Workers of a building site in Senegal’s capital don’t get paid for months. Soulemain, one of them, decides to cross the ocean in search for a better life. 17-year-old Ana, despite being promised to another man, waits for the return of her love. Inspired by the figure of Penelope, but also Romeo and Juliet, Atlantique is a tale of spirits, trauma and growth. Cannes Grand Jury Prize of 2019.
Directed while still attending Le Fresnoy film school, this documentary was the inspiration for the director’s first feature film. A group of Senegalese friends that aspires to cross the ocean, in a journey that may also be between life and death.
What’s the gap between pleasure and pain? What are the body’s limits in terms of sensitivity? Inspired by the violent, erotic and seductive images of the Chilean painter Carmen Silva, aunt of the director, this is a story of a wound that produces pleasure.
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A young man has an accident. His friend helps. His friend’s mother welcomes him. The wound that is born is hot and a perfect attraction to the abyss. It is in this context that the Chilean Woodroffe (whose English name contrasts with his origins), takes advantage of a situation that is never common. The family atmosphere has something “off-place”, and the house, apparently tidy, is about to explode in contained energy. Woodroffe risks being the next Chilean “case” after Dominga Sotomayor. (Miguel Valverde)
Using a stop motion animation technique, Mathilde Pepinster imagines the story of a man that visits the supermarket but thinks he is an eskimo, living surrounded by ice.
Since Aznavour received his first camera from Edith Piaf in 1948, that filming became a part of his daily life. The singer kept a video diary where he recorded key moments of his life, travels, concerts, lovers and friends. Before he died he expressed the desire to make a film out of this material. Fulfilling his wish, Marc di Domenico accesses these personal files, while filming himself the French singer for 3 years.
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The usual is for the cameras to be directed at them, the singers, the actors, the men and women who climb up to the stage and fill up the screens. One of the biggest names within the french songs and music, son of Armenian refugees that journeyed through the XXth century and crossed into the next one certain that only death could stop him (and only her would indeed force him an early retirement, at 94 years of age, in the year 2018), Charles Aznavour was first and foremost a singer, but he also filled screens, as we’re eternally reminded by that “Shoot the Piano Player” in which Truffaut made him lead character right at the beggining of the nouvelle vague eruption. “Aznavour by Charles” shows us Charles Aznavour, the star, making something beyond the usual. In 1948, Edith Piaf offered him a recording camera. In the following 34 years, Aznavour filmed landscapes and faces, anonymous people, the women of his life, other stars like himself. Marc di Domenico dived into that huge archive and shaped it. Romain Duris made himself Aznavour e gave voice to his thought. A revealing movie came out of it. The observer becomes the observed thing, and vice-versa. “Aznavour by Charles”, Charles is Aznavour. (Mário Lopes)
If you don’t fall asleep the bogey man will come for you! In the Slavic mythology it’s Babai who kidnaps the children. Aisagaliev’s film contains this oneiric fear of growing up, but is above all a vertiginous and sensorial voyage through the first visual and sonorous impressions of childhood. Two brothers and a rather severe father. The world tears apart before the eyes, they are blurry memories, pieces of happiness and humiliation.
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A Russian-born and US-based director Artem Aisagaliev comes back to his grandparents’ house in the Russian Far East to make a deep dive into his childhood memories, casting almost exclusively his own family members in his first feature Babai. Through the eyes of the two little brothers, the director wanders about the foggy border between the kid’s world and that of the adults, a border that you cannot cross unscarred. The camera sticks to claustrophobic close-ups of the faces, hands, and backs of the two boys, who move freely in a very limited space, the space that shrinks before one’s eyes giving way to an army-style discipline. Boys don’t cry in this world devoid of female presence, and if they do, Babai, a mythic folklore creature, will take them away. Babai is also the name of the boys’ grandfather, and this is a line easy to read: the boys will be kidnapped, eventually, from their world of surprise and wonder, to serve their duty as men. (Anastasia Lukovnikova)
In the cinematic universe of Carlos Conceição, the marvellous is not a world apart from reality. They complement, sacrifice one for another. A brother helps a sister die happy. The fairy tale is also a tale of fucking and oxygen masks.
Poor Leo. He knows the idea that women prefer bald men is not completely true. But salvation is coming his way: a marvel and mysterious hair-growth liquid.
According to the Islamic faith, barzack designates a state of limbo, between hell and paradise, after earthly life. In the Spanish city of Melilha, situated in the North of Africa, several young people are in this limbo, yearning for a passage to Europe. They live waiting, inhabiting the caves and crevices in the mountains next to the harbour. In this timeless, ancestral space, they light fires, sing and search in the darkness for the light of another life.
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The constellations of the lights on the distant shore of Spain are as unreachable as their look-alikes on the sky above for the group of boys stuck on the North coast of Africa in Alejandro Salgado’s first feature. Barzakh in Islamic culture is a state between life and death, and for the boys who try to make their crossing to Europe, it finds its earthly incarnation in the endless waiting on the cliffs, in-between the countries, the continents, the bare force of nature and the so-called ‘civilised world’, boyhood and adulthood. The boys are mere silhouettes against the scarce lights of the endless night, their shadows glide on the ancient walls of the caves, they have no names and no faces but they have voices to sign the songs about the land they have left behind and their dreams of the life that is yet to begin. (Mafalda Melo)
A single cinema shot can contain the turbulent destinies of a democracy. In the street, two filmmakers interview the journalist Marília Melhado. With the elections, the political atmosphere is tense and a group of Bolsonaro’s supporters attack the freedom of opinion.
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Journalist Marilia Melhado agrees to give an interview, at the Brazilian polls, on the election day that marks the decision between Jair Bolsonaro and Fernando Haddad. This simple description doesn’t convey the tangible impotence of the film, especially palpable in a moment of political polarization, virtually globally, in which public discussion becomes untenable. And if we must endeavor to listen to each other, let us start by listening to Marilia. (Ana Cabral Martins)
It was during the shooting of António Campo’s Terra Fria (1992) in the region of Trás-os-Montes, that the producer, now director, João Mazeda heard this true story. A theft of water, a homicide, a question of honour, a tragedy in the village of Gralhas, Montalegre.
After being in the festival with Antão, o invisível (2017), the Portuguese-Swiss directors make their return with this, half “zoological documentary”, half fictional portrait, that takes place in a Geneve’s bird sanctuary. The rectangular framing, the young Antonin’s voice over hovering above that “sacred place”, but also a ecological argument and a detailed sense of observation, all is part of this magical island that captivates our gaze.
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The young and intriguing duo of directors formed by Maya Kosa and Sergio Da Costa delivers with L’Île aux oiseaux a second feature film of an almost unreal poetry although intimately linked to reality, back and forth between fiction and reality where one springs from the other as if by magic – which has always been at the heart of the work of the Swiss duo (of Polish and Portuguese origin respectively). Like the injured birds of prey, Paul, Antonin and the other employees of the Genthod center must relearn how to hunt in order to survive in a society which “allows no mistake”. “What is that smell?” Asks the young man, a newcomer to the center and a hero of the film, when he first enters where the little cages are with mice; “It’s shit, you’re going to get used to it,” replied Paul, who works there for a long time. A raw and simple opening sentence that sums up the film fairly well: grand in its terrible and contradictory simplicity. The scarcity of dialogues renders its content even more powerful. The words are carefully chosen, between wonder and precision, in a way that recalls Rohmer’s dialogues but with the simplicity and offbeat comic tone found on a Kaurismäki film. Like as if the many sequence shots which punctuate the film speak with images when the words are silent. (Mickael Gaspar)
Sembène’s first feature is considered to be the first Sub-Saharan African film by an African filmmaker to receive international attention. Based on an author’s homonymous short story, it tells the coming from Dakar to the French Riviera, of Diouana, a young Senegalese woman, hired as a babysitter by a cosmopolitan French couple. This is a silent rebellion path, going from illusory dreams of a better life to a reality of exploration.
In a critique to the Berliner films that depicted labour problems always through masculine lens, Sander changes the point of view. Irene, single mother, works in a washing machine factory and has to deal with discrimination, sexual harassment and lack of solidarity.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
Paulo cannot afford to pay alimony to his ex-wife. In order to be able to see his son again, he starts working at night as a taxi driver in Rio de Janeiro. Through the windows of the car, through the stories of his passengers, starts the journey and autopsy of a city. A city where the sun only arrives through a mirage. Nocturnal existences, tired shadows, solitude and silence that observe. Fabrício Boliveira won the acting prize at Rio Film Festival.
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Left to his own fate, Paulo, recently divorced, starts working as a taxi driver to survive in the big city and pay his 10-year-old son’s pension. While driving through the endless nights of Rio de Janeiro, we follow him in the interior of his taxi, where passengers who connect more intensely with Paulo’s history pass by. In this dark and throbbing chronicle, the unpredictability of the night occupies the forefront of the film, where oscillating and claustrophobic images work as a vehicle for anguish.
In this eighth feature film by Eryk Rocha, strolling between fiction and documentary, the director films the streets of Rio de Janeiro as a dark and decadent space, and where hope is only reborn inside the taxi, when new passengers help Paulo overtake loneliness and the urban chaos inherent to his night work. Only these characters can bring love and happiness back into Paulo’s life. (Inês Lima Torres)
At the beginning of the 70’s, René Viénet, situationist and filmmaker, bought the rights of a Chinese kung fu film and, by adding subtitles and later sound dubbing, transformed it into an hilarious burlesque avant garde comedy. It was the technique of “detournement”, that reformulated and recontextualised works of art for other means. And so, a martial arts film was now containing situationism aphorisms and fights opposing proletarians and bureaucrats.
This film is not in English and does not have subtitles in English.
Inspired in the Canticle of the Sun or Canticle of the Creatures, that Saint Francis of Assisi wrote in 1224, Gomes’ short film reactivates its scope. In the city of Assis in 2005 and also in the remembrance of the small creatures’ praise towards a forgetful saint.)
This is a travel through the improvised music in Portugal, in particular Lisbon, with focus on the now closed bar Irreal. Based on interviews and filmed concerts with artists like Gabriel Ferrandini, Adriana Sá and Lantana, Chaos and Affinity shows us a cultural reality not well known. And also, a group of artists and venues where this improvised music takes place. Pedro Gonçalves directs his first feature film.
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One of the strengths of Pedro Gonçalves’ documentary is its contemporaneity. Most documentaries about music focus mainly on bands, artists or movements that no longer exist or whose golden moment occurred in the past. Chaos and Affinity tells us about the here and now. A portrait of improvised Portuguese music, with a greater emphasis on Lisbon and with an epicenter in the, ironically extinct, bar Irreal. Pedro gathers a group of incredible musicians, rescuing them from their invisibility through concerts and interviews. An object for future memory in what is his first and promising film. (Carlos Ramos)
