Social & External
The people behind it
Anas Alhajj
Protagonist
Simon is an eight-year-old boy who seems to have everything from life. He’s a handsome child, he’s rich yet unhappy. He senses that there’s something wrong with his life and this leads him to wander off thanks to his fervid imagination. His greatest wish is to leave the materialistic world behind since he isn’t fond of it. That’s why the only present he wants for Christmas is for Santa Claus to take him away to live in his fairyland toy factory. At the same time, a secret that his family has been keeping for a long time suddenly comes to the surface and it is feared that the worst might happen soon. The expectation for the stroke of midnight on the night before Christmas is transformed into reality for everyone on the eve of something truly different. Something terrible that might happen.
Years after the crime, three clueless investigators discuss the disappearance of a young tourist in a small French town.
'Ad Meliora' (translation: Towards Better Things) is an experimental short film about the struggles girls go through growing up in a male dominated society.
A father and son, affected by the tragedy at a railway station in Serbia, grieve in different ways.
After a woman comes into contact with photographs from an archive, she reflects on her existence through her memories and the memories printed on photographs.
A young man performs 'pranayama' sitting against a bleak wall. We observe him through a frame that seems to be connected to him in some way. As we go on to witness the nature of the frame, will the images presented to us be able to convey his intentions, thoughts, and ultimately, his fate? This experimental feature film is comprised of 7 parts of black and white imagery with no sound at all.
Human, Tears, Art
A woman reflects under the parapet.
The death of the minotavr talks about the concept of the heroine's journey. Suffering, horror and exhaustion lead the protagonist to a process of transformation, abyss and expiation, because only murdering to minotaur and everything he represents is possible to return to life. From the female gaze, it shows the depth of the emotional wounds caused by domestic violence; the same one that the surrealist Dora Maar lived and that ask why, as a society, instead of killing the minotaur, we blindly continue to send him women only to be devoured and ask them why they simply did not fight, why they did not try get out of the labyrinth.
10 scenes on a feeling
Inundated by the relentless, breakneck pace of Seoul, a weary woman seeks to anesthetize her misery with alcohol and partying. Longing to break free, she will have to take a leap of faith to find solace and serenity.
An introverted guy randomly asks a girl out at the Delhi train station on a day date. They spent the entire day getting to know each other. One is keeping a secret and the other longs for love. Will destiny intervene?
A reclusive former star of British cinema reflects on the loss of her child and her past life in the spotlight.
X-ray images were invented in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers presented their respective invention in what today is considered to be the first cinema screening. Thus, both cinema and radiography fall within the scopic regime inaugurated by modernity. The use of X-rays on two sculptures from the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum generates images that reveal certain elements of them that would otherwise be invisible to our eyes. These images, despite being generally created for technical or scientific purposes, seem to produce a certain form of 'photogénie': they lend the radiographed objects a new appearance that lies somewhere between the material and the ethereal, endowing them with a vaporous and spectral quality. It is not by chance that physics and phantasmagoria share the term 'spectrum' in their vocabulary.
The fan's self-sacrificing blades dance in the air, generating a refreshing breeze that wipes away the sweat of others and brings solace on a scorching day.
A group of characters deal with the aftermath of catastrophe.
Job pleads to God for an answer to his suffering and receives one.
In March 2020, an Argentine woman flees New York with her Peruvian husband for his family’s empty beach house outside of Lima, whereupon an unplanned pregnancy precipitates the destruction of her marriage. In the present, she rips the moments of this narrative from their context, and reconstructs her story to reckon with her profound feeling of loneliness and the experience of time in which it has trapped her.
20 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.
Middle-aged widow Beatrice Hunsdorfer and her daughters Ruth and Matilda are struggling to survive in a society they barely understand. Beatrice dreams of opening an elegant tea room but does not have the wherewithal to achieve her lofty goal. Epileptic Ruth is a rebellious adolescent, while shy but highly intelligent and idealistic Matilda seeks solace in her pets and school projects, including one designed to show how small amounts of radium affect marigolds.
A pair of twin brothers from East L.A. choose to live their lives differently and end up on opposite sides of the law.
Dr. Alan Stone breaks new ground for treatment of the mentally ill through an experiment on three paranoid schizophrenic patients who believe they are Jesus Christ.
Based on the writer/director's childhood, FARMING tells the story of a young Nigerian boy, 'farmed out' by his parents to a white British family in the hope of a better future. Instead, he becomes the feared leader of a white skinhead gang.
A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.
The true story of 20-year-old Colleen Stan, a hitchhiking woman abducted by a young couple and held captive for seven years, during which time she's tortured and forced to live as a slave to her captors.
An uninterrupted rehearsal of Chekhov's 'Uncle Vanya' plays out by a company of actors. The setting: their run-down theater with an unusable stage and crumbling ceiling. The play is shown act by act with the briefest of breaks to move props or for refreshments. The lack of costumes, real props and scenery is soon forgotten.
The story of a young writer's transformation when her past invades her present.
Conman Robert Freegard poses as an undercover MI5 agent and kidnaps countless victims amidst a high-stakes manhunt, until the woman who fell for him brings him to justice.
A 21-year-old reformed gangster's devotion to his family and his future is put to the test when he is released from prison and returns to his old stomping grounds in Watts, Los Angeles.
Mahree Bok lives on a farm in South Africa. Her father is a policeman who cannot hide his joy when activist Steve Biko is caught by the South African authorities. Piper Dellums is the daughter of a US congressman from California and who lives in a nice home in Washington DC. When Mahree is chosen to spend a semester at the Dellums' house, she doesn't expect that her host family would be black. Nor do her hosts suspect that she is not a black South African.
A young man with a bright future suffers a near-fatal accident and recreates his new life with the help of an unlikely animal friend.
The story of Elizabeth Smart's kidnapping and captivity, as told from her perspective.
Gentle and broken, a homeless man fights others on video for money but soon finds comfort in an unlikely friend and the lost diary of a young girl.
In New York City, a young girl is caught in the middle of her parents' bitter custody battle.
Jamie Fitzpatrick and Nona Alberts are two women from opposites sides of the social and economic track, but they have one thing in common: a mission to fix their community's broken school and ensure a bright future for their children. The two women refuse to let any obstacles stand in their way as they battle a bureaucracy that's hopelessly mired in traditional thinking, and they seek to re-energize a faculty that has lost its passion for teaching.
Rory is an ambitious entrepreneur who brings his American wife and kids to his native country, England, to explore new business opportunities. After abandoning the sanctuary of their safe American suburban surroundings, the family is plunged into the despair of an archaic '80s Britain and their unaffordable new life in an English manor house threatens to destroy the family.
South America, 1960. A lonely and grumpy Holocaust survivor convinces himself that his new neighbor is none other than Adolf Hitler. Not being taken seriously, he starts an independent investigation to prove his claim, but when the evidence still appears to be inconclusive, Polsky is forced to engage in a relationship with the enemy in order to obtain irrefutable proof.
The relationship of a couple who meet by chance in New York City is put to the test when they encounter a life or death circumstance.
