Playlist
Orsolya is a bailiff in Cluj, the main city in Transylvania. One day she has to evict a homeless man from a cellar, an action with tragic consequences that triggers a moral crisis which Orsolya must weather as best she can.
An experimental essay on the technological evolution of the violence and control exercised by Israel over Gaza and the Palestinian people. In three movements, the first-person narrative combines personal and historical archives.
On a beach in southern Chile, a man lives in isolation, surrounded only by a pack of dogs as his companions. In half-spoken words, he tries to articulate an unspeakable secret.
Between Belgian colonial archives and footage shot in the present, the violence of a dehumanising economic system unfolds through the story of a couple forced to work in a mine.
At the dawn of the 21st century, a man exposes the ordinary horror of the massacres committed by Poles against their Jewish fellow citizens during the war, driven by a genocidal impulse of 'neighbors'. An uncompromising didactic on the writing of History.
A primatologist and his team free a group of black-crested macaques. Somewhere between eco-politics, speculative primatology and ritual performances, this furiously playful film questions the humanist truths that underpin our relationship with non-humans.
Migrants try to cross the border between Belarus and Poland. The Frontex offices in Warsaw are empty at night. 'Don't you think that the borders of empires, like the roots of a tree, are much more extensive than we think?'
After hitting a dog with his car, Stefan, guilt-ridden, decides to bring it with him to the hometown lake, where he is headed in order to complete the film about his mother who has recently passed away
Delia, an 18-year-old from rural Romania, wins a car in a soft-drink competition. She travels to Bucharest with her parents to shoot a commercial. However, tension arises as her vision of independence clashes with her parents' plans to sell the car for financial gain. The film explores family conflict and consumer culture through sharp satire.
A woman and a man investigate, persist, and sing: 'We've always lost something, we've always lost something, but we're looking for something small, and that's enough for us day after day'. Between hieroglyphs printed by birds on the sand of the Camargue and an equation borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe, the enigma must be solved.
A patient reverie on water in all its states, guided by the thought of Gaston Bachelard and Jean-Christophe Bailly. A journey for the eye towards the most penetrating of contemplations, where the transformation of the gaze that guarantees the preservation of living things takes place.
A damaged film shot in 1982 in a Latin American country documents the violence that took place on 9 May that year. Beneath its apparent banality, the film raises suspicions of manipulation of the truth.
Amidst lush foliage, vibrant flower beds, babbling brooks and neatly kept lawns, characters move tentatively. As they carefully observe and interact with their surroundings and each other, a mysterious tension is growing. Beautifully shot on 16mm, and accompanied by the rousing sounds of music from Nika Son, Helena Wittman's latest work is a feast for the eyes and the ears.
To apply for an arts programme, the director revisits a chaotic abortion party in a logorrheic narrative staged within a lo-fi, delirious digital universe.
A translation of our visual perceptions in darkness, a metaphysical and sensory journey. Mental images in constante metamorphosis, encounter a poetic and reflective flow through voice-over.
A few seeds preserved in Madrid's Botanical Gardens are sent back to the south coast of Peru, where they were collected centuries ago. A sensual imaginary journey, a counter-narrative to colonial despoilment.
Noah, a young transgender person, struggles with life and his addictions in Hamburg's Central Station district. The filmmaker is almost his age. The friendship that binds them together gives rise to a deeply moving portrait.
A YouTuber navigates between isolation and connectivity in a crumbling Cuba. Whispers of technology and birdsong intertwine, reflecting the frozen and closed-off state of his world.
Spring equinox 2024: 20 March at three hours, six minutes, twenty-one seconds (GMT). Vattetot-sur-mer, in the Pays-de-Caux region of Normandy, Gaza is being bombed.
Filmed by the inhabitants of Gaza, this documentary captures the destruction, suffering, and resistance of displaced individuals. The poems of Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza on 7 December 2023, accompany this chronicle of an ongoing genocide.
The road, the house, the key, the animals, Bamssi. Images as urgent as an Instagram story create a dialogue within the family across the sea: Mourad and Fairuz, Tunisia and abroad. Time passes both slowly and quickly.
Nastia, who has lived abroad for years, starts to teach her mom how to use Internet services. Can an intimacy regained via zoom be a turning point for the future relationship between two adults?
A poetic yet visceral journey of Daniel SS, a marginalized man living near Chile's Maipo River. After a failed suicide attempt, he wanders through rural terrain and later urban Santiago, confronting loneliness, addiction, and societal stigma while seeking connection and purpose amidst personal and societal upheaval.
"When I was younger, I hated my body as much as I was obsessed by images of nature. On the one hand, I told myself that they were sublime, and that's why they existed, and on the other, I had the impression that as a woman, if people didn't look at me, I was going to disappear. I loved images so much that I forgot what was real." - Marion Guillard
A film that emerges from the sonic and visual power of a concert by Croatian musicians Alen and Nenad Sinkauz and a performance by Dutch-Indonesian dancer Marije Nie. Historical denial, collective violence and resistance are intertwined.
Vibrant, colourful, hand-drawn animation in which a group of manta rays rise up against humankind.
It is summer morning, when a certain craftsman is visited by his great friend, who hands him… a surprisingly baaing gift.
A scientist designs a harmless-looking flat digital creature - until it starts throwing her professional and personal life into chaos.
An old hermit wants to spend his last days alone in peace and quiet. Unexpected guest changes the course of his story.
Toto the tiger escapes from the local circus, causing a commotion in the area. Despite being aware of his presence, driven by an impulse, a girl living in a nearby city decides to leave her home.
Roadside greenery is a no man's land. It was created to be passed by, not to be in it. Geometrical and artificial, yet taken by wild weeds – does it belong to man, or to nature? The same goes for your Body. You drag It through your days instead of being in It. Be It.
A year after the premiere of her documentary debut Lapilli, Paula Ďurinová returns with an entirely different, yet equally sensitive film entitled Action Item. This activist anatomy of burnout, set in Berlin, interweaves the observation of community sharing with a more experimental montage. The work takes note of the myths associated with individualistic society yet, at the same time, it conveys sincere moments of solidarity between individuals who aren't afraid to speak of their anxieties. This is both a personal and also very human film, which invites us to take a break in these hectic times, when burnout doesn't necessarily mean the end; on the contrary, it might be a new beginning, where individual pain is gradually transformed into the power of collective sharing.
Based on a skin-deep montage of personal archives, this intimate and political evocation of a life uprooted from its roots is coupled with a painful evocation of Crimea, the homeland lost since the Russian invasion.
A slow, continuous zoom focuses on the Armenian mountains above an ancient riverbed, while the voices of two demons echo off-screen. Inspired by Michael Snow's Wavelength, a hallucinatory meditation on disappearance.
Should you go to Venice alone when you thought there would be two of you? The narrator literally projects herself into the Serenissima, while extracts from books punctuate her mental journey, tinged with existential questions.
The camera moves from hand to hand to portray a street corner and the story of a collective celebration: 14 July in Massabo, Marseille. It's time to light up the neighbourhood and the sky with fireworks.
A playful and virtuoso exploration of the fundamentals of the dance/image relationship, through the sensitivity and emerging practice of dance students. A collective research project in which the intense beauty of a time of innocence verges on the anguish of the world.
Digital reconstruction by film historian Michael Witt of a remarkable montage film created by Jean-Luc Godard, composed from his film Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut (la vie)) and reels from five other films: Old and New (also known as The General Line) by Sergei M. Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov (1929), The Moving Day by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton (1922), La Terra Trema by Luchino Visconti (1948), and Man of Marble by Andrzej Wajda (1977).
Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave stuck like a knife in the heart of Europe. Camera in hand, the filmmaker retraces his grandfather's steps. As he strolls along, one encounter follows another, fragments of lives suspended in the shadow of war and censorship.
Between pandemics, people's revolts and male institutions, this period film cheekily combines fantastic psychedelia and handmade sets. Inspired by the life story of Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic and the first woman to write a book in English.
An eight-year-old girl is found dead, killed by her parents. The investigation reveals a life of abuse. The filmmaker reads Frédéric Boyer's eponymous book dedicated to this true crime story. From the story of an infanticide unfolds a meditation on our relationship with evil.
The landscape painter Antônio Parreiras enters the world of the dead. Wandering through darkness, forests and cities, he reunites with old friends, questions his art, and reflects on the history and future of a devastated country.
Sofía, a young journalist, is making an "artistic documentary" about the Chilean army. She finds herself caught between her grandmother and another woman, whose views on the military legacy are radically opposed. A hallucinatory dive into the country's torn history.
This fully archival journey through the 35 years of Alfredo Stroessner's regime in Paraguay reveals unseen footage and explores one of the longest-running dictatorships in history, whose effects still resonate today.
North Sudan, Merowe Dam. Abu Salma, a seasonal worker from Darfur, works in a traditional brickyard on the Nile, downstream of the dam. Just like his exiled companions, he spends his days in the mud, far from his loved ones and in exhausting labour. Each night, he secretly works on the erection of a structure, a tall shape made out of mud, wood, and plastic. As the mud builds over the solid skeleton of the structure, it begins to take on an almost organic-looking form. One day, as he returns from Jebel Barkal, the mystical mountain, his creation has mysteriously disappeared. Soon strange occurrences begin to take place, and Abu Salma starts to get the uneasy feeling that someone or something is watching him.
Emmaüs' companions repair and resell donated items. Between the warehouse and the shop, a small group takes everyday life in a different direction, presenting people and objects with humour and tenderness.
Lost in her fears and fantasies, a young woman writes in a notebook. A young man finds this notebook on a train. Suddenly, they find themselves in the heart of a forest, in a nocturnal reality where dreams come to life.
A man is convinced that strangers will soon invade Paris and lay siege to his home. He decides to take them by surprise and invade the suburbs. A young washerwoman is jogging along the canal. Will their paths cross each other?
A father dies; his family cares for the deceased and prepares him for his next life. The American setting and way of life intertwine with Buddhist beliefs and customs in a Tibetan family exiled in the United States.
A pioneer in sound recording, Ludwig Koch was suspected by the Nazis of complicity in the Reichstag fire. After taking refuge in England, he specialized in recording birdsong. Blending contemporary imagery with his sound archives, the film retraces his journey.
Drawing on both telenovelas and home movies, MACDO re-enacts a Christmas Eve in Mexico City in the late 90s. A sharp exploration of power dynamics and the mechanisms of domination within a family.
As he proved with his scandalous, scathing political comedy Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (NYFF59), Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude is among the most radical filmmakers working today and one of the few unafraid to diagnose the absurd evils and moral blind spots that make contemporary living what it—unfortunately—is. In his latest film, Jude again explodes conventional boundaries of narrative and form, this time charting a lacerating course through one day in the life of a severely overworked film production assistant, Angela, who drives around Bucharest on her latest gig: filming work accident victims auditioning to be in a safety equipment video for a German multinational corporation. At the same time, the sleep-deprived Angela upkeeps her own side project—a face-filtered, trash-talking, right-wing alter ego with more than 20,000 viewers that serves as the film's perverse Greek chorus. Intercutting all this with footage from Romanian director Lucian Bratu's feminist 1981 film Angela Moves On, following the travels of a female cab driver around the city's same sights and locations, Jude initiates a conversation with his country's past and present, while engaging in a meta-commentary about the ability of the captured image to exploit, and to contort the truth.
The end of History, they say. Every summer, thousands of tourists flock to the foot of the Pont d'Arc armed with beach towels, coolers and plastic buckets. The mouth of the Chauvet cave overlooks the landscape, below float a parade of canoes as groups of speleologists search for the slightest crevice in the rock. Children fray their own passage. Through the mists of time, the Chauvet painters beckon to us. Possible worlds, past, present and future. A dream chronicle of a drift along the river Ardèche, between caverns and canoes.
On the outskirts of an isolated mining town, Lázaro discovers a dead body. He thinks he has a respiratory illness and doesn't want to go back to the mine. Rumours, suspicion and desire surround him.
Orphan of the country where he was born, orphan of the Portuguese state. Imprisoned for half his life, never free. Bruno is 'Ghoya', a Cape Verdean Creole rapper and political activist. This film is a crossroads in a moment of struggle and life.
Two high-mountain guides trudge in the moraines of the Mer de glace, a famous glacier in the Mont Blanc massif. The images capture their dances with the void, the verticality and instability of the ground. The sound materializes this moving and unpredictable environment.
In 1929, the Ardnacruscha hydroelectric power station was inaugurated in County Clare, Ireland. Observing the interplay of water and concrete, this essay examines the majestic edifice by replacing it in the context of a burgeoning modern nation-state.
Rolle Workshop, a Journey
The night flowers in Daria's garden hide the secrets of a country that has turned love stories into routine crime scenes. A tale of patriarchal violence combined with botanical (mis)uses, told from the archives of Iranian cinema.
An aging Italian immigrant in Chile runs a wig shop and hosts lavish parties energized by overlapping soundtracks—revealing a man clinging to past exuberance while grappling with solitude and silence.
Having lived in his home for 12 years, Jacob, a painter, faces the threat of eviction like many New Yorkers. At the heart of this portrait lies 'an exploration of what makes a house and how a house shapes a way of life.
A love journey along a side path. From her cabin to the 'garden of little brambles', the director engages in dialogue with the beings she encounters. Women, animals, flowers, trees, and books joyfully coexist in this quest.
Henri Laborit's thoughts taken from Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard shooting Notre musique, a song by Fairuz: just some of the materials in this essay-tribute to the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich.
"Disaster ruins everything while leaving everything as it is,wrote Maurice Blanchot. Everything." - Ghassan Salhab. From the southern districts of Beirut to southern Lebanon, a car winds its way through the devastated country. No title for such desolation.
Marius is a divorced man in his late thirties. His five year-old daughter Sofia lives with her mother, which causes Marius a deep frustration. On the day Marius arrives to take his daughter on their annual holiday, he is told that she is ill but he doesn't believe it and insists to take her with him. The situation soon gets out of control with all the family taking part in a web of humor, violence, childish songs, police interventions and love statements.
In Tokyo, between two major sites of protest and resistance against authoritarianism, a small group of queer people gather. They move around, talk, and share their experiences of struggle and creativity.
After 20 years of traveling across Latin America, a Franco-Swiss ethnographer disappears from the map. Through travel diaries of various ethnographers and nonfiction film archives, the author imagines and constructs a travel journal of the unknown and incognito ethnographer of the 1950s and 1970s, a testimony to the industrial transformation, evangelization, and ethnocide of Latin American communities.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, young filmmakers from a São Paulo favela make a film to apply for a grant offered by an institution that uses them as mere pawns. An opportunity for a critical exercise and a demonstration of lucidity.
Mario wakes up with no memory of his past life. His encounter with Lazare marks the beginning of a spatio-corporeal drift, from the eastern suburbs of Mexico City to the surrounding underground cavities, where bodies and landscapes crack in the same motion.
From a montage of visual archives gathered from YouTube emerges the social and cultural landscape of an American high school, along with a story centered on Eva, a typical cheerleader at the heart of a strange collective episode.
A dreamlike, fantastical drift around a fractured identity, with dazzling visual inventions. Like a diary that visually conveys a state of being between two worlds.
What do you tell your dead parents? Combining family archives and glimpses of today, the filmmaker weaves together fifty years of his life and the socio-political history of Chile. The montage wanders through the ages, between light and shadow, without ever leaving the joy.
Twenty years ago, believing she was doomed, Irma took a trip to Greece. Today, she retraces that journey, accompanied by three young men. From island to island, between sky and sea, the travelers read, listen and live, carried by a longing for beauty and clarity.
A writer, a filmmaker, a trip to Italy: a diary in two voices, where the desire and the difficulty of love are intertwined with literature, cinema, landscapes and the pink stones of the spaces to inhabit.
The Dead Nation is a documentary-essay, which shows a stunning collection of photographs from a Romanian small town in the 1930's and 1940's. The soundtrack, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, shows us what the photographs do not: the rising of the anti-Semitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust, a topic which is not very talked about in the contemporary Romanian society.
Based on the contemporary exploitation of coltan, a strategic mineral, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the film offers a testimonial and reflexive weaving between the archives of the colonial past and the present of its consequences and resurgences.
In 1968, Nadir, a Moroccan student at the film school in Łódź, Poland, has a love affair with his editing teacher, a Jewish anti-Zionist woman. A recovered letter carries the narrative into a meditation through time on the violence of history.
An observation of post-colonial economic relations through the intersecting trajectories of two Filipino women: one preparing to leave her native island to work as a domestic in Europe, the other to return for good.
A political-documentary following the grief-driven quest for justice after 16-year-old Manuel Gutiérrez is fatally shot by a Chilean police officer during a 2011 protest. The film chronicles how his disabled brother Gerson, their family, and community activist Miguel Fonseca form a solidarity committee seeking accountability amid institutional failures.
On New Year's Eve, in the streets of Berlin, Alex delivers coke driving her taxi. Three other car journeys capture three earlier moments in a life marked by personal tragedy. From season to season, an interior journey into states of being.
What would it be like to film the 6,852 islands of the Japanese archipelago? A refuge film in two parts. The first is a manifesto, a reflection of the catastrophe. The second gathers the film-islands, last traces before the disappearance.
In a dream journal I find notes to make a film, but there is nothing concrete about the dream that generated them. Just a mix of fascination and concern. I decide to retrace my steps and start at the place where I grew up: the Faculty of Architecture and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. The history of sciences and cities is founded on a structure of power and bureaucratic violence, and at the same time, these institutions are inhabited by sensitive scientists who wonder about other ways of cohabiting the world. In the contradiction, I become a witness to the unexpected: birds dreaming synthetic melodies, a parrot singing songs about animals, a monkey howling in response to the roar of engines. How do these institutions see and hear? How is knowledge about nature represented over time?
Emi, a high‑school history teacher in Bucharest, becomes the target of condemnation when a private sex tape is leaked online. Amidst the COVID‑19 pandemic, she must defend herself at a parent‑teacher tribunal, exposing societal hypocrisy as the film juxtaposes her daily ordeals with satirical essays on nationalism, sexism, and consumerism—culminating in three alternate, provocative endings.
Following the death of the coach of a professional football club, events come to a head and the world seems to fall apart around the team. Latent sadness, orderly crisis, slow-motion fall.
Eight months pregnant, Madalena is the producer of a science-fiction film written by her recently deceased father. As the shoot descends into chaos, she must save the film before the baby is born. A queer, radiant, and heartfelt comedy.
Nora Díaz is an actress obsessed with acting and lying. She travels through Santiago's streets, testing her invented characters in real situations. Through these performances, she observes the conscious and unconscious fabrications of Chilean society, where truth and lies intertwine.
How would a photo album carefully made by a Romanian Army Regiment from WW2 look like? By a stroke of luck, we have an answer: Regiment 6 Roșiori created their photo album on the Eastern Front. So now we can see how a "military gaze" operates, what does it see, what does it want to keep in memory for all posterity. We have systematically broken the flow of this silent photo album with texts taken from other documents - which reveal what the photos tried to hide.
This 10‑minute experimental documentary contrasts two cinematic depictions of Marshal Ion Antonescu's execution: the silent, raw B&W footage shot by amateur cameraman Ovidiu Gologan in 1946, and a stylized 1994 film reenactment by director Sergiu Nicolaescu. By juxtaposing these portrayals, the film explores how cinema shapes, distorts, or sanitizes historical memory through montage.
The mourning for a father and the absences, intertwined with what remains. Letters, written by birds that used to visit the filmmaker when she was a child, now reveal secrets to her son, whom she watches grow up.
Very early in the morning, Marian, a seven‑year‑old boy in a remote Romanian village, convinces his father to walk to town carrying their broken television to get it repaired, turning a mundane chore into a touching father–son journey.
A 22‑minute stop‑motion short where a collection of plastic toys—Barbie dolls, dinosaurs, toy soldiers—embody the human life cycle from birth to old age. Through meticulously staged tableaux, the film satirizes sex, consumerism, war, and societal clichés, echoing nineteenth‑century critiques by Flaubert and Chekhov
A sculptor proposes a monument honoring the 1905 mutiny of the Russian battleship Potemkin's sailors—who received political asylum in Romania—during a dialogue with a Culture Ministry official. With sharp, satirical wit, the film deconstructs historical myth, memory, and cinema, even bursting in references to Eisenstein and contemporary geopolitics.
In Spring 2022 Masha prepares to leave Russia - her homeland that has changed. It turns into a chain of unexpected farewells: her mom dies of cancer, her lover flees army conscription, everything including her own old self is falling apart. Her way to cope with the grief is to fixate everything with her camera. Her anger guides her to inner emigration to the local underground scene, which became an escape for young russians. This kaleidoscope of shards chronicles not only the spirit of the time, but the director's personality crumbling against the backdrop of global turmoil.
A film based on the true story of Doug Street, a chameleon-like man who forged his way through 1980s American society by pretending to be someone he was not. A modern tale that tackles class and race relations with sardonic humor.
In their feature-length debut, Gossing/Sieckmann dive into the merfolk subculture with performance artist and siren Una. Genre elements, fiction and documentary, self-care, political activism and self-chosen identities blend into one another.
"It's an investigation into the scene of the loss… Ends with the death of the father and I would add the sting to the mother which has been censored: just the lips moving and the slight twitching of the shoulders." - Pierre Louapre
Sleeping on an ice floe, crossing Greenland alone, fighting a bear bare-handed… There's not much that scares Coline Morel any more. Except, perhaps, confronting her own existence.
Two individuals, one assigned male at birth and the other assigned female, each feel displaced by society's gender norms. They forge a friendship built on shared loneliness and the longing to belong—whether within or outside Chilean society.
Survival in a collective squatted space becomes increasingly difficult amid societal collapse, with the residents grappling for individuality through social protest and physical endurance under oppressive conditions.
What remains of the Natzweiler Struthof concentration camp, established by the Nazis in the Bruche valley in Alsace? The last remaining witnesses share their stories. Between topography of places and memory mapping, the accounts bring fragments of resistance back to light.
Three Breton teens watch a film that mimics their romantic lives, which smudges the boundaries between experiencing and witnessing. Their love triangle takes shape in unexpected ways in Jaime Rosales' beguiling new feature, which deeply contemplates love, choice, and fate.
An 8-minute observational short capturing everyday life and intimate encounters in Santiago, Chile, through a quietly powerful lens. The film invites reflection on memory, place, and human connection.
In Valparaíso, Vasnia struggles to make ends meet while raising her young daughter Javiera. Amid poverty and the looming hope of her partner Jaime's return from prison, she navigates hardship and resilience in a rarely depicted Chilean community.
Where do the dead survive? A young woman has lost her mother. She sets out to find her, embarking on a metaphysical quest with friends and poets to help her face the void, and cinema to grasp the invisible.
A man, convinced his life is a failure, records a personal video message to loved ones addressing his disappointments. After attempting suicide, the film continues with a raw, tragicomic depiction of his failed act, merging humor and despair in a single take.
Set in Wallachia, Romania, in 1835, a local constable and his son embark on a humorous yet poignant manhunt to recapture a runaway Roma slave who had an affair with his master's wife. The journey exposes entrenched prejudices across nationalities and beliefs, combining biting satire with a western‑style odyssey through a complex social landscape.
On June 29, 1941, the Jewish residents of the city of Iasi were rounded up and beaten, shops and homes were looted, and most of the men were shot or crowded onto trains, where they later died of asphyxiation. While Germans took part in the pogrom, the majority of the perpetrators were Romanian policemen, military officers, and civilians. How can a film deal with this crime?
Male prisoners speak out. They question the figure of the father through the creation of a collective film. Personal stories and fiction intermingle to question the foundations of patriarchy and the construction of masculinity.
Two lame people in their sixties bump into each other in the street. They never leave each other's side, strolling along at breakneck speed, attentive to every little thing in their path. Small production, big emotion.
Considered to be India's first queer film, this musical melodrama of rare formal inventiveness wraps its arabesques around a love triangle between two men and a woman.
Measures for a Funeral brilliantly spotlights a young academic's run towards one woman — acclaimed early 20th-century Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow — as she simultaneously flees from another, her failed musician mother.
A provocative theatre director plans a street re‑enactment of Romania's 1941 Odessa massacre, igniting fierce debate over historical memory, artistic responsibility, censorship, and national identity. As she grapples with bureaucratic obstacles and public scrutiny, the film confronts how societies choose to remember—or forget—their darkest chapters.
In 1981 Botoșani, a teenager named Mugur Călinescu chalks protest slogans in uppercase letters against Ceaușescu's regime. Radu Jude adapts Gianina Cărbunariu's documentary play and intercuts staged courtroom-style scenes with archival propaganda footage, creating a Brecht‑inspired montage that interrogates state surveillance, propaganda, and repression.
Set in 1937, a young medical student named Emanuel enters a sanatorium by the Black Sea to treat bone tuberculosis. Immobilized in a body cast and bound to his bed, he navigates isolation, communal dynamics, existential longing, and political tension as personal decline unfolds in the shadow of impending wartime repression.
At 29, Laurent is searching for meaning in his life. Without a job or a home, he lands in a deserted ski resort during the off-season and immerses himself in the lives of the few locals he meets. When the tourists arrive with winter, Laurent can't leave.