Iran 2017, Toronto Discovery FIPRESCI Award
First Feature Film by Sadaf Foroughi
Synopsis
Seventeen-year-old Iranian Ava challenges the strict rules of her traditional upbringing and learns that her mother broke the rules as a young woman as well.
Current slate
Balekempa (The Bangle Seller)
India 2018, Rotterdam Bright Future Competition- FIPRESCI Award
First feature film by Ere Gowda
Synopsis
A village bangle seller and his wife cannot conceive a child. The villagers gossip. In this close-knit patriarchal community in South India, hidden desires and relationships find a way to exist. Will the husband’s secret ever come out?
L’Amour Debout
France 2018, Cannes ACID selection
First Feature Film by Michaël Dacheux
Synopsis
Martin, in a last ditch hope, comes to meet Léa in Paris. They are both twenty-five and shared their first love story together. They are both now striving to mature.
La Cama
Argentina 2018, Berlin Forum
First feature film by Monica Lairana
Synopsis
Jorge (60) and Mabel (59) spend their last 24 hours together as a couple locked in their family home,. They eat, fuck, cry and laugh. They dismantle their house, just as they do their relationship.
Le Fort des Fous
France, 2017- Locarno Cineasti del Presente, Toronto, Rotterdam 2018
Narimane Mari
Synopsis
Departing from material records of the early colonial “scientific expeditions” and “taming campaigns” led by the French colonizers in North Africa, the story follows a community of young nomads and wanderers as they form an imagined utopian society in response to imperialist rule.
Our Madness
Mozambique 2018, Berlin Forum
Joao Viana
Synopsis
Ernania is hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in Mozambique. She dreams about her little son, Hanic, and her husband, Pak, who is a soldier of the war. In the meantime, a quirky musical intrument plays: her own bed. Ernania’s musical virtuosity, attracts the attention of the hospital nurses. One day, her song is played in a radio program and Rosa, an envangelical priest of “Rádio Moçambique”, goes to the hospital to listen to Ernania’s song. Ernania takes the priest’s visit as an opportunity to run away from the hospital.
Pillar of Salt (The)
Turkey 2018, Berlin Forum
First Feature Film by Burak Cevik
Synopsis
A reclusive woman in her thirties leads a life frozen in time in a cave-like room. In her rare trips to the city, she chats with an oarswoman haunted by the devils. She searches for her twin sister in unfrequented corners of the city. In this journey in which time and space are out of joint, a same dream is recounted time after time.
Room for a Man
Lebanon, 2017 Montreal RIDM – Grand Prize
First feature documentary by Anthony Chidiac
Synopsis
A young Lebanese filmmaker who shares a Beirut apartment with his mother and pet dog sets about reconstructing his identity by renovating his bedroom. But as the male construction workers come and go in the freshly embattled household, new questions, old arguments and unexpected passions get stirred…
Silent Mist
China 2017, Busan Window on Asian Cinema, Rotterdam 2018
Miaoyan Zhang
Synopsis
In the seemingly tranquil midst of a small canal town, a rapist lurks in the shadows of the night, searching for prey. A schoolgirl, a young woman and a young couple, al seem unable to cope with both the visible and the hidden dangers they all face from their morally corrupted compatriots.
Theatre of War
Argentina 2018, Berlin Forum- Ecumenical Prize & CICAE Art Cinema Award
First Feature Documentary by Lola Arias
Synopsis
This is an essay on how to represent war, performed by former enemies. British and Argentinian veterans of the Falklands/Malvinas war come together to discuss, rehearse and re-enact their memories 35 years after the conflict.
Walden
Switzerland 2018, Karlovy Vary Documentary competition- Special Jury Prize
First Feature Documentary by Daniel Zimmermann
Synopsis
In the forest of the Catholic Monastery of Admont in Austria a fir tree is felled and processed into planks of wood. By train, truck, boat and finally by hand, the stack is transported to a mysterious destination right in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest.