Venice Winners

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?

The film is a study of the 20th century cult of personality - the myth, the lure and the corruption of the political hero who is a fusion of two characters. Drawing from the so-called Dilessi incident of 1870 (updated in the film to the dawn of the twentieth century), this Megalexandros is a bandit of the sort that typically plagued nineteenth century Greece. Wrapped in the spiritual cloak of yet another Megalexandros - a legendary Greek liberator and King Arthur-like figure whose tale originated in 1453 under Turkish domination and has come down through oral tradition over the centuries - he becomes a leader of mysterious charisma. He kidnaps a group of English aristocrats and takes them to a mountain village where he is attempting to establish an agrarian commune among a company of Italian anarchists. The socialist hero becomes a Stalin-like tyrant whose trademark silence only reinforces his power. The film is a true work of demythification - from the roots of myth to the false promises of the new century.

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.

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.

Let’s imagine that there is a new craft, and that it is called "replacing". Let’s imagine an unemployed man who would practice such craft every day. So much so, that he would actually work beyond measure, and that he would be, in his own way, a happy man. All he does is take on, for a few hours, the role of absentees who duck - for more or less serious reasons, their official occupation. He makes do with just enough, our hero, because money isn’t everything in life: one needs to keep in shape, and not letting oneself go in times of, how to say, dark crises. Let’s imagine, also, that there is a twenty years old young man (his son) who plays the sax like a God, and is therefore lucky, as he is an artist. Let’s then imagine Lucia, restless and wary, that hides a secret behind her desire to get ahead. Will they get to the next episode safe and sound?

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Zama, an officer of the Spanish Crown born in South America, waits for a letter from the King granting him a transfer from the town in which he is stagnating, to a better place. His situation is delicate. He must ensure that nothing overshadows his transfer. He is forced to accept submissively every task entrusted to him by successive Governors who come and go as he stays behind. The years go by and the letter from the King never arrives. When Zama notices everything is lost, he joins a party of soldiers that go after a dangerous bandit. Adapted from Antonio di Benedetto's 1956 classic of Argentinean literature.

A documentary about how a dominant cultural and demographic institution both sustains their traditional activities and adapts to the digital revolution.

Anberber has studied in Germany and returns post-graduate to Ethiopia. He is full of hope that he can support his country with his newly acquired knowledge. It's a story about hope and disillusionment, about foreignness and homeland.