? This may certainly be the case, but sometimes you need time to be sure of this love. This film describes such a story about getting to know somebody and falling in love as a teenager, and about meeting again many years later. It begins in the 70s, in the summer in a small town by the river. Bruno and Lalo are teenagers and good friends. They hang around together in the heat, until one rainy day Lisa turns up, a beautiful young woman who capriciously and quick-wittedly turns the heads of both boys - and then decides on one of them. Three decades later she is back again and finds the friends from her youth living in differing situations. "I am single now", she says, but I can't get the picture of the three of us out of my head. No, she is certainly no longer the same Lisa for both men as she was back then. The pictures and memories that one had of one another, are these still any use in the present? What was it like back then, this love? What did we want, what happened to us? They ponder these questions in front of the camera, giving voice to their memories. How does a love story and history fit together? Can you carry on where you left off three decades ago? These and other questions are pondered by this film about making friends and falling in love as a teenager, and of meeting again many years later. The wonderfully easy-going triangle of their adolescence can probably not be revived. But what about unique and true love from back then? Paula Hernández’ film is also an experiment about how feelings are linked to the spirit of the time the ups and downs of life, in which light, air and sun play a not insignificant role. An intensive, thoughtful, atmospherically very emotionally intoned film about love and about time, which gives this love a new dimension.

Argentina

100′

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Una noche (2012)

Lucy Mulloy

Cuba

90′

Mired in the nervous desperation of Havana, Raul dreams of escaping to Miami. When accused of assault, his only option is to flee Cuba. He begs his best friend, Elio, to abandon everything and help him reach the forbidden world 90 miles across the ocean. Elio’s commitment is tested when he is torn between protecting his twin sister and his own desire to get out. Brimming with the nervous energy of Havana’s restless youth and the evocative cinematography of the sun-bleached capital, UNA NOCHE follows one sweltering day, full of hope and fraught with tension, that burns to a shocking climax.

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Une ville à Chandigarh (1965)

Alain Tanner

India

53′

When, in 1947, a portion of Punjab province was assigned to the newly created Pakistani State, Albert Mayer began planning a new capital for the portion which remained in the possession of India. Le Corbusier had been responsible since the 1950s for general planning and, more particularly, for large-scale buildings typical of the governmental sector. A year after the death of Le Corbusier, Alain Tanner began shooting his film in a city still partially under construction, or even, in certain places, at the planning stage. The inhabitants of the metropolis, however, already numbered some 120,000. Among the most modern of cities architecturally, Chandigarh was archaically constructed by hand. Impressions of this green horizontal city-brick not permitting vertical development-are captured in long static shots and numerous traveling shots. John Berger's commentary inscribes the visual beauty of that reality within a larger reflection: climate did strongly influence the decisions of the planners, whereas the new city did not succeed in breaking the old social rules with a single blow. These rules continue to determine the level of education and income, and it is not even possible for these workers who are in the process of constructing Chandigarh to live in it themselves. However, the film partakes of Le Corbusier's optimism in its appreciation of architecture as an instrument aiding men to clarify their visions, to exercise their powers of discernment and to establish new relations, even if the results will only make themselves felt in the long term.

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Valley of Saints (2012)

Musa Syeed

India

81′

In the valley of Kashmir, a lakeside city convulses with riots and curfews. A young man tries to escape, when he meets a beautiful environmentalist in an abandoned houseboat. Trapped together in his floating village, their blossoming romance threatens to derail his dreams.

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Virgem Margarida (2012)

Licínio Azevedo

Mozambique

87′

1975, Mozambique’s rebirth. The young revolution sweeps the streets of Maputo from prostitutes and bad habits. Sent to re-education camps deep in the countryside, they will become "new women". Margarida, a sixteen year-old girl from the countryside, was mistakenly taken. This is their story. Women bounded by adversity.

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Voyage to Cythera - Taxidi sta Kythira (1984)

Cythera, in Greek mythology, is the isle of dreams where one can dedicate oneself to happiness (or the pursuit thereof). In this quest within a quest, the tale of the father's return is told as if from the point of view of his son Telemachus and as if Telemachus were a filmmaker, as well as a middle-aged man with a son of his own. A film director, tired of the illusions and fictions of his profession, searches for a story of substance by attaching himself to an old man, a recently returned political exile. The man, away in the Soviet Union for 32 years and now stateless, finds himself at the beginning of a journey, not the end, and Angelopoulos evokes the past, present and future to bridge the gap between reality and the imagination. VOYAGE TO CYTHERA is about an old man - the country's leftist past - who cannot become reconciled to his country's present or perhaps it is Greece that is not ready to come to grips with its past. In the end the old man is set adrift on a raft headed away from Greece into international waters, with no home to steer toward, joined by his wife a latter-day Penelope who, despite the fact that this man is more a stranger than a husband to her after so many years, chooses to share the rest of her life with him and in doing so accepts all of his past, his sorrow, his politics and his failed dreams. It is a journey to the dark side of Greek history where it crosses paths with myth.

Greece

134′

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Wilaya (2012)

Pedro Pérez Rosado

Western Sahara

88′

Fatimetu is born to a Sahrawi family in a Saharan refugee camp in Algeria and later sent to live with foster parents in Spain. After the death of her mother she returns to the camp. She has been absent for sixteen years. Her brother now expects her to stay and look after her sister Hayat, who has difficulty walking. Fatimetu, who unlike the other women can drive a car, finds work transporting animals, meat and bread from one administrative district to another. In time, the Sahrawi people become accustomed to the woman who tears about the desert without a hijab in her beaten up jeep. But Fatimetu is torn between life in the desert and her memories of her family and friends in Spain. The Sahrawi are a Moorish ethnic group in Algeria that is still waiting for the referendum that will define their status under international law. Told in concentrated, poetic images, Pedro Pérez Rosado’s film does not only give us the story of two reunited sisters or the clash of two different cultures; he also allows his Saharan protagonists to describe in their own words their political and social predicament.

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Winter Song (2015)

Otar Iosseliani

France

116′

Resemblances can be unnerving. Such as the one between the viscount who went, puffing on his pipe, to the guillotine during the Terror, the army chaplain who has a brigand's tattoos on his chest and is a compulsive baptizer of soldiers, pillagers and rapists, the Parisian down-and-out left as flat as a pancake by an encounter with a steamroller, and, last but not least, the cultivated concierge—and occasional arms dealer—in an upscale building. Almost all the film's characters meet in that very building except, of course, the homeless, who are carted by the cops from pillar to post. Yet amid all this chaos, there are dream spaces, love stories and solid friendships that perhaps allow us to hope that tomorrow will be better than today.

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Wolf And Sheep (2016)

Shahrbanoo Sadat

Afghanistan

87′

In rural Afghanistan, people believe in the stories they invent to tell each other, explaining the mysteries of the world, they don’t understand. Shepherd children own the mountains. Even though there are no grown ups around, they know the rules very well; the main one is that boys and girls are not allowed to be together, they have to be separated. The boys practice with their slings to fight the wolves should they attack the flock. The girls smoke dried branches of wheat secretly and play wedding, dreaming of getting a husband soon. They gossip about every one and everything, but mostly about Sediqa, 11, an outsider among the shepherd children. They think she is cursed, as an evil ghost disguised as a snake bewitched her grandmother. Sediqa picks up her sheep and goats every morning and drops them in the owner’s house every evening. She dreams of having a sling and learn to swing it like the boys and hit a wolf. Qodrat, 11, becomes the gossip topic of everyone after his mother remarries with an old man with two wives. He prefers to be alone in the most isolated parts of the mountains. This is where he meets Sediqa and they become friends until Qodrat’s mother has to send him away.

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Woman in the Septic Tank (2012)

Marlon N. Rivera

Philippines

87′

As far as their film school final project is concerned, these three students have only one goal in mind - international fame, including Oscars and festival prizes. They know what foreign audiences expect from Philippine cinema - prostitution, abuse, rubbish tips and slums - and apply this magic formula to develop the ultimate in misery porn. A mother, battered by life, sells her child to a sex tourist; a story as harsh and realistic as it is rousingly emotional. The only thing missing is a big-name star, but famous actresses can be such divas... ANG BABAE SA SEPTIC TANK is the most successful independent film in the history of Philippine cinema, and a rare example of an intelligent film-within-a-film plot that takes an illuminating behind-thescenes look at filmmaking. Highly entertaining and hugely self-deprecating, this comedy draws on ingrained clichés in order to shamelessly exploit them. In addition, the sophisticated dramatic structure allows leading lady Eugene Domingo, a Filipino movie star in real life, to deliver an exceptional performance, at once touching and wildly funny.

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Worlds Apart (2015)

Christopher Papakaliatis

Greece

105′

Set in modern day Greece, "Worlds Apart" is comprised of three separate narratives each following a love story between a foreigner and a Greek. Each story represents a different generation falling in love during a time of socioeconomic turmoil that dominates Southern Europe as a whole,only to connect as a single story in the end. Almost like a triptych work of art where each painting stands alone,yet its true impact lies when viewed as a whole. "Worlds Apart", follows the characters difficult path to love and the complications that their world has. Nevertheless Greece,despite its harsh realities,is still a place where truth,beauty and humanity exist. A place where love can thrive even in the darkest hour.

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Yaaba (1989)

Idrissa Ouedraogo

Burkina Faso

86′

Ten year old Bila and his cousin Nopoko live happily in their Sahelian village. Bila is taken with an elderly woman, Sana, whom he calls «Yaaba», although the rest of the village treats her as a witch. One day, Nopoko falls ill with tetanus; her condition worsens. Nobody in the village, not even the healer, can help her - except, perhaps, Sana. Yaaba is one of Idrissa Ouedraogo’s major works and typical for his approach: "My Africa is not only about masks, dances and cottages, it's about love, friendship and reflecting on the world," says the maverick director, who is aware of Western film codes but refuses them, who remains rooted in Africa despite his many travels.

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Yeelen (1987)

Souleymane Cissé

Mali

106′

A key film of Africa in restored version! In this epic drama drawing on Bambara culture, which echoes mythic legends in an invented tale, a hero undergoes ordeals that allow him to renovate a decaying society. A young man must penetrate the secrets of the Komo cult (a real caste of specialist knowledge among the Bambara), whose members have abused their spiritual powers. Niamankoro suffers his father's wrath as he travels throughout the Bambara empire and Dogon and Peul societies.

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Yojimbo (1961)