Playlist
Fascinating flight through the ruins of a Shanghai quarter where each shot is animated to make the walls and windows completely penetrable and enter the lives of dwellers that are being evacuated, to see and hear their existence.
A small town and its hopeful citizens are about to embark on a bright new journey. Massive rusty cranes, foreign investors, and the joyful chants of cheerleaders carry the dream of a great nuclear future. Disturbed only by gigantic stinging mosquitoes, the townsfolk celebrate the atomic hurray by engraving the nuclear power plant logo on buildings and soup bowls. Amidst the apparent atomic prosperity, lies a past that no one wants to remember. An island holding terrifying secrets. Stories of shocking and horrible crimes loom on the city just like the dark clouds of mosquitoes descending on its citizens. A world instantly transformed by ideologies, regimes and dreams of economic prosperity. The tales of characters whose lives intersect in a sinister past, nuclear future and the stinging mosquitoes flying through time, sealing their fate together. From the team behind the IDFA Silver Wolf award-winner "Georgi and the Butterflies".
A blind photographer; a city split in two; two Japanese girls revealing themselves to the camera; a Romanesque cloister hiding a secret; a train journey. From Chris Marker's images, new and endless stories emerge.
A terminally-ill actor decides to donate his body to a medical academy after death. He gradually learns to accept his upcoming parting with life.
Pó de estrelas (Stardust) is a found footage experimental film. When black and white lengthy photographs are set against one-frame fragments of color TV ads, something unusual happens. Welcome to the real world.
A tapestry of seemingly unconnected vignettes beginning with an extraordinary event at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, where the victory of the Peruvian football team was declared void. The film mixes the personal with the political and the historical, going from a portrait of an optimistic taxi driver to that of three waiters of a train to that of an alienated outsider living in the Amazonian forest region.
To begin with, I wanted my father to speak with me about Death, his future death. I had a desire to "interweave" my investigation and my thoughts with the carefully chosen words of this untalkative man. Then - ironically - my father really died. To say "really" is to make of reality in that which is unspeakable to make with that reality.
Director Tan Pin Pin examines the lost and forgotten archives of pre-1965 Singapore.
Ilya Ilf is the co-author, with Yevgeny Petrov, of the famous novels The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf . The film depicts Ilya Ilf's long correspondence with his future wife Maria Tarasenko.
Her Dear Old House (Tsui no Sumika) is an intimate observational documentary following 90-year-old Matsu Yamamoto as she prepares to leave the home where she has lived her entire life. As her beloved house is scheduled for demolition, director Tatsuya Yamamoto captures the rhythms of her final days there, reflecting on memory, aging, family, loss, and the emotional ties between people and place. Through quiet, patient observation, the film becomes a poignant meditation on impermanence and the meaning of home.
Six billions people live on the planet and everyone has his single, own life. We are so different, we such miscellaneous. And each of us shall certainly raise some questions about the sense of life, about destination, about death. And each one tries to find his own answers to these eternal questions. The Man remains weak and vulnerable by essence, even having named himself crown of creation.
Galicia is being bombed. A foreign power is invading the Iberian peninsula via the Galician coast. Bombs fall, fires rage and the stern voice of the war reporter coldly reads through the casualty list. As always, in all wars, the first victim is truth. And as always, and in all situations, images can lie and lie and lie.
Can a candidate with no political experience and no charisma win an election if he is backed by the political giant Prime Minister Koizumi and his Liberal Democratic Party? This cinema-verite documentary closely follows a heated election campaign in Kawasaki, Japan, revealing the true nature of "democracy."
An artful documentary on young immigrants in Europe.
A war veteran with post-traumatic disorders talks about his practical inability to start a normal life after his fighting and killing experience. This 35-year-old married man with three children, who joined the Croatian army in the very beginning of the war and saw various Yugoslavian battlefields from his perspective of a sniper, is unemployed today and tries to adapt to his surroundings while still feeling the closest to his former, now similarly dispossessed co-fighters.
Mix-mastering history, the paranoid thriller, the documentary and the landscape film, pic tells of very different fates for two sets of brothers in oppressive Philippine settings.
"Recently, my young son came up to me. He had seen my old uniform hanging in the closet. He asked me, 'Daddy, are you a warrior?' and I didn't know how to respond to him". It was this moment that Vardan Hovhannisyan describes as the turning point when he knew he needed to return to the archive footage he shot during the Karabagh war. In "A Story of People in War and Peace" Vardan tries to find the people he shared a trench with twelve years ago to speak with them again today. Vardan's intimate conversations with the people he finds raise the ultimate questions about the human costs of war and how it changes ones life forever. More importantly it seeks to find out how they are surviving in peace. "The film combines strong and unique archival war footage from the trenches of a 20 meter battlefield with the human and touching stories of the survivors who are now living on in peace time. Twelve years later I had the opportunity to follow them over a year-long shooting period and was able to create a very close and intimate portrait of their lives and their universal stories", Vardan Hovhannisyan.
11-year-old Alla desperately wants to get to an elite ballet academy in St. Petersburg. The jury give her a second chance - in 2 months' time she just needs to improve her proportions.
From 1994 to 2009, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China led to the forced relocation of more than a million people living along the Yangtze River. Everyone living below the critical threshold of 135 meters above the waterline has to go. But farmer and orange picker Bing'ai is refusing to move. She simply wants to stay living on her own land, growing her own vegetables. Why would she want to start again somewhere else?
Director Yan Feng follows Bing'ai and her family for ten years as they battle it out with unyielding civil servants and bureaucratic officials. In vibrant scenes, the film captures everything from heated gatherings on the village square to daily work in the fields—all set against a backdrop of imposing mountains.
As the struggle against the forced relocations goes on, it brings Bing'ai and her husband closer together. In conversations with the filmmaker, the ever-resolute farmer is surprisingly candid about the deprivations of her past, her married life and her dreams for the future.
Nijuman No Borei (200 000 Phantoms) questions our relationship to History by assembling archival images and photographs of Hiroshima and the dome of Genbaku, the editing of which creating a sort of memorial ballad in the heart of the city from 1944 to 2006.