DONBASS

UKRAINE  • 120′ DONBASS by Sergei Loznitsa When we call “peace” the war, when the propaganda is presented as the truth, when we call “love” the hatred, it is there that the life begins to look like the death. Donbass survives. Manuel practises hell. There is a hackneyed phrase: history repeats itself – the first time[…]

SOW THE WIND

ITALY – 90′ a film by Danilo Caputo Nica, 21, drops out of her university course in agronomics and returns home to Apulia in southern Italy after three years away. She finds her father deep in debt, a polluted, devastated region, and olive trees destroyed by a parasite. Everyone seems to have given up in[…]

WAJIB

PALESTINE/FRANCE  •  90′ a film by ANNEMARIE JACIR Abu Shadi is a divorced father and a school teacher in is mid-60s living in Nazareth. After is daughter’s wedding in one month he will be living alone. Shadi, is architect son, arrives from Rome after years abroad to help is fatherin hand delivering the wedding invitations to[…]

SALT OF THIS SEA

PALESTINE/FRANCE • 105′ a film by ANNEMARIE JACIR Soraya, 28, born and raised in Brooklyn, decides to return to live in Palestine, the country her family was exiled from in 1948. On arriving in Ramallah, Soraya tries to recover her grandparent’s money, frozen in an account in Jaffa, but is refused by the bank. She meets[…]

STRAY DOGS

TAÏWAN  •  138′ a film by MING-LIANG TSAï There is no story to tell. Hsiao-Kang is a good for nothing who holds signboards for a living. He smokes and pisses in the streets that are ever flowing with vehicles and pedestrians. The only people in his life are his two children. They eat together, brush their teeth[…]

THE MUTANTS

PORTUGAL  •  114′ a film by TERESA VILLAVERDE Andrea, Pedro and Ricardo refuse to accept the world as it is. They don’t seem to fit anywhere. But they don’t give up, they go on looking, projecting a palpable force that spreads everywhere, threatens to explode. They’re bursting with the energy and determination to change things, to[…]

THE REPENTANT

ALGERIA • 84′ a film by MERZAK ALLOUACHE Algeria region of the high flatlands. As Islamist groups continue to spread terror, Rashid, a young Jihadist, leaves the mountains to return to his village. In keeping with the law « of pardon and national harmony », he has to surrender to the police and give up his weapon.[…]

THE ROOFTOPS

ALGERIA  •  91′ a film by MERZAK ALLOUACHE Algiers. An overcrowded city, with its endless traffic jams, its chaotic crowd, its rundown buildings, its old apartments piled up with families trying to survive… In this suffocating city, the terraces, progressively transformed into living spaces, they too, over time, become effervescent spaces where smiles cross the[…]

LUMUMBA

CONGO/BELGIUM • 116′ a movie by RAOUL PECK Patrice Lumumba, the hero of Congolese independence, was not yet 30 when the first tremors of botched decolonisation thrust him to the forefront of the international political area. After a course of a few years, Lumumba, became the most reviled man of this intense cold war period. Becoming[…]