IFFR 51 (Jan 26-Feb 6, 2022)

<p>&quot;She presented her first film at the festival in 1990 and now Mijke de Jong is back at IFFR with Along the Way, the moving story of two refugees trying to reach Fortress Europe. The film&rsquo;s genesis lies in the voluntary work De Jong did at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, where she met the Afghan twins Nahid and Malihe. Touched by their story, ambitions and talent, De Jong decided to collaborate with them. This results in a moving, powerful film about Fatima and Zahra&rsquo;s experiences, stranded, as they are, in Istanbul after a life-threatening journey from Teheran. Their goal is Greece, but even then they will still be nowhere. Like other young adults Fatima and Zahra hope they will make it; they dream of careers as filmmakers. With their ingenuity and resilience, they will undoubtedly succeed &ndash; if they are given the opportunity.&quot;</p>

<p>Colourful, unpolished portrait of the Rotterdam theatre-maker Paul R&ouml;ttger, whose work has been all about inclusivity for 30 years. The thread running through the film is rehearsals by Theater Babel Rotterdam, the theatre company of which he is director, that performs some 150 productions a year. R&ouml;ttger previously headed the Rotterdams Centrum voor Theater and Theater Maatwerk (Rotterdam Centre for Theater and Custom-made Theatre). The documentary shows his ongoing search for equal artistic collaboration between people from a wide variety of genders, cultural backgrounds, physical and mental conditions, and professionalism.</p>

<p>Anatomy of Time begins with the ending: the death of Maem&rsquo;s beloved spouse, a merciless former Thai army officer who fell from grace late in his career. Alternating between past and present, filmmaker Jakrawal Nilthamrong&rsquo;s second feature film &ndash; his first, Vanishing Point, won him the Tiger Award in 2015 &ndash; tells the story of Maem, the daughter of a rural clockmaker. We see her as a young woman yet to discover herself in the 1960s, and in her present role as her dying husband&rsquo;s loyal caretaker &ndash; a man now hated by the Thai people.</p>

<p>At the end of the 19th century, Lise grows up as the eldest daughter of a Danish landowner with a large brood. Lise&rsquo;s mother is about to give birth, in a household where the Bible dictates life and superstition is stronger than trust in science. Nevertheless, Lise&rsquo;s existence also carefully exhibits the spirit of a new age: Lise&rsquo;s mother has fought for her to be the first girl to go to school. However, when her mother&rsquo;s pregnancy proves life-threatening, Lise realises how fragile her plans for the future really are.</p>

<p>Ara has always believed she will vanish when she turns 28 years old. As her birthday approaches, she submerges in the most fundamental sensations of existence. A masterful debut film from director-writer &Aacute;gata de Pinho, whose performance leads her character from trauma to catharsis in the most beautiful way.</p>

<p>In a beautifully decorated house, an exasperating passive-aggressive dialogue &ndash; full of mindfucks &ndash; between two teenage girls culminates in a disquieting physical event. This is how to get a dog barking. Compared with Kramer&rsquo;s later, more stylised work, her first short is shot in a strikingly straightforward way. The tone, despite its seductive rose pink hue, is just as unsettling below the surface, as in the rest of her oeuvre.</p>

<p>&quot;Japan is in the grip of a new drug: Golden Monkey. This mysterious substance not only gives the user boundless energy, but also changes its victims into shadow monsters &ndash; the perfect cannon fodder for fighting wars. In the animated sci-fi drama Battlecry, Haya hopes to put an end to this crisis. The World Bank employee is helped in this by Soji, a soldier on leave with a troubled past. Like his new comrade, he desperately wants to restore Japan to its former glory. Flashbacks to the old days, interspersed through this detective-style story, underscore the pair&rsquo;s tragedy even more.&quot;</p>

<p>Two canals in a Dutch nature reserve* run parallel to each other for miles. The camera moves across the surface of the water and accelerates to fly from one canal to the other. The images change from black-and-white to infrared and we see the nature reserve from an unusual color spectrum, and at a different velocity. Imagining a totally different perception such as through the eyes of the dragonfly, which perceives different wavelengths and can &#39;see&#39; many times faster, &gt;200 images per second, than a human. The tour ends where the two canals meet; by the water at the foot of a silent witness, an overgrown bunker.<br /> *Striking fact: the former peat exploitation waterways of the Peel have grown themselves into protected nature reserves in the midst of extremely industrial livestock production that poses a threat to biodiversity.</p>

<p>40-year-old Clara is in her element among the animals and nature. However, purple tape marks where she is permitted to go on the grounds of her house, on the edge of the Costa Rican rain forest. Hunchbacked and developmentally challenged, she lives under the protective regime of her devout mother, Fresia, who views her syndrome as a sign of God&rsquo;s providence, and attributes healing skills to her. She regularly functions as the unwilling focal point of religious services, with which do&ntilde;a Fresia &ndash; who also has Clara&rsquo;s niece Maria under her protection &ndash; augments the household&rsquo;s income. A second source of money is the white mare, Yuca, which is rented to a tourist organisation. Clara&rsquo;s deep connection to nature is portrayed with a hint of mystery and accompanied by a dark, dreamy score. A new animal caretaker brings out long-repressed feelings.</p>

<p>&quot;The epitome of a 1960s wuxia movie. The storyline and characters in Dragon Inn are very simple, a triumph of Hu&rsquo;s distinctive style. The action centres on the comings and goings of a small guesthouse, with particular attention paid to the props and set. As the film progresses, characters move in and out of the guesthouse and the fighting becomes increasingly intense. The scenes are precisely executed and varied, never once becoming repetitive, despite the close focus on the guesthouse. Hu was an expert in creating special effects to show feats of superhuman ability, producing some fast, fierce, and truly jaw-dropping fight scenes. As a martial arts film, Dragon Inn far surpassed anything else in its era, elevating the martial arts genre to a status far beyond what it had ever achieved before.&quot;</p>

<p>The Asoj&aacute; the bird-god-woman of Ayoreo culture, who can transmute her spirit&mdash;flies, bringing with her memories of the past, present and future. She was a tiger; she was a plant; she was a jaguar: today, she is Eami, a five-year-old girl whose name means forest and world. She has lost her own kind a people displaced from their shrinking forest home. They have become co&ntilde;one an Ayoreo word that translates as &ldquo;insensate,&rdquo; the term they use to refer to those outside their culture. In a trance, Eami hears the voices of her grandparents and is joined by a lizard, who guides her. He knows she must leave the forest. She must leave everything behind, so she will not die there.</p>

<p>Although little known beyond the borders of Slovakia (and the Czech Republic), Eduard Grečner is a key figure in the development of modern cinema in Central and Eastern Europe. First as an assistant director to &Scaron;tefan Uher on his seminal Slnko v sieti (1963), the first work of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and then as an auteur in his own right with his feature debut Every Week Seven Days, which is even more experimental in tone: more jarring and abstract &ndash; sharp, pointed, poignant. The film could have been a lyrical evocation of the ČSSR&rsquo;s first generation: the youngsters born during the war, who grew up in a state violently at pains to find and define itself, and were now ready to break away from the nation-builder ethics of their elders &ndash; but Grečner turned it into an anxiety-riddled existentialist vision of a whole globe in fear. A staggering monument freshly restored!</p>

<p>&quot;She&rsquo;s literally called France, the newsreader (played by L&eacute;a Seydoux) for France&rsquo;s most important news programme. France de Meurs doesn&rsquo;t shy away from &lsquo;re-enacting&rsquo; even the most sensitive stories. French director Bruno Dumont is clearly taking aim at the national media and political establishment in France, which often sing from the same hymn sheet. The opening scene even has a witty cameo for French President Emmanuel Macron. This biting parody reflects on what authenticity is worth in this post-modern world. It is only after France is involved in a car accident, that she realises that her deeds do have serious consequences. Her bubble finally starts to burst. Dumont plays with the relationship between entertainment and reality, to such an extent that the whole film almost feels like a fa&ccedil;ade. He turns the whole of France into a hall of mirrors, distorting and exaggerating the ugliest aspects of the country.&quot;</p>

<p>&quot;Enchanted, the audience watches as young Matilda makes a lightbulb burn using just her body. One marvel follows another in the circus tent. Until the cheering audience is suddenly wiped out by a falling bomb. Welcome to the capricious world of Freaks Out. In fascist Rome in 1943, the circus artists fear for their lives. Matilda decides to flee Italy with her supernatural friends: a hugely strong wolfman, an insect whisperer, a human magnet, and the lovely manager. Their journey will not be easy. German Nazi Franz, a twelve-fingered pianist who can see into the future, is hunting circus freaks to help the Third Reich. Brute force is always an option in this adventurous mix of fantasy and war film. Alongside the wonderful decors and attractive camerawork, Aurora Giovinazzo&rsquo;s moving lead role is particularly poignant. A talent to watch.&quot;</p>

<p>&quot;To stay, or to go? A question many young Haitians grapple with, as the situation in Haiti deteriorates and the violence gets worse. So does Freda, an anthropology student from a poor neighbourhood in Port-au-Prince. Her boyfriend leaves for Santo Domingo. She is unsure whether she should give up her family and her belief in the future of her country. In the meantime, her sister is trying to move up the social ladder by bleaching her skin, her brother moves to Chile, and her mother tries to keep herself and her shop afloat. In her fiction debut, documentary filmmaker Gessica G&eacute;n&eacute;us shows the Haitian community from the inside, with an emphasis on a female perspective within a patriarchal society. Against a backdrop of religion and colonialism, activist discussions and street protests &ndash; featured in documentary footage &ndash; it is mainly the actors who set the tone in this stirring sketch of complex situations, intimate personal relationships, and painful moments. Largely Creole-spoken and developed with support from the Hubert Bals Fund.&quot;</p>

<p>A villa in Hillegersberg with a speedboat moored to his own jetty, expensive cars, lunch at Old Dutch &ndash; life smiled at criminal lawyer G&eacute;za Szegedi. Until the tax authorities came to put things straight. Penniless and without regret, he looks back at his glory years. Portrait of a colourful character who refuses to be tragic.</p>

<p>Pity young performer Sissy St. Claire: she is allowed to shine in her very own TV special on Saturday night, but this doesn&rsquo;t turn out as expected. Sissy gives her all in the show which &ndash; with its songs, sketches, and a question-and-answer section &ndash; closely follows the old-time, American variety evening TV formats, complete with commercial breaks. Expect disco balls, glitter outfits, and Stars and Stripes prints in this spectacle beamed straight from a whole other shimmery analogue video epoch.</p>

<p>Glass Life is a dynamic configuration of images and video accumulated over the years on the artist&rsquo;s hard drives. From her studio, the artist uses her computer and various studio set-ups to make sense of her visual archive &ndash; and the world outside. Luscious pictures of food, political figures, screen idols, sportswomen, Instagram models, grand artworks, cartoon characters, emojis and self-portraits, among many other images, vie for our attention. A dizzying navigation through our consumerist visual world.</p>

<p>In an empty museum, a number of young women reflects on transnationality and living in diaspora. In an environment where colonial history is still tangible, they smoothly and confidently navigate between politically charged considerations and personal stories. Thekrontjong [Indonesian diaspora music] improvisations by the band FRED is the musical layer in their collaboration.</p>

<p>Seatbelt&hellip; Mirrors&hellip; Handbrake&hellip; Clutch&hellip; Father, leg in plaster on the back seat, growls driving instructions. His hyperenergetic young son dances and jumps around the car. They bicker about the ill dog in the trunk, but from the passenger seat mother mainly tries to keep things light. The eldest son drives this unruly group &ndash; to which he doesn&rsquo;t seem to entirely belong &ndash; in silence, through broad Iranian landscapes.</p>

<p>Clarisse, who appears to have left her husband Marc, drives an old station wagon around France. Her husband and their two children, Lucie and Paul, still live in their home, where a piano occupies centre stage. Clarisse admits to a waitress that she really misses her kids.</p>

<p>Mildly absurd, surreal one-man project by David Spanish, the cameraman for Drama Girl, IFFR Tiger Competition 2020. In his directorial debut he is the actor, scriptwriter, art director, and electro/techno musician. He performs, disguised by masks with hollow or no eyes.</p>

<p>Over the summer of 2020, artists&rsquo; collective IPIHAN settled at the former Beton Centrale Rotterdam site. They left the comfort of their studios to come up with concepts, artworks and, ultimately, an exhibition, in situ. Artists Pim Palsgraaf, Daan Botlek, Willem Besselink, Ties Ten Bosch, Jordy Walker, Michiel Jansen, Toine Klaassen and Esther Kokmeijer as well as German artist Regina Kelaita, guest artist Leslie Nagel, art and architectural historian Guus Vreeburg, photographer Aad Hoogendoorn, and Marieke van der Lippe took over the abandoned site for a few weeks and created art with what the location had to offer, from materials to space and the dynamics of deterioration.</p>

<p>A Hollywood Boulevard character impersonator struggles to earn a living. Wandering the alternately picturesque and abject streets in its unidentifiable militant suit, without a sense of place or purpose, and a loose grip on reality due to the conspiratorial content it consumes, the Impersonator drifts deeper into the fantasy of its character.</p>

<p>She tells the rich Bellmer family that she has been attacked, but we viewers know better &ndash; Gloria has just bashed her own face with a coke can. The question is, of course, why does she want their attention so badly? In the thriller Inexorable, it gradually becomes clear that this young woman will stop at nothing to infiltrate Marcel and Jeanne&rsquo;s family.</p>

<p>A man is tormented by religious visions. His mother and sisters take care of him, but he doesn&rsquo;t quite appreciate it. They become impatient and ponder the situation. What does his supreme being really look like? Time for a pink intervention.</p>

<p>Queer performers lip-sync to archival confessionals of unknown provenance as they explore abandoned spaces of abject neglect. The blurring of time and place creates an air of the unknown, but not the intangible. Through their evocative performances, Soroya, Harry &amp; Kenya render an all-too-familiar story for members of the LGBTQIA+ community of loneliness, traumatisation, and marginalisation. But, as the title suggests, this unplaceable world is also a reverie of immense, heart-gripping beauty.</p>

<p>Without Italo Disco, no house music, no Chemical Brothers, no Daft Punk, right? Which illustrates how jaunty youth music can age with great dignity. With plenty of fun facts, this documentary offers an excursion back to an epoch when millions of Europeans indulged in synthesisers, catchy melodies, and bizarre English lyrics. It was a German record producer who came up with the genre label. With an appropriate mix of seriousness and irony, the comments are delivered by international trendwatchers, sociologists, and of course the pioneers themselves.</p>

<p>This digitised 16mm film shows the making of a death mask for the then-still-young Jules Deelder. Mondini-VanLoo filmed the process in 1979, as part of the Bandaged Poets series by New York author Ira Cohen. Saxophonist Benjamin Herman (New Cool Collective) composed the soundtrack. Images and sound keep Deelder&rsquo;s spirit alive.</p>

<p>Korean Ghost Stories was a popular TV series telling tales of the eerie and the uncanny. This episode took its inspiration from a legend that originated on Cheju island, whose inhabitants claim that fishermen who vanished around Socora Rock were now in Ieodo, an empire ruled by women who didn&rsquo;t allow any man to leave. The legend, it seems, was popular in the 1970s.</p>

<p>Teen Marion desperately tries to keep her family in one piece, in the Walloon apartment she shares with her two sisters and her single mother Alice. However, loving their mutual jokes and nicknames may be, mum leans heavily on her &lsquo;ugly ducklings&rsquo;. She encourages the youngest to play truant, has the eldest sort out her medication and, after a nervous breakdown, her daughters are left to their own devices.</p>

<p>It was supposed to be a fun pyjama party, in Eden&rsquo;s parents&rsquo; basement. Instead, eight girls are trapped following a serious earthquake, with no water or electricity. The birthday cake, diet soft drink, and cheap wine gradually run out, and their telephone batteries won&rsquo;t last forever either. But, the worst thing is the threatening presence of a man in the house. At least, one of the girls says so. Then she promptly disappears without a trace.</p>

<p>For 36 years, journalist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jon Alpert followed three troubled people in Newark, New Jersey. Rob, Freddie, and Deliris are friends trying to survive on the fringes of a callous society. They make money initially with petty crimes and increasingly turn to drugs to keep reality at bay.</p>

<p>When director Eugenio Polgovsky passed away in 2017, his sister Mara stepped in to assemble his surviving film footage into Malintzin 17, an absorbing documentary about nature, observation and the wonder of childhood.</p> <p>A beautifully patterned Inca dove has made a nest on a power line overhanging the road in the unassuming and quietly affecting documentary Malintzin 17. As filmmaker Eugenio Polgovsky trains his camera on the bird from his Mexico City balcony, he uses it to gently prompt discussions with his five-year-old daughter, Milena, in what becomes a sensitive snapshot of parenthood. Constructed from footage shot over a week in 2016, the film has been assembled by his sister, Mara Polgovsky, after Eugenio suddenly passed away in 2017. Knowledge of this naturally influences how we understand the finished film, but it only serves to heighten the impact of this absorbing and serene&nbsp;work.</p>

<p>Medea is an intelligent, highly educated woman who gives up on her dreams when she falls for rich businessman Alexei. When the pair have two children, she patiently waits for him to divorce his wife, and as he decides to emigrate from Russia to Israel, she meekly follows him. But when he shuns her for having committed a crime to protect him, her blind love turns into burning rage.</p>

<p>Mariana is 21 and lives in a religious community, where she does her best to be the ideal woman: beautiful and docile. In the evenings, she and her friends express their religiosity in other ways. In town, they hunt down women with looser morals and teach them a lesson. When Mariana no longer fits the perfect picture herself, however, her belief is shaken.</p>

<p>&ldquo;We endured gender discrimination for a long time, and now we&rsquo;re starting to speak out.&rdquo; Sound familiar? This is from a KBS talk show taped sometime in the 1980s/1990s, when the Republic of Korea was faced with a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, economic growth and social reforms had changed the situation of women in principle &ndash; but not in practice, as White Slavery was rampant and rape a widely downplayed crime, while men behaved grosso modo as if nothing had happened and blah-blah&rsquo;ed about women as flowers and some such.</p>

<p>When you join the French Foreign Legion, you agree to be bound by a tight-fitting straightjacket of official procedures and unwritten laws. Your brothers-in-arms become your family. While a group of men of different origins carry out a mission in Mali, the women they leave behind have to build a life for themselves as best they can, within the closed community of the military base.</p>

<p>This documentary series follows three young people in Rotterdam-Zuid, each of whom is grappling in their own way with the trials of growing up. Tamia is an articulate girl with strong opinions, who wants to be a spoken-word artist, for which she is relentlessly teased: &ldquo;They call me extra, unnecessary, different.&rdquo; Selena has a mouth full of braces, a distant sister, and a father who has a clumsy way of showing his love. She really wants to spend time with the whole family, and to have a good time together. &ldquo;Nobody has manners here.&rdquo; Darlin, who was born on Cura&ccedil;ao and grew up in the Dominican Republic, wants nothing other than to work to support his mother, who has serious health problems: &ldquo;I want to finish school and not get a criminal record.&rdquo;</p>

<p>Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that&rsquo;s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region&#39;s natural resources &ndash; and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being &ndash; past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience &ndash; Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.</p>

<p>The late dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who died in 1989, resurrects in 2021 as a hologram to address the contemporary inhabitants of a small Romanian village. What happens next is captured in a hybrid documentary, observing the effects this unusual encounter has on the people involved, many of whom are first-hand witnesses of Ceaușescu&rsquo;s rule.</p>

<p>Three girls &ndash; Ana, Paula, and Mar&iacute;a &ndash; live in a remote mountain village dominated by drug cartels. Most of the adult men have left to earn money elsewhere, but they don&rsquo;t send money home to the women they have left behind. The women work in the poppy fields, and try to keep their daughters out of the hands of the clans.</p>

<p>Paris Window was the first feature film project by Amanda Kramer (although the film wasn&rsquo;t finished until after Ladyworld, 2018), and was made on an ultra-low budget. This hermetic chamber piece was shot in the filmmaker&rsquo;s own apartment. An adult brother and sister, Julian and Sunny, live together. Their close relationship is characterised by all kinds of rituals. Sunny regularly goes out to work, but Julian remains indoors, watching weird new age infomercials. When Sunny gets into a relationship with a man who looks a lot like Julian, their relationship is put under pressure. Influenced by the TV, Julian starts to suspect a conspiracy against him.</p>

<p>Several men play a computer game, in which the lovely virtual teen Rinko inevitably wraps players around her finger. During the weekend, they stroll around the Japanese port city of Atami with their devices, communicating and flirting with Rinko. A couple of teenage lovers also visit Atami, after which the girl discovers her boyfriend falling for the virtual Rinko.</p>

<p>Big issues, packaged in flamboyantly witty dialogue, are addressed amidst hyper-stylised decors with a theatrical 1950s feel (think a rather dark, campy twist on West Side Story (1961) as directed by John Waters). How should one be a &lsquo;real&rsquo; man or woman? And, what does the institution of marriage have to do with it?</p>

<p>A tale of disaster, both natural and social. A sweeping chorus of ecstasy and dread uses found footage to overlap two great perils of our time: the external degradation of our earthy landscape, and the hollowing out of our internal landscapes through inane and omnipresent media. But when an earthquake brings two men into each other&rsquo;s arms, the possibility of love in the face of trauma is revealed.</p>

<p>Immersive three part film from director Jon&aacute;s Trueba, who captures the spirit of a group of teens in Spain in an empathic, compelling, and moving way. In 2016, Trueba asked the teens to participate in a five-year project, in which they recreated situations from their lives. They talk about their insecurities, wanting to be accepted, loneliness, and what they are supposed to do with their lives. They demonstrate against school privatisation, debate politics and, like many adults, worry about the planet&rsquo;s future.</p>

<p>In a nightclub, reminiscent of a 1980s photo-novel, a band is playing requests. The texts play with pop clich&eacute;s about life and true love. Until a dissatisfied customer can&rsquo;t take it anymore and reveals the universal truth.</p>

<p>After a wild sex party in the apartment he rents out on Airbnb, Budi gets a call from his brother in Indonesia that their father is in hospital. Father and son try to bridge the distance during an emotional phone call. In the meantime, Budi cleans up the flat. The next renters are due in 15 minutes.</p>

<p>Shooting the breeze, Shabu (14) hangs around the Peperklip, a striking residential complex in Rotterdam&rsquo;s Feijenoord neighbourhood. This Rotterdammer with Surinamese roots knows everyone here, and thinks he&rsquo;s already a star. Later, Shabu is convinced, he&rsquo;ll become rich and famous. But not just yet, because this summer he&rsquo;s in the doghouse: he &lsquo;borrowed&rsquo; his grandma&rsquo;s car and crashed it, and now he has to pay for the damage. When selling ices and stacking shelves doesn&rsquo;t bring in enough, Shabu decides to draw on his musicality, charm, and network.</p>

<p>The black female body, away from the exotifying gaze, in all its glory, power, and strength. With the use of spoken word, strong imagery, culture and history, SHE is an interdisciplinary manifesto which challenges the perceptions of the black female body and empowers those women who possess it to see the true beauty they hold. The film has been made as part of a development trajectory together with HipHopHuis.</p>

<p>&lsquo;Shunyata&rsquo; means emptiness.This film reflects the stream of consciousness as a continuous flow of change and transformation. Shunyata is created by layering, constructing, and deconstructing 16mm film footage and analogue wave forms into an immersive, sense-transcending experience, one that through constant change and chaos evokes a sense of deep meditation and timelessness. A white cloud fades in the empty sky.</p>

<p>The world of film and television is mad about dead young women: thrillers and crime dramas present a succession of attractive, partially clad female corpses. In this dance film, Amanda Kramer takes us into a cardboard factory that logs such corpses, complete with torn stockings and photogenic fake blood.</p>

<p>So Loud the Sky Can Hear Us explores the identity of a group of Feyenoord supporters. They unfold a hidden world of faith, love, compassion, and vulnerability. As Xausa attempts to trace back the &lsquo;lost voice of God&rsquo; among the voices of the supporters, she wonders how the lost monophony of ancient chants may turn into a new polyphony.</p>

<p>A seedy and hilarious slice of film history starring Jim Jarmusch, Mick Jagger, and IFFR&rsquo;s very own Hubert Bals in puppet form. From the days when forbidden films were locked away in cans, and occasionally became subject to their own complex heist plots.</p>

<p>Short film version of the app &ndash; loosely based on tarot &ndash; the maker developed as a graduation project. Barbie dolls and Lego versions of Bert and Ernie play the lead roles. Instagram filters give them all sorts of layers, emotions, and identities. The game enables players to discover their life&rsquo;s goal.</p>

<p>The first 24 hours as a Master of Fine Arts. Palace (Diamond Stingily) is a tall black Aquarius and a sculptor on the up. She was in the Venice Biennale, among other shows, which pisses people off; they think her success is not because of her art, but other attributes. She is exhausted, frustrated, and wants to go home to see her family. She plans a silent protest to not attend the graduation party, even though she has promised DJ.</p>

<p>The rise and fall of a middle-class family at a historical moment marked by diminished expectations. An extended Catholic family navigates the personal and financial upheavals of life in the 1980s and 1990s. Seen through the eyes of an only child, a sensitive young boy, the family&rsquo;s trajectory is further signposted by the era&rsquo;s defining political events, as revealed through real archival footage.</p>

<p>Like Fritz Lang, David Fincher or Bong Joon Ho before him, talented debut filmmaker Lado Kvataniya uses the concept of police detective vs serial killer for an excitingly stylised, macabre and haunting narrative, that ultimately revolves around the identity of an era: in this case, the late 1980s Soviet Union. With Glasnost and the end of communist rule, the West also learned of the (unsurprising) fact that there were serial killers in Russia too &ndash; the most notorious case probably that of Andrei Chikatilo, nicknamed the Rostov Ripper, or the Russian Hannibal Lecter.</p>

<p>Author and actor Eduardo de Filippo (1900-1984) is seen as one of the major Italian artists of the 20th century. He plays a big role in The King of Laughter, even if it takes a while to find out exactly what this role is; the relationships within the extensive theatrical clan of patriarch Eduardo Scarpetta, the &lsquo;king&rsquo; from the title, are labyrinthine.</p>

<p>Merry hell breaks lose when half of Budapest invades the apartment of a lonely, old fashioned elderly lady who has decided to move.</p>

<p>Pasquale, an old crook who lost his fortune to gambling, organises his last big heist and reunites The Wolves, a gang of North-Italian fairground operators who moonlight as thieves. The robbery of a money truck &ndash; transporting 12 million euros in cash &ndash; could be a good pension for everybody, and secure the legacy of their old-school craftsmanship.</p>

<p>Undercover investigator Reiji Kikukawa, nicknamed &quot;The Mole&quot;, learns that Shuho Todoroki, head of the Sukiya-kai, plans to purchase a shipping container full of 10 tons of amphetamines disguised as pasta being sold by the Italian Guillotina Family led by Don Razza. Reiji is tasked by the police with catching Shuho Todoroki and arresting him at the deal, thereby postponing Reiji&#39;s return to normal life as well as his marriage proposal to his girlfriend Junna.</p>

<p>&ldquo;Whatever you do, don&rsquo;t be yourself&rdquo;, is the message given by a mysterious young woman to a street musician played by Mathieu Amalric. In this idiosyncratic musical, by French comedy directors Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu, this life lesson comes across as a religious revelation: carrying just his guitar, the modern troubadour sets off for Lourdes in search of the mysterious woman, who may just be the contemporary answer to the miraculous appearances of the Virgin Mary.</p>

<p>Lookalikes are as much part of Indian popular cinema&rsquo;s romance with stardom as the super celebrities they &ndash; sometimes more and sometimes less &ndash; resemble. The Juniors, as they&rsquo;re popularly referred to, live a paradoxical existence all of their own: if one meets Kishore Bhanushali on the streets, it&rsquo;s like time is out of joint, for he looks like Golden Age-icon Dev Anand &ndash; in the 1960s! It&rsquo;s fitting that Bhanushali is also a stand-up comedian, as the Juniors are in equal parts paeans to and parodies of the original stars. The Juniors even have their own films, which are often satirical revisions of beloved classics.</p>

<p>Alla Demidova ranks among the greatest actresses to have graced the Russian-language stage over the past six decades, as well as screens big and small. She&rsquo;s famous for her tragic characters. Perhaps because she, above all, understands the world as a realm of worries and sorrow?</p>