Interdependence
Composed by eleven short-movies. Started in 2018, the project explore in a sensible and creative way the position of humankind and nature. The key stories illustrated by the eleven internationally recognized filmmakers reflect the intertwined relations between human society and natural environment that are aggravated by climate change on multiple dimensions and scales, hinting at possible solutions.
Silvio Soldini
Daniela Thomas
Bettina Oberli
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Faouzi Bensaïdi
Nila Madhab Panda
Asa Hjorleifsdottir
Salomé Lamas
Shahrbanoo Sadat
Leon Wang
Karin Williams
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Silvio Soldini
Olmo, eighty years old, looks out of the window of a building in the suburban area of a city. His eight-year-old grandson Giulio is reading him an article from the newspaper about melting glaciers, the greenhouse effect, methane and CO2... “What is C-O-2?” asks the child. “Do you remember the carbon dioxide we studied?” says Grandpa. “The one the trees breathe?” asks Giulio. The day after, they’re leaving for a short tour instead of going to school, searching for an old tree.
The œuvre of poet Raffaello Baldini (1924-2005) through the words of those who knew him, the poems he himself read, the fragments of his monologues, his beloved Romagna landscapes.
Anna is an accountant for an important insurance firm and lives with her longterm lover Alessio - a man who longs for a stable longterm relationship with children, home, etc. Anna, feeling as though the fire has fizzled in that relationship takes up with co-worker Domenico and the two begin a passionate affair.
For ten years, Tobias has worked in a clock factory and in the relentless sound of ticking, he sees life go by without much expectation. One day, Tobias sees Caroline, a former school pal from the East. His dreams seemingly become shattered as Caroline is married and has a daughter. A series of surprise events further obstructs their relationship, but Tobias perseveres. He has little to lose.
In this stunning omnibus feature, six Italian directors explore different facets of contemporary Milan, from subways to skyscrapers, shuttered old theaters to the inimitable La Scala. The result is a rich and eclectic portrait of urban life and spaces—both rooted in history and bursting with a diversity of architecture and humanity. In this stunning omnibus feature, six Italian directors explore different facets of contemporary Milan, from subways to skyscrapers, shuttered old theaters to the inimitable La Scala. The result is a rich and eclectic portrait of urban life and spaces—both rooted in history and bursting with a diversity of architecture and humanity.
A chemical analyst and a supermarket clerk strike up a friendship after they are brought together by the death of an elderly woman.
An endearing light comedy about a woman who spontaneously becomes a resident of Venice after her family left her begin. While enjoying the wonderful people she meets she achieves a new life and the first time independent of her family.
Also Directed by Daniela Thomas
In the periphery of São Paulo, the pregnant single mother Cleuza works as maid in the apartment of a middle-class family. Each of her sons has a different unknown father: the oldest, Dênis, has a baby son that lives with his mother and he works as motorcycle courier.
An elegant dinner, which takes place in real time, brings together a group of intellectuals in the early 90s in São Paulo, Brazil: the hosts are the editor of the country's top news magazine and her husband, the company's lawyer, and the occasion is the wedding anniversary of the magazine publisher and his wife, a famous theater actress. The publisher has written an open letter to the president of the country, with serious denunciations, which will run in the upcoming issue. He risks being arrested this very evening. As tensions increase with the imminence of prison, secrets come to light revealing the conflict between the ethics sought in public life and the ethics practiced in private life.
Brazil 1821. Upon his return to the imposing farmhouse, Antonio, a rich cattle herder, finds out that his wife dies in labor. Forced to live in the property with numerous African slaves, he marries his wife's niece. A restless soul, he returns to droving, leaving his young wife behind alone with the slaves.
In the Kalapalo cosmogony (an ethnic group that lives in the Xingú Indigenous Park), water is as old as humans and is the source of life. That is where all their sustenance comes from, their food, their drink, their joy. The idea of using water as a dumpster, of poisoning water is a dystopia. In this documentary Chief Faremá —from Caramujo village on the banks of the Kuluene River— tells us about the birth of water and warns us about the consequences of disrespecting it.
On December 31st 1999, destiny brings a fugitive prisoner and a depressed middle class teacher together, as the new millennium approaches bringing hope to everyone.
Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to chose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.
20 short films about human rights.
In an empty city, scorched by the sun, the young and old confuse the fever of sunstroke with the delicate birth of passion. Like ghosts, they hover around buildings and endless flatlands in search of the ever elusive love. Inspired by 19th century Russian short stories, the plots weave and unravel together in the improbable city of Brasilia – a distorted mirror-image of the Soviet utopia – located in the heart of the Brazilian desert.
After the death of his mother, a young Brazilian decides to leave his country and travel to her native land. In a foreign land, he finds love and danger.
Also Directed by Bettina Oberli
An isolated farm in a remote part of the Jura region: this is where Pauline and Alex are living in complete self-sufficient harmony with nature. Their life project is sealed by their love, their ideals and their work. The couple is now ready to take the step towards total independence, and start producing their own electricity. The arrival of Samuel, who comes to install a wind turbine, deeply troubles Pauline, upsetting their relationship and their values.
The Polish woman Wanda, 35, looks after Joseph, 70, in his family villa by the lake. She is there for him around the clock and also helps his wife Elsa, 75. The youngest son Gregi, 28, likes her very much. The work is poorly paid, but Wanda needs the money for her own family in Poland. Since everyone lives under one roof, Wanda gets an intimate view of their family life. So intimate that Wanda unexpectedly becomes pregnant.
Bavaria, Germany, 1950s. The sudden return of the young Kathrin to the small village where she was born stirs up the feelings of guilt and personal ghosts of its inhabitants, haunted by dark memories related to a multiple murder that happened two years earlier at the Tannöd farm, a hideous crime that remains unsolved…
André, 55, lives with his mother Louise, 80, and leads an unspectacular life. He works as a taxi driver while the elderly diva dreams of bygone days as an actress in Hollywood. One day the charismatic Bill, 50, an American, turns up on their doorstep - a stranger who will soon turn their quiet life upside down.
Centers around four older ladies from the Emmental region. When four older women decide to turn the local corner shop into a chic lingerie store, the whole community is thrown into disarray.
Also Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Moussa attempts to cross the desert to escape his debts, only to return to his village defeated and dejected.
Present-day Chad. Adam, fifty something, a former swimming champion, is the pool attendant at a N'Djamena hotel. When the hotel gets taken over by new Chinese owners, he is forced to give up his job to his son Abdel. Terribly resentful, he feels socially humiliated. The country is in the throes of a civil war. Rebel forces are attacking the government. Authorities demand that the population contribute to the war effort, giving money or volunteers old enough to fight off the rebels. The District Chief constantly harasses Adam for his contribution. But Adam is penniless; he only has his son.
In 2013, former Chadian dictator Hissein Habré’s arrest in Senegal marked the end of a long combat for the survivors of his regime. Accompanied by the Chairman of the Association of the Victims of the Hissein Habré Regime, Mahamat Saleh Haroun goes to meet those who survived this tragedy and who still bear the scars of the horror in their flesh and in their souls. Through their courage and determination, the victims accomplish an unprecedented feat in the history of Africa: that of bringing a Head of State to trial.
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun.
A 25 year old young man with dreams of becoming a dancer despite the fact that he's paralyzed from the waist down. His dreams are shattered when his uncle falls seriously ill. To save him, he decides to go work for petrol traffickers.
An African high school teacher flees his war-torn country for France, where he falls in love with a Frenchwoman who offers a roof for him and his family.
Also Directed by Faouzi Bensaïdi
Casablanca, a city of contrasts, modern and traditional. Kamel is a murderer for hire who receives his encrypted assignments online. After his executions, he usually calls Souad, an occasional prostitute. But the phone is always answered by her friend Kenza, traffic officer and responsible for the largest roundabout in the city. Kamel soon falls in love with that voice and begins to seek her. Meanwhile, Hicham, a computer hacker, who dreams of emigrating to Europe, is infiltrated by chance in Kamel plans ...
Under the impacts of a changing climate, the world changes, it has already changed. In a distant and near future, both fantastic and absurd, men and wo-men survive as they can. Following a man, a slender figure between Tati and Buster Keaton, we discover through scenes of his daily life how devastating the effects of climate change are on humans and nature. How do we barricade against excessive heat or cold? How will it be to go to a supermarket, or a zoo filled with different animals and species? A disturbing and hilarious ride in the future, that is already our present.
Football seen through the eyes of some of the best directors of the world.
Volubilis is a tale of love in a world of despair, of beauty among the ruins. In the Moroccan city of Meknès, recently married Abdelkader and Malika struggle to make ends meet. They dream of leaving the family house and finally starting a life of their own together. But one day at work, Abdelkader gets mixed up in a violent incident that will turn their lives upside down.
In Tetouan, at the northern edge of Morocco, three young men decide to rob a jewelry store. The heist goes awry, and their destinies part drastically.
1981, Morocco. A village in the Atlas mountains. A city in the distance. A child. A family facing its destiny.
Longtime friends, Mehdi and Hamid, work for a collection agency. They crisscross the villages of southern Morocco in their old car and share double rooms in shabby hotels. They are exactly the same size, and wear the same suits and ties, as well as the same shoes. Paid nearly nothing, they try to play hard to make good figures. One day, in a gas station planted in the middle of the desert, a motorcycle parks in front of them. A man is handcuffed to the luggage rack, threatening. It’s the Evader. Their meeting marks the beginning of an unforeseen and mystical journey.
The members of a debt-ridden family reunite in an evanescent Tangier, running away from painful memories but at the same time clinging to a past they do not want to forget. Their childhood home and its magnificent estate are due to be sold in early autumn; increasingly, summer days fade into distant memory.
Also Directed by Nila Madhab Panda
In a village affected by climate change and scanty rainfall, a blind farmer strikes a deal with the debt recovery agent to save his son from a debt trap.
Tomboy Shreya coaxes her widower father Dev to take her to their ancestral village in Haryana something he is not too keen about. Eventually she gets her way and along with her dad, her brother Sam and granny, she reaches her destination only to understand why her father had been putting off the trip for years.
Jatin, Harry and Rohan head to Manali for one last trip before Jatin gets married. In Manali, the group of friends meet Natasha and are set forward on a journey of rediscovery.
Halkaa is a story of a eight year old boy who lives in the slums of delhi and wants proper access to a toilet. This story is of a boy who is a real life Superhero who fights against the system to get what he wants and deserves.
It is almost like a silent film about a man and the sea. The film is based on the vanishing villages on the sea.
The film wryly expresses the changes in hierarchy, caste and the power equation when water, the most important resource, vanishes and how the oppressed become the oppressors.
The film celebrates the survival of the human spirit against overwhelming odds and highlights the need for underprivileged children's education. Its a film based on former indian president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and is aimed at inspiring the poor to educate their children. Written by DaGambit Chhotu's peasant village is ruined by drought, so his ma drops the boy with uncle Bhati, who runs a tea stand at the city outskirts. Clever Chottu, who calls himself Kalam after the self-made Indian president, soon outsmarts uncle's adult assistant and makes friends with the loneliest boy in the palace, now a hotel, a prince his age.
Also Directed by Asa Hjorleifsdottir
A story of love, madness, and 24-hour daylight. Solange's boyfriend Baldur mysteriously takes off for Iceland. She follows, but an even deeper mystery awaits her.
In a remote fjord in 1940's Iceland, young farmer Bjarni and aspiring poet Helga begin a passionate, forbidden affair, emotions running as wild as the ocean waves that surround them.
It’s a spring morning in Reykjavík. A man and a woman wake up in their bed and know that their relationship has ended. They take a drive out of the city, towards the end of love, perhaps toward the end of the world. A story of love, loss, and the mysterious power of nature herself.
Girl meets boy on a cold winter night. She's a single mom, and he becomes less charming than she thought he was after she invites him home. As things are getting out of hand, her young daughter wakes up, and roles become reversed as they deal together with the aftermath.
When young Sól is sent to live with her distant countryside relatives for a summer, she becomes entangled in a dramatic rite of passage with a mysterious farmhand, Jón, and the farmer’s daughter, Ásta.
Also Directed by Salomé Lamas
How can I lie that I’m asleep and be faster than my body? - “But it wasn’t so violent, was it?” She stayed in bed repeating that she was sleepy for 40 minutes.“I’ve wanted it to be almost like a mantra and to generate tension.” The embroidery draw maps the relation between a mother and a daughter. Time past and time present if all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable. “It was a school exercise, I would use what was close to me, what was domestic and you were part of it” Fourteen years have past. I take her images; I compel her to answer me. She is the mother. She is the daughter. She is my mother.
A woman finds herself, not sure how, in Beirut’s Hall of Fame after closing hours. Like Molly Bloom, and the more virtuous Penelope, this woman waits for her husband. She appears to have set a date with him. But he has not arrived. While she waits for her husband she interacts with the figures/statues in the Hall of Fame. She cleans the dust from their eyes, straightens out the baseball cap of another, she smooths out the cape of a third figure. She works so that they appear cleaner and better arranged. However, while she waits Hanan only makes an effort to improve the appearances of the figures that represent regional and world political leaders who are responsible for the chaos that ravages the Middle East. Despite Hanan’s effort, it will difficult for them to appear ‘clean.’
Capitalocene. From above, the abstract monumentality of the Niger Delta (Nigeria), redefined by human ambition into environmental catastrophe. Existential fable. Another no-man’s-land, where the blackness or the psychopathology of (Frantz) Fanon’s colonization (and other African philosophers) seems now like an empty sound, and scholar debates, that understand neocolonialism, echo distant and misfit. In the war for oil, we find the resentment of a region forgotten and cursed by its resources.
Three unusual paintings played by the director that literally tests her limits in this encounters with the landscape of São Miguel, in Azores. The power that emanates from the filmed landscape is as seductive as the risky shape of the encounter between image and sound. A limit-film for an inventive Portuguese artist.
The panoramic shots are breathtaking: a majestic mountain landscape in winter, flat-roofed tin shacks cowering next to one other, women perched on steep slopes using primitive tools to break through pieces of rock. La Rinconada is situated over 5,000 meters high in the Peruvian Andes, on the edge of a gold mine. This 21st century El Dorado is an inhospitable place, where untold numbers of people live and work in the most precarious of conditions, hoping both for gold and a better life. Salomé Lamas has constructed a cinematic diptych to convey the extremity of this situation and the dimensions of its misery without having to resort to graphic images.
For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?
‘None of the people who were asked about me had seen me.’ Le Boudin documents the encounter of the young Elias Geißler with the testimony of Nuno Fialho who at the age of 16 was forced to enlist in the French Foreign Legion. ‘I didn’t enlist. They enlisted me.’
A man, Francisco, works in an open-pit mine. He goes to see his boss about taking the following day off. At first the boss doesn’t want to allow it as there is so much to do, but he finally concedes. The next day his daughter calls on him, a visit he no longer counted on. They spend the day with one another. The longer they are together, and the later the night gets, the more absurd the situations and moments they experience become.
A Comunidade is a short documentary focused on CCL, the oldest camping park in Portugal.
Ubi Sunt. Porto. Cartography of an imaginary place attracted by the margins (social and geographical) Hybrid and eclectic project, it is the outcome of a audiovisual research residency of humam and urban exploration of an expanding city. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?". Reflective essay on mortality and life's transience, it emerges from that dialectic, of a and episodic and fragmented structure with a choreographed cinematography; where the memory intersects the contemporary.
Also Directed by Shahrbanoo Sadat
A little girl goes place to place for collecting people's votes.
It is dawn. Rural central Afghanistan, far away in a village. A young wo-man is milking a goat while her little boy is assisting her by holding the horns of the goat. There is a flock of goats and sheep waiting to be milked before the young shepherd takes them to the mountains to graze all day long. She cooks Quruti, one of the most popular meals in the entire Afghanistan but especially central Afghanistan. For some years people have been making less and less Quruti as they struggle to feed their animals because the mountain pastures have dried up. Climate change has affected rain patterns and soil fertility in the whole region.
In rural Afghanistan, people are storytellers who make up and tell each other tales of mystery and imagination to explain the world in which they live. The shepherd children own the mountains and, although no adults are around, they know the rules; they know that boys and girls are not allowed to be together. The boys practice with their slings to fight wolves. The girls smoke secretly and play at getting married, dreaming of finding a husband soon. They gossip about Sediqa; she’s eleven years old and an outsider. The girls think she is cursed. Qodrat, also eleven years old, becomes the subject of gossip when his mother remarries an old man with two wives. Qodrat roams alone in the most isolated parts of the mountains, where he meets Sediqa and they become friends.
In Kabul, a family with 4 girls is about to move to a new house. The father feels he lost the position as the head of the family, since the oldest Girl, Sakina, 22, is working and pays for all the costs. Communication between the family members is difficult. Sharifa, 20, helps in the house and is looking for a job, Kamila, 16, learns English and Zar, 10, takes care of her sick chicken. Everyone is trying in their own way. An 18 year old Girl from Afghanistan is new in an isolation refugee camp in Germany. She feels lonely and is trying her best to adjust and to understand the routine in the camp. One day, a man, 23, stitches his mouth and starts a hunger strike in the canteen. Worried about him and at the same time fascinated by this man who strongly sits there day and night, she starts to look after him.
A historic drama with musical Bollywood scenes. Kabul in the early 90s. Soviet values rule the country. Women can wear miniskirts, children can go to school and people can go to the cinema, concerts as well as universities. Life in Afghanistan is similar to life in the Western world. 14 years old Qodrat sells cinema tickets on the black market in the streets of Kabul. After selling a ticket to a secret police officer by mistake, he ends up at the Soviet orphanage, where he fakes his identity at the registration, in hope of getting more power. Everyday life for Qodrat is about friendships, falling in love, doing naughty things and going on adventures – just like it is for children in other parts of the world. However, behind the safe walls of the orphanage the world they once knew is drastically changing as the Mujahideens start the civil war.
Also Directed by Leon Wang
On an island not far from the mainland, the young father seagull is anxiously guarding the new born gulls by the nest and awaiting the return of the mother seagull. The mother seagull has given up everything she has, but the baby seagull is still hungry. The father seagull had flown away in search of more food...The main diet of black-tailed gulls is pelagic fish in the sea, molluscs and aquatic insects in coastal wetlands and estuaries. However, with the overfishing of offshore fish and the pollution of the marine environment, seagulls can catch fewer and fewer small fish in the upper layer.