Media

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."

The internet has changed everything, also for journalism: business models are falling by the wayside, news is available for free, anywhere and at any time. I accompany journalists in their daily lives, see how they struggle, and I do what they also do: I observe and ask, also question myself, my fascination and my suspicion. I, too, use the net with ease. I am a user – and I am used.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mariana, Martìn and the city of Buenos Aires. Martìn and Mariana live across from each other on the same block, but never meet. They pass each other, not knowing about the other’s existence. She goes up the stairs as he goes down the stairs; he gets on the bus just as she gets off the bus. They go to the same video rental shop, but a video rack separates them; they sit in the same row at the cinema, but the auditorium is dark. The city brings them together, and, at the same time, keeps them apart. Director Gustavo Taretto told the story of Mariana, Martìn and the city of Buenos Aires once before: «MEDIANERAS is a short film that received 40 awards worldwide - a short film with a feature film hidden inside. Our aim is to bring the feature to light. In the film EL SOL DEL MEMBRILLO (QUINCE TREE OF THE SUN), Víctor Erice reflects, among other things, upon Antonio López’s obsession with painting a tree that he had planted and seen growing in his garden. The tree changes with the passing of time, the seasons, and especially in different shades of light. MEDIANERAS is my tree. I planted it over four years ago, and I’ve been watching it grow since then. Following the analogy with the painting, the short film unveils the gesture in the stroke, the artist’s palette, the trunk which holds it in place, the main branches and the colour of its leaves. Now, with the feature, the moment has arrived for going into detail, for exploring depth and hues, ambiguities and contradictions. The story changes in exactly the same way as the city that serves as its setting: Buenos Aires. Some of the scenes wither away, while others bloom.» (Gustavo Taretto)

This Charlie Hebdo staffer is being filmed since 2011, when the young Moroccan journalist came to France as she couldn't work in her own country anymore. We follow Zineb El Rhazoui before, during and after the attack on the satire magazine in Paris. From being a censored journalist she becomes the most protected woman of Europe. Never afraid, but then she falls in love and gets pregnant. What now?

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.