Africa is a nervous film, made out of hints that little by little hide and reveal intimate fragments of a man’s psychotic condition. Its rigorous construction, with a risky aesthetic full of contrasts and oppositions, makes it an experimental film with a truly original language. (Rita Figueiredo)
This animation tells the story of the Queen de Montparnasse, as she became known in the bohemian and creative Paris of the 1920s. Kiki de Montparnasse became the muse of major avant-garde painters of the early twentieth century and in this film her story is told using the different styles of each of those artists. (M. Moz)
At the motel Marín”, the most diverse “passengers” enter daily. Men in search of new experiences, romantic couples, prostitutes who earn their living by ensuring that they “like everything.” But there are also women who take care of the cleaning and other room services, each with their own story and vision of the world. (P. C.)
“I was wondering, where will we end up if we start drilling on one side of the earth and coming out from the other. Since most of the globe is covered with water the answer is most likely in the middle of the ocean.” However, this film comes to prove this theory is wrong and discovers four diametrically opposite spots of land or antipodas. In the first pair, two brothers are crossing Entre Ríos in Argentina to Shanghai and from strickigly beautiful sunset we move to the busy chinese metropolis. The second antipodas takes us from Russia and lake Baikal to Chile. The third from Hawaii and volcano Kilauea to Kubu in Botswana. The final pair is in Maraflores of Spain to Castle Point of New Zealand. A trip around the world in 104 minutes and Kossakovsky as Jules Vernes offers a magnificent kaleidoscope of our world. (Nina Veligradi)
17 teenage girls take together an unexpected decision that will change their peaceful little lives and leave them misunderstood by the boys and adults around them: they decide to get pregnant all at the same time. This is based on a true story that occurred in 2008.
Before entering, a request: let’s forget what it means to watch a film, to be in a movie theater. Let’s face the colossus that is Leviathan from scratch, to better enjoy the experience that immerses all senses and swings a stormy voyage to the limits of nature and human strength. Filmed with twelve GoPro cameras (how many were lost in the process?), the film follows the travels of a fishing boat at sea on the east coast of the United States. The images are the look of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, but more so of the fishermen and the fish – living and dead ‚ that we encounter in these troubled waters. We feel the skin of each battle as if we abandon ourselves to the wind, the rain, at the mercy of a sea more distant than we are used to, sunny and seductive. Fancy forgetting Leviathan just to see it again for the first time. (M. M.)
A group of friends is walking in a dense forest. It’s summer, they have time to play with words, to lose to one another. One of the boys listens repeatedly to the same recording of the voices of the group. They have already been in that exact location, but they are not lost. The references announce an outcome to which they refuse to surrender. The meticulous work of image and sound of the film’s young director Jazmín López creates a space that is as real as it is magical. There is a tension in the rhythmic passing of time in Leones, sweet at first and then wild, agitated. Will the pack, as brave as this first film, receive the tragic end announced? (M. M.)
What is this world we live in where 38 people watch a rape followed by a brutal murder and pretend that nothing happened? Whether out of laziness or indifference, the truth is that nobody called the police while the horror lasted. And how does someone who begins to feel the remorse for what he didn’t do faces the hostility of those who gradually feel the world they live in falling apart? Those who prefer to ignore than to see the destabilization of the fragile fantasy that surrounds them? Like a craftsman, Lucas Belvaux reconstitutes that evening in a tour-de-force of an harrowing violence. It’s good to have the Belgian back! (Rui Pereira)
In a large apartment high above the city lives our couple. They’re in love. She’s a painter; he’s a successful actor. Just a normal afternoon ‚ except that this isn’t a normal afternoon, for them or anyone else. Because tomorrow, at 4:44 am, give or take a few seconds, the world will come to an end far more rapidly than even the worst doomsayer could have imagined. The final meltdown will come, not without warnings, but with no means of escape. There will be no survivors. As always, there are those who, as their final cigarette is being lit and the blindfold tightened, will still hope against hope for some kind of reprieve. For a miracle. Not our two lovers. They ‚ like the majority of the Earth’s population ‚ have accepted their fate; the world is going to end.
Punk’s Not Dead. Not is the oldest punk in Europe and has a brother, Dead, who is fired from a store where he was a mattress salesman, and ends up living with his brother on the street. The two decide to launch into an open war against the consumer society and all its capitalist dreams. Together they want to be free and lead a revolution… their way. Le Grand Soir is a poetic road trip set in the peripheral, commercial zone of a city. A satirical and demanding film, from the duo of Belgian filmmakers, which proves that their filmography is absolutely unavoidable and urgent to see in this 10th edition of the festival. With this film, punk spirit is invited and with it, so are all of its spectators. We are not dead. (A. I. S.)
When Robin notices that his front neighbor looks like his dead mother, he starts filming her obsessively and compulsively. He shares with us his daily life by the window, watching the balcony, waiting for something he knows so little about. (M. C.)
After the film about the Arctic Desert, Anna Abrahams leads us to the mountain peaks. The journey is sacred, seeking the unknown, guided by adventurers phrases where each one has his own way of experiencing the climbing to the top of a mountain, the landscape and the mystery. (Miguel Cabral)
If there was one word to describe this day it would be alone. And Alina Rudnitskaya is approaching this loneliness by leaving her camera on the waiting room of this painful procedure. Maybe her filming is not as courageous as those women are but its extre
School is back in session. During a writing test, little Pierre manages to escape the greyness of his school by plunging headlong into the happy memories of his holidays spent in the company of his faithful sheep.
Joey is a clumsy blue beak bird that lives in the jungle of Puerto d’Azu. Because of his small wings he can’t fly. When he finds the love of his life at the top of a tree he has to be inventive.
The film opens on a water-skiing accident – a girl (Délie) drives a speedboat and pulls a young man (Stan). They are both challenging their own limits when a crash occurs… Stan wakes up from a coma after this serious accident, to find out that genealogi
Between 1961 and 1974, thousands of men were mobilized and went to Angola, Mozambique and Guiné-Bissau to fight in a long and not really assumed colonial war. 50 years after its beginning, it still is a delicate and airtight matter, supported by an exclu
Childhood memories can be whatever we want them to be, but for the director there is an unavoidable obsession behind her birth and childhood. Through a bureaucratic monotone voice we hear the details of Pujol’s behavior and development. The landscape which illustrates the text is dense and dry, but it is also the revisiting of a time at the same time objective and clinical. (MV)