After a rough break-up, Elizabeth sets out on a journey across America, leaving behind a life of memories, a dream and a soulful new friend ‚ a cafe owner – all while in search of something to mend her broken heart. Waitressing her way through the country, Elizabeth befriends others whose yearnings are greater than hers, including a troubled cop and his estranged wife and a down-on-her luck gambler with a score to settle. Through these individuals, Elizabeth witnesses the true depths of loneliness and emptiness, and begins to understand that her own journey is part of a greater exploration within herself.
Life in Loops is a new version of a film, using its original material and mixing it with new imagery. About 30% of the material originates directly (in a new edit) from the documentary film Megacities by Michael Glawogger, the rest is constructed from its unused footage and new footage of Tokyo filmed by Megacities cameraman Wolfgang Thaler. The sound, created by the Sofa Surfers, defines the visual edits, and vice versa. The result is a symbiotic connection between image and sound that could best be described as an experimental-music-documentary film.
Me and You and Everyone We Know is a poetic and penetrating observation of how people struggle to connect with one another in an isolating and contemporary world. Christine Jesperson is a lonely artist and Eldercab driver who uses her fantastical artistic visions to draw her aspirations and objects of desire closer to her. Richard Swersey (John Hawkes), a newly single shoe salesman and father of two boys, is prepared for amazing things to happen. But when he meets the captivating Christine, he panics. Life is not so oblique for Richard’s seven-year-old Robby, who is having a risqué internet romance with a stranger, and his fourteen- year-old brother Peter who becomes the guinea pig for neighborhood girls‚Äî practicing for their future of romance and marriage.
The most stigmatized people in Calcutta’s red light district, are not the prostitutes, but their children. In the face of abject poverty, abuse, and despair, these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother’s fate or for creating another type of life. In Born into Brothels, directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman chronicle the amazing transformation of the children they come to know in the red light district. Briski, a professional photographer, gives them lessons and cameras, igniting latent sparks of artistic genius that reside in these children who live in the most sordid and seemingly hopeless world. The photographs taken by the children are not merely examples of remarkable observation and talent; they reflect something much larger, morally encouraging, and even politically volatile: art as an immensely liberating and empowering force. Devoid of sentimentality, Born into Brothels defies the typical tear-stained tourist snapshot of the global underbelly. Briski spends years with these kids and becomes part of their lives. Their photographs are prisms into their souls, rather than anthropological curiosities or primitive imagery, and a true testimony of the power of the indelible creative spirit.
Nine years ago in Before Sunrise, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) two 23-year old travellers in Viena, met, fell in love and parted 24 hours later, promising to meet again in six months. Jesse is now in Paris promoting his novel that focuses on the encounter. Céline comes along to a reading. Afterwards, in the hour or so he has to spare before heading to the airport, they wander trough a sunlit and impossibly romantic Paris, talking. Both wer obviously deeply affected by their earlier encounter, and now, given a second chance, they both have to decide what to do next.
Paris, the Gare du Nord, anything can come along, even trains. We’d like to stay but we have to hurry on.
Like the thousands of lives that intersect at the station, Ismaél, Mathilde, Sacha and Joan are going to meet there. Ismaél sees Mathilde for the first time on a suburban train platform. They gradually fall in love. They meet Sacha and Joan. Sacha is looking for his missing daughter while Joan spends her life in the station between Lille, London and Paris. The station is a world apart, frequented by everyone: the French, immigrants, emigrants, travellers, and ghosts. It’s an intersection where each life passes quickly and vanishes.
The young Canadian Xavier Dolan returns after his impressive debut “I Killed my Mother” (IndieLisboa 2010). A popish looking love triangle between two best friends, Francis (the director himself) and Marie, that both fall madly in love with Nico, a curly
In his first documentary since “Grizzly Man”, Werner Herzog, accompanied only by his cameraman, traveled to Antarctica, with rare access to the raw beauty and raw humanity of the ultimate Down Under. Herzog’s latest meditation on nature, explores this land of Fire, Ice and corrosive Solitude.
First heartbeat, first slow dance, first kisses, first scares and one of the most important moments in a girl’s life, the moment you became a woman. Albertine -the alter ego of the director herself – is having a flashback during a train ride and goes back to being 11. On the train with her parents, she visits her grandmother in her country house for vacation celebrating her 67th birthday. The year is 1979, the year Apocalypse Now and The Tin Drum were out on cinemas. A more mature Delpy returns to a human and more common territory than her previous film The Countess. Playful and nostalgic, Skylab is a big family canvas given by the eyes of an exceptionally smart girl. (Nina Veligradi)
