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[…]

SALVADOR ALLENDE

CHILE   •  100′ a film by PATRICIO GUZMAN « I recall September 11, 1973, that dark day when America instigated a coup d’état to bring down the pacifist and democratic revolution that was taking place in a faraway country, Chile, my homeland. Salvador Allende, the President of the Republic, that “son of a bitch‚” as Richard Nixon[…]

XIME

GUINEA BISSAU  •  93′ a film by SANA NA N’HADA Xime, 1962. Iala is confronted with losing the authority over his two sons. Raul, the elder son, had been sent to the seminary. In fact, he joined the liberation movement against the Portuguese colonial regime. Bedan, the younger son, remaining behind the village, is in[…]

SALAMANDRA

ARGENTINA • 88′ a film by PABLO AGUERO Argentina during military dictatorship in the early 80s: Hoping for a new life after being released from prison, Alba takes her six-year-old son Inti with her to a remote hippie village in the foothills of the Andes. She settles in the house of a deceased physician and indulges[…]

ZULU LOVE LETTER

SOUTH AFRICA • 99′ a film by RAMADAN SULEMAN Johannesburg is in a state of euphoria two years after the first democratic elections. Here Thandeka, a young black journalist, lives in fear of her country’s past. She’s so troubled that she can’t work, and her relationship with Mangi, her 13-year-old, profoundly deaf daughter, goes from bad[…]

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[…]