Playlist
<p>Karavaychuk played the piano for Stalin as a child prodigy and in the course of his career wrote music for more than 200 films, by Paradjanov and Muratova among others. Filmmaker Andrés Duque is the first foreigner to win his trust. Who’s this man who looks as if he stepped out of a story by Gogol?</p>
<p>Privileged to enter into the house and privacy of a Chinese family abroad, one of the immigrations that is usually the most reserved and secretive. A Cantonese grandmother who loves the cheese of the adopted country but not the language, along with the father who is also often reluctant to accept the new country. The adaptation, to France in this case, seen through the slit eyes of a star who does not speak Chinese. It is all in the form of an essay that has no lacking of humour and its great parody: how to find the country of origin through fellow immigrants.</p>
<p>In June of the year 2000, in the region of the Chiapas Heights, an ambush against a patrol car took place where cops were killed. Tzotzil professor Alberto Patishtan was randomly pointed out as guilty of this event and sentenced to 60 years in prison.</p>
<p>The Italian “refugee island” of Lampedusa is in the firm grip of winter tristesse. The Tourists have left, the remaining refugees fight to be taken to the mainland.</p> <p>As a fire destroys the worn down ferry, that connects the island to Italy, the mayor Giusi Nicolini and the local fishermen struggle for a new ship. While the refugees are finally transferred by plane, the fishermen occupy the port in order to protest. The island is isolated and as food supplies run out the protesters start to disagree with each other. The coast guard tries to prevent the tragedies of the upcoming season out in the sea, while many islanders try to describe the role of Lampedusa to the never ending stream of reporters that step by on the island.</p> <p>The tiny community at the edge of Europe is engaged in a desperate fight for dignity, and for solidarity with those who many consider the cause of the ongoing crisis: the African boat people.</p>
<p>Is it possible to write an autobiography including one’s own death? This is the game that the Brazilian writer and filmmaker, João Paulo Cuenca, proposes. A game into which he was forced to play when he received the surprising news of the death of his own identity in 2008. Here, the resurrection works the other way round: someone steals the name of a living person to die for him, but who is that someone? Cuenca throws himself into a police search in which he plays the detective of himself. Strange calls, false clues and a mysterious woman who appears and disappears. The fiction and the thriller are served on a tray of reality. If one writes the script of one’s own life, he/she inevitably ends up starring in it. Even in the death.</p>
<p>Pulcinella, a character from the popular Neapolitan tradition which acts as a link between the living and the dead, returns to the south of Italy with a new mission: to fulfil the last wish of a country person who wants to save his young buffalo and take it to the north. Therefore, man and beast embark on a long journey through this beautiful and lost Italy where they will travel through Etruscan caves, trees of death and palaces in ruins. The vagrancy will be serene and the meetings will add absurd to absurd. The final destination of the journey is not important, when the film declares another intention: “In a world in which the soul is denied, the only art possible that remains is to be a buffalo”. Or to walk alongside it.</p>
<p>Here, Casa Blanca is the name of a small fishing village in the Gulf of La Habana. The two subtle and poetic stars of the film live there: Nelsa and Vladimir, mother and son. She is an old woman and he has Down’s syndrome. Neither of them can manage alone, but together they achieve an incredible machinery to get on with their lives. Simple lives, full of whispers and caresses, but they are also exposed to the threat of drifting apart. “You were born a prince”, she says to him, whilst he helps her to have a bath. They share a bed in a Cuban corner where they are the kings of their dreams.</p>
<p>A journey through the labyrinth of a woman’s mind, OLMO AND THE SEAGULL tells the story of Olivia, a free-spirited stage actress preparing for a starring role as Arkadina in a theatrical production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. As the play starts to take shape, Olivia and her boyfriend, Serge, whom she first met on the stage of theTheatre du Soleil, discover she is pregnant.</p>
<p>A historic journey in terms of an essay through the use of murals and political paintings in Teheran and a film for which its author has been sentenced to six years in prison and 223 lashes in his country. Keywan Karimi, through two male voices and a female voice, invites us on a journey around the walls of the Iranian capital, such as the only space where the freedom of ideas and expression can be developed. Also the propaganda of the regime. The revolution and its movements against it have fought to speak on walls on which aerosols do not cease to write “Down with the Dictatorship”, in the complicity of the night.</p>
<p>At the end of this film, there is no moral or happy ending, just reality, pure reality. A mother and her daughter look at themselves in the same mirror: no man has lasted in their lives. And the roles are changed. One of them confesses, followed by the other in a film that includes its making of as part of the contents and turns out to be psychoanalysis about independent women that is not lacking comedy. A big silence. The film looks further back and discovers that the same happened in four generations: in this house, men did not last, they have never lasted. The mother proudly tells the story whilst her daughter has some doubts.</p>
<p>An Iranian documentary filmmaker through the image of a tree conveys the feeling of a search and ends culminating with a poem of his father about desarriago and exile.</p>
<p>Intrepid short film that enters into the mind of three paedophiles in the Netherlands: a student called Kasper, a young writer by the name of Hugo and a 44-year old financial consultant called Ben. The young director, Guido Hendrikx, masterfully handles this tricky issue which, as its title indicates, surrounds us and to which we are neighbours. In 24 minutes, the underlying questions are posed: How does somebody cope with a conflict of these characteristics in their head? How does the environment influence these tendencies? What is the distance between confession and understanding?</p>
<p>The relocation of a factory in Finland to China is the setting for this pair of artists to react with a short film that hides intelligence and a profound denunciation in its apparent simplicity. We see the spaces that were left abandoned in Europe. We hear the voices from China that tell us of the reasons for the transfer. This dissociation includes everything: cheap labour, tougher working conditions and a stage that is left empty and establishes a bridge between two worlds through which the human being passes with his ambition, progress and other follies.</p>
<p>Industrial sounds combined with traditional native songs are one of the extremes that is touched on in this oneiric journey to the end of the world by the two Argentinean directors: Federico Molentino and Juan Manuel Ferraro. The images are also part of the search for opposites: a black and white file of the selk´nam community is magically projected on the new spaces of progress. Everything takes place in the sacred land where they live. Therefore, bow hunters and sorcerers live on containers, light towers and the urban landscapes of a lost geography in the film world.</p>
<p>In a workplace situated higher than any other in Poland, the constant nocturnal observation of the surrounding world is an unbroken norm. The employees suspended beyond time and space in ‘The Place’ remain at their posts, unshaken and immovable, despite reversals, adversities and startling situations.</p>
<p>What is feared most – war or its latency? The cows featuring in this film seem to have a clear answer to this question from the meadow close to the Golan Heights where this film is set. The Middle East is seen from the calm of a herd of cattle and in two layers. The first layer is of innocence in which the ruminants look at us, oblivious to the battle whilst peacefully filling their four stomachs. Behind them, there is a backdrop of details that show us the threat to this calm of fresh grass, tranquillity and bovine happiness.</p>
<p>The city spreads and devours the jungle. At the same time, the city’s ruins host another jungle, a veritable internal memory. The question of the frontier arises. What delimits one space from the other?</p>