Playlist
Finding out that a friend of his—with whom he lost contact 12 years before—is in a psychiatric hospital after killing a lady, the filmmaker begins a 1,700-kilometer journey by train—from North to South Vietnam— because he feels the need to keep on moving in order to find some clarity and answers together with his daughter who narrates the film. Immersed in the train, Dirdamal's camera watches people in transit and this interval unveils their intimacy as if it were completely in the open. The film is also a glance to a country marked by a war, as in the stop at the former North-South border, the place where more bombs have ever fallen in the whole history of humankind; an evocation of its tribal roots, the Ruc sub-ethnic group; as well as a reflection on fatherhood and empathy, and on the perception of human complexity through the eyes and the innocence of a little girl.
A powerful man, who is also the former prime minister of Georgia, has developed an exquisite hobby. He collects century old trees along Georgia's coastline. He commissions his men to uproot them and bring them to his private garden. Some of these trees are as tall as 15-floor-buildings.
Where his prior film, the acclaimed epic AQUARELA, was a reminder of the fragility of human tenure on earth, in GUNDA, master filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky reminds us that we share our planet with billions of other animals. Through encounters with a mother sow (the eponymous Gunda), two ingenious cows, and a scene-stealing, one-legged chicken, Kossakovsky movingly recalibrates our moral universe, reminding us of the inherent value of life and the mystery of all animal consciousness, including our own.
Greek epic poems and first- person journals clash together in Damien Odoul's most recent film. Théo/To, a young man with Down's Syndrome–and a martial arts student–has grown isolated from the world, with his father, in a sophisticated house in the middle of the forest. Once he violently gets rid of his strict custodian, he begins a journey of self-discovery. The plot is divided in tableaux-like chapters and the delirious encounters
that define each of them (a serpent, a ninja, an empress, and a stranger) denote To's late sexual awaking and transform his individual odyssey into a mental journey into the depths of his psyche. In an ironic and naturalistic way, Théo et les métamorphoses approaches the epic tale in order to dissect the complex experience of the world from its protagonist standpoint.
Brazil, 2017. Fernando, A bankrupted Brazilian filmmaker, grew up haunted by the violent memories of his grandfather and by the spirit of a mysterious Mozambican man. Pushed by the nowadays cultural and political situation of his country, the filmmaker dives into a journey of misadventures and unexpected miracles, searching for the ghosts of his family past.
Originating in the myth of the Undines, half-human half-sea creatures, Christian Petzold takes the opportunity to name thus his protagonist and weaves a love story in contemporary Berlin —and unlike his recent films he hides no spaces with- out a defined time. Paula Beer, apparently the director's new staple actress, is once again – as in Transit— the film's protago- nist, together with the enigmatic Franz Rogowski. Together, they
make a powerful couple that gives the film that thespian devotion usual in Petzold's movies.