Road movies

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Abu Shadi is a divorced father and a school teacher in his mid-60s living in Nazareth. After his daughter's wedding in one month he will be living alone. Shadi, his architect son, arrives from Rome after years abroad to help his father in hand delivering the wedding invitations to each guest as per local Palestinian custom. As the estranged pair spend the day together, the tense details of their relationship come to a head challenging their fragile and very different lives.

Project initially entrusted to Maurice Pialat, who had already begun to film it under the title of “Meurtrières” (see the special edition of Les Inrockuptibles devoted to Pialat), Messidor is based on a crime story which hit the headlines in France in the 1970s: two adolescent girls run away and go on a criminal spree which ends in their deaths. On the face of it, this subject is remote from the world we associate with Tanner, since a violent story of this kind and its social background would seem to impose the realistic, even naturalistic form always shunned by the Swiss director. Moreover, Tanner is instinctively averse to filming physical violence. “Killing a person”, he says, “is generally a gratuitous special effect.” Consequently, of all Tanner’s films Messidor is the only one in which someone dies of non-natural causes. It is also Tanner’s most sombre work, characterised by a despair unmitigated by his usual verbal and situational humour. This is because Tanner accepted the project only on condition that he could recast the original idea and use this violent story as a vehicle for more personal preoccupations: the limits of freedom (already treated in his previous film) are here related to the girls’ frantic flight in the Swiss countryside. What interests him is the possible sullying of this place of excessive peace and quiet, now transformed into a field of experience and criminal fun-and-games by the two characters.