East of Noon

Netherlands, Egypt. Cannes Director’s Fortnight 2024

Hala Elkoussy

Synopsis

Set in a confined world outside time, East of Noon is the fable of prodigy ABDO (19) who uses music to rebel against his elders: showman SHAWKY (70), an eccentric showman who rules with a mix of performance and fear, and storyteller JALALA (75), who provides relief with stories of the Sea, which no one else has seen. East of Noon is a satire on the inner workings of an ailing autocracy and its inherent vulnerability to youth’s unchained vision of a better world. Continuer la lecture →

A Fireland

France, Cannes ACID selection 2024

Mona Convert

Synopsis

In the Landes forest, a family passes down the secrets of fire from generation to generation. Under the eyes of animals, the days and the nights succeed one another. The father, Patrick, eats grass. The daughter, Margot, explodes. The child, Jean, codes firefly arrangements. Continuer la lecture →

Far West

Switzerland, Nyon Visions du Reel Competition 2024

Pierre François Sauter

Synopsis

Angela and Jay survive by fishing for food on the wave-beaten volcanic rocks. Their life as a couple is under stress and their existence is precarious. In their fishing village, which is being transformed into a touristic spot, they rub shoulders with Big Game Fishing enthusiasts who pay fortunes to enjoy themselves and prepare for the Blue Marlin World Cup by hunting the “cheetah of the seas”. 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →