Life for Bogdan couldn’t seem more blissful, sea-vacationing along with his gorgeous wife and adorable young son. He has grown up: the days of glorious drinking trips and sexual adventures are long gone… But when Bogdan unexpectedly runs into his best friends from high school, vivid memories immediately flood back. Torn between his family obligations and the lure of a fun night out with his old friends, Bogdan – or Boogie, as he was known back then – comes to a realization. The gaps between his childhood pals have grown wider. Friendship, it seems, can no longer be based on common tastes in women, beer, or football teams.
Secção: Cinema emergente
During an ordinary evening in front of a soap opera, a young girl rejects her mother’s constant signs of affection. The warm family environment becomes asphyxiating.
In a Trás-os-Montes jail, preparation starts for the Way of the Cross staging and the prisioners, as if they were students again, gather in the classroom to receive instructions. The documentary watches them since their first rehearsals until the procession, with a detailed insight into the process: the dramaturgy taken very seriously, the image of Jesus’ wounds painted carefully, the making of the wooden crosses that close the film in a geometrical shot, the elderly witnessing the developments and singing about life and time never going back. The directors uses summary shots, filled with incisive, curious notes ‚ a poster of Jesus Christ on a door, as if he was a celebrity to be embodied. The quietness of the countryside and the peaceful life of the rural community form a contrast with the latent tension, the uncertainty of the future and ensure the nostalgia of tradition. (Ágata Pinho)
The director of this film-performance faces the power of nature as she is trying to convince a waterfall to turn into a power plant. Her discourse, the arguments she uses, her supposedly ecological and well sustained reasoning can’t but hide our lack of most basic common sense. What has humanity to do with nature? Are we trying to do our best or to dominate? (Karim Shimsal)
Turning a city into an anthill is just a question of perspective. The way you see one thing determines the signification of the very same object. Entire lives through one day. The energy turned into futility, the everyday objectives turned into a senseless agitation. (Karim Shimsal)
In a near future we will be able to seek refuge in memory implants that will allow us to live in a vintage fictional world. Living in this fake reality recreated with old-fashioned images a mother has decided to erase the death of her daughter. But the child is still there somewhere, hiding in some lost spaces of her memory. (Karim Shimsal)
In Alasca landscape never changes, only grows old.
“Alicia in the Land” follows a thirteen-year-old girl from the Quechua tribe as she makes a 180 km journey on foot. From her village in southern Bolivia, Alicia sets off in search of work in northern Chile, in the tourist town of San Pedro de Atacama. Close-ups, filmed with a hand-held camera, with only the girl’s breathing and the repetitive thud of her footsteps on the soundtrack, long lateral pans in which the horizontal lines of the plains interact and combine with the geometry of Alicia’s silhouette; all underscore the effort involved in such a journey.
Wandering through moving images taken with a tourist camera juxtaposed with classic movies, From New York with Love is an essay on a foreigner’s evolving relation with his host country. (André Valentim Almeida)
Sorry, this entry is only available in European Portuguese.
12… explosões em Viena.12 … explosions in Vienna.
A modern parody of a film noir. The film’s structure follows the classic example of voice over narration on a first-person basis by the anti-hero Enzo as a plot structuring mechanism. Enzo, is a recently released from jail thief, with specialty in opening safes with his bare hands in 10 minutes. Enzo, constitutes the classic clumsy protagonist, a Peter Sellers look alike, emotionally allienated for a long time that he can’t remember the last time he smiled at someone. His Clumsiness is sexually aroused by a fellow crook as the femme fatale heroine. The film’s setting is partly filmed in a decadant nightclub with failed cabaret artistas and gamblig dens and partly outdoors to metro stations and factories. A Euro-noir tale of corruption, seduction and deception and a tribute to film noir/soleil. (Nina Veligradi)
In a French rundown industrial park, Mao, a Muslim boss, owns a company that specializes in repairing trucks and pallets. He decides to open a mosque and designates the imam without consulting the workforce.
A hard rock band lead singer is realising his father role, on his way to meet his wife in order to sign the divorce papers, he is rediscovering himself as an adult. So Yong Kim’s highly anticipated For Ellen once again is focusing on the humanistic side, examining the state immaturity when it comes to parenthood. A father/daughter attempt to build a relationship, a puzzled child dealing with rejection and a desperate father filled with guilt is trying to explain his absence. Not knowing how to act, he appears less mature than his daughter, unable to relate to her emotionally and struggling to maintain a connection with his place of being. He keeps asking himself in front of his daughter if he should be there, creating even more uncertainty and fear. A character drama about childhood given by the point of view of a failed musician and absent father trying to gain presence in his life. (Nina Veligradi)
Time rushes by us. It rushes like the clouds in the sky that are swept and left drifting by the wind. As it passes we live and feel its passage. A brief reflection about time and life seen through two moments of our mother’s lives.
If she’s over 40, grew children and a not so polite man as partner, a woman can start wondering about the ways she had conducted her life. Or being carried by it. Anyway and no matter what she does, she’ll always feel wrong‚Ķ (Possidónio Cachapa)
Victor is a former rock musician who will do anything to help his addict son and his rock band, in a small Romanian town. At the same time, he is trying to rebuild a new family with the woman he is with. But Victor’s life seems to get more and more complicated and leans toward his son and his rock band. After Morgen, screened at IndieLisboa in 2011, Marian Crisan returns with his second feature film, Rocker, focusing on family relationships between father and son. The film follows this father, lost in a maze of emotions and frustrations, whose escape turns out to be, after all, rock music and the band’s concert in a larger city. (C. C.)
Robin and Robin meet in a laundry. While waiting for the washing to be over, they get attracted by their obvious similarities. (M. Moz)
Five Emiles ‚ perhaps in remembrance of the five children whom Rousseau abandoned to welfare services ‚ are splashing in the bathtub. Their conversation on nature, man and education is animated, paradoxical, and humorous.