Agra

India, Cannes Director’s Fortnight 2023

Kanu Behl

Synopsis

Guru, a young man in his twenties, works in a call center in Agra. In love with Mala, a work colleague, he stills lives with his parents, whose house is divided in two parts. Guru lives on the ground floor with his mother while his father is upstairs with his mistress. when Guru announces that he wants to marry Mala, and make the terrace of the house his future bedroom, nothing goes as planned. Frustrations, faults and family hatreds come to light, symptoms of an Indian patriarchal society with many taboos. Continuer la lecture

Geographies of Solitude

Canada, Berlinale Forum 2022 -Ecumenical Award, Arthouse Cinema Award, Caligari Film Prize-, Jeonju Grand Prize, Hot Docs Best Film & Best Emerging Director, Las Palmas Best Film

Documentary by Jacquelyn Mills

Synopsis

Geographies of Solitude is an immersion into the rich landscapes of Sable Island and the life of Zoe Lucas, a naturalist and environmentalist who has lived over 40 years on this remote strip of land. Continuer la lecture

Grace

Russia, Cannes Director’s Fortnight 2023

Ilya Povolotsky

Synopsis

An old camper van passes through obscure Russian province, carrying a teen girl, her father and a rusty film projector. They’ve been on the road for long, drifting among the eerie picturesque “nowhere’s”. She’s used to his melancholy and random women. He bears with her whims. But everything changes on the way up North, when their world packed in the tight space of the car along with hopes, hurts, fears, and unburied past — eventually explodes. Continuer la lecture

La Bonga

Colombia, Paris Cinema du Reel, NY MoMA Doc Fortnight, True False 2023

Sebastian Pinzon Silva & Canela Reyes

Synopsis

Two decades after a death threat from right-wing paramilitaries caused the maroon community of La Bonga to flee, the townspeople embark on a symbolic journey through the jungles of the Colombian Caribbean to resurrect a home that exists only in their memories.  Continuer la lecture

Le Spectre de Boko Haram

Cameroon, Rotterdam Tiger award 2023, FESPACO Paul Robeson award

Cyrielle Raingou

Synopsis

A group of children forge their own world amid the dangers of armed conflict. We meet Falta, studious and hardworking, who is struggling to come to terms with the death of her father in a terrorist attack. Her classmate, Ibrahim, and older brother, Mohamad, struggle to balance their childlike energy with a traumatic past that takes them away from the innocence of their eight and eleven years. Continuer la lecture

Mixtape La Pampa

Argentina, San Sebastian Zabaltegi 2023

Andres di Tella

Synopsis

This is the cinematographic diary of an extended trip through the Pampas, on the trail of Guillermo Enrique Hudson, aka William Henry Hudson. Hudson is an enigmatic figure, full of contradictions: he was an Argentine gaucho who became an English writer. He fought in the army against the “savages” but also defended them. He wrote obsessively about his native land, but never returned. In the twists and turns of the road, a combination emerges of documentary speculation, personal memory… and dreams.

Continuer la lecture

Monisme

Indonesia, FID Marseille competition 2023, best film at Bucarest Experimental 

Riar Rizaldi

Synopsis

Several professional actors and non-actor professionals portray a dynamic of human-nature relationship in one of the most active stratovolcano in the world, Mount Merapi. In the shadows of recent eruptions, these actors play a story that is written together with volcanologist, sand miner, and a mystic—people who have a close bond with the mountain, potentially illustrating fiction and nonfiction situations that could and would have happened in Merapi. Continuer la lecture

sr

Germany, Rotterdam Tiger Competition 2024

Lea Hartlaub

Synopsis

Recorded in the first dictionary of the Egyptian language is the hieroglyph of the giraffe: sr. In Lea Hartlaub’s film sr the animal emerges as a recurring motif, appearing sometimes directly, sometimes on the margins, across 16 fragmentary episodes that depict a panorama of human activity. Continuer la lecture

The Day is Long and Dark

Mexico, Malaga 2024

Julio Hernandez Cordon

Synopsis

Vera, a teenage girl that cannot control her thirst for blood, lives in depression. With the help of Cruz, her father, she tries to calm her deadly instincts. This movie portrays the fragility of the emotional bond between a father dealing with a daughter who doesn’t want to live and is afraid to attack her mother and the boy she likes. Continuer la lecture

The Soldier’s Lagoon

Colombia, Paris Cinema du Reel 2024

Pablo Alvarez Mesa

Synopsis

200 years after Simón Bolívar’s liberation campaign across Colombia, La Laguna del Soldado retraces The Liberator’s journey across the high-altitude marshlands while searching for glimpses of his ghost still present in this historically contested territory. Reflecting on the construction of historical narratives and their environmental repercussions, La Laguna del Soldado traverses the páramo, a living and elusive archive, navigating through the dense fog suspended between Simon Bolivar’s past and Colombia’s present. Continuer la lecture

The Song of the Auricanturi

Colombia, Karlovy Vary Proxima competition 2023

Camila Rodriguez Triana

Synopsis

Rocío returns to her home town to reunite with her mother Alba, from whom she was separated as a child. The only thing from her mother that Rocío had kept is a cassette recording of her voice singing her a song in a language that they invented to communicate with each other. Alba has stopped talking as a reaction to trauma from the war that their territory endured. This forces Rocío to find other ways to communicate with her mother and tell her that she is pregnant. Continuer la lecture

Voyages en Italie

France, Rotterdam big screen competition 2023

Feature film by Sophie Letourneur

Synopsis

A French couple burnt out by the routine of their daily family life decides after much hesitation to travel to Sicily for a short holiday. Voyages en Italie depicts the neuroses and eccentricities of Jean-Philippe and Sophie, the gracious dynamics of their relationship and the depth of their affection and intimacy. Continuer la lecture