Lektionen in Finsternis

Several years after “Fata Morgana”, Herzog again perceives the desert as a landscape with its own voice. Virtually devoid of commentary, the imagery concentrates on the aftermath of the first Gulf War – specifically on the Kuwaiti oil fires.

L'exil et le royaume

At the foothills of the empire, some go fishing, some go flirting. Time flies. Cigarette after cigarette, we reinvent the world. When the weather is good on the other side, we can see the lost paradise. Is it a mirage?… The time has come for us to become unreasonable: the whole world is passing through Calais.

La Matiouette

Two brothers meet for the first time in ten years. One of them became an actor in Paris. Passing through their village, he stops at his brother’s hair saloon, which used to belong to their father. They don’t have anything in common anymore, not even their name. The gap is irreparable.

Die Siderische Nacht

If one day the earth stopped rotating around itself, one of the sides would loose the light from the sun. But if someone read a sequence of phrases out loud, during that time a light brighter than daylight would shine. In a film textured of engravings and collages, this story is told ‚ an imaginative narrative, disturbing and prophetic. (Miguel Valverde)

Les navets blancs empêchent de dormir

Ana visits Boris in Brussels. He is a conceptual artist with a promising career ahead of him. She is still looking for her place in the world of adults, but her nature celebrates gladly freedom and innocence. For years they have tried to say goodbye so they can move on and this time they may suceed. A poetic and inspiring film about breaking up and starting over. (Ágata Pinho)

L'enclave

A village where silent dwellers are occupied by repetitive tasks. A wood where a bunch of men in rags seems to be waiting for something. And a man, at night, running away.

L'arrière-pays

After ten years away, Jacques Pruez, an unmarried, 50-year-old, modestly successful actor, returns to his home village in southwest France when he learns that his mother is dying. He stays around to attend the funeral and support his aging father. As he does so, the gulf between the life he once new as a child and his life now as a middle-aged man becomes painfully apparent.

Do Céu e da Terra

“In far away Paraguay, there was a young man … who in his heart had an empty meadow.” This is the theme for a musical film in animation, where the director plays exemplary with screens, guns and money, between narrative and abstraction. Chagall, Picasso and Kandinsky hang around in a synthesis that seemed impossible, a film adapted from a book by P. Cachapa. (Miguel Valverde)

Mourir auprès de toi

A tragic-comic animaton by the pair Jonze-Cahn. In a Parisian bookstore, book characters from the universe of fantasy come to life, using 3.000 pieces of felt cut by hand by designer Olympia Le-Tan. The music and overflowing imagination give them an unexpected life. (Miguel Valverde)

La vie lointaine

“Life at a Distance” is the title of Haruki’s unfinished novel. Yoshido is preparing a film of the same name based on his deceased friend’s manuscript. When Martin meets Haruki’s ghost near the forest that borders the house he doesn’t yet know that he’ll become the main character in this distant life.

Le petit chaperon rouge

Delphine is twenty years old. She is too young to have experienced the activism of the seventies, but for her it is not something that belongs to the past. She decides to find something that will allow her to act and which, she claims, is owed to her.

El Estudiante

For Roque, arriving from the countryside, the University in Buenos Aires was an opportunity to meet girls, but it is with politics that he falls in love. Between classes and parties where popularity, curiosity and insecurities are measured, everyone is looking for themselves, but Roque is discovered by the intriguing Paula and her passionate speech. In more or less informal conversations, students talk about capitalism, marxism, quote Rousseau or Hobbes, discuss the necessity of war and the hypothesis of a new social order. When differences seem to divide the Student Union, chaos is installed and Roque steps in as a leader, fighting for a righteous education. With a raw style, hand-held camera and closed shots that bring us close to the characters’ struggles (interior and exterior), we stumble on them as they stumble on each other. (Ágata Pinho)

L'apprenti

Mathieu, 15 years old, a student at an agricultural high school in France, works part-time on Paul’s farm, a small-size dairy farm on the plateaux of the Haut-Doubs region bordering Switzerland.

L'Arbitro

In the hellish mayhem of a lowest division football match, the destinies of two thieves cross path.

The Night of The Moon Has Many Hours

A man crosses a river in a raft. He places the bodies he finds along the way calmy and scrupulously on top of it. In the silence of the night, his repetitious movements leave us wondering about the sense of his route and gestures. (Miguel Cabral)

The Pettifogger

With a varied iconography working as a stimulating dialogue, the director portraits the life of a conman. The set of animated pieces illustrates his vices and troubles as cards, women, applause, decline and ascension follow on. Music and distant sounds, of people and places lost somewhere in 1963, ignite the experience. In an offish bar we listen to conversations, billiard balls colliding and a lonesome piano. The collage of stimulus immerses us, agitates us, soothes us and it is our breath that slows down as the films’ rhythm slackens and we gain space to think about what we just absorbed. A voice whispers you lost something, the most precious thing that children possess and in between destructions, life is gambled, consumed, money gained and money lost. (Ágata Pinho)