The Bridges of Sarajevo
Thirteen European directors explore the theme of Sarajevo; what this city has represented in European history over the past hundred years, and what Sarajevo stands for today in Europe. These eminent filmmakers of different generations and origins offer exceptional singular styles and visions.
Jean-Luc Godard
Angela Schanelec
Ursula Meier
Cristi Puiu
Cristi Puiu
Isild Le Besco
Sergey Loznitsa
Teresa Villaverde
Teresa Villaverde
Marc Recha
Kamen Kalev
Vincenzo Marra
Vladimir Perišić
Aida Begić
Leonardo Di Costanzo
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard addresses two filmic letters to young Israeli soldiers who were sentenced after refusing to intervene in the occupied territories.
TV commercial (commissioned by Swiss tobacco company F.J. Burrus S.A.) for Parisienne cigarettes.
Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.
The title of this twenty-minute video by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, “Freedom and Fatherland,” is the official slogan of the Canton de Vaud, in Switzerland, where the filmmakers live and grew up. To fulfill their commission from a Swiss cultural festival, they adapted a great Swiss novel, “Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud,” by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, from 1911 (about a local artist who goes to Paris for his education and then returns home) and extruded its autobiographical analogies to Godard’s own life and work. Using a choice set of clips from Godard’s films to coincide with events from the painter’s life, verbal references to modern times and to Godard’s own—Sartre, the late nineteen-sixties, the cinema—and images of the Swiss terrain, which plays a decisive role in the work of Pache, Godard, and Miéville (an important filmmaker in her own right), they produce the effect of mirrors within mirrors.
Jean-Luc Godard's poetic meditation on war, violence and defeat. The film is structured in three parts. The three segments are "Hell", "Purgatory", and "Heaven". The first segment is a montage of war images from documentary and fictional sources. The second concerns two young Jewish women attending a European arts conference in Sarajevo. The final segment concerns the after life.
For Ever Mozart is an episodic film that follows a theater troupe from France attempting to put on a play in Sarajevo. Along their journey they are captured and held in a POW camp, and they call for help from their friends and relations in France. Director Jean-Luc Godard presents stories about this troop to ask how one can make art while slaughters like the one in Bosnia are taking place, and he throws in a strong critique of the European Union. For Ever Mozart is one of Godard's most disjointed and difficult films. Its stories sometimes seem to form a whole and at other times the links among them are unclear. One gets the impression that in each episode Godard attempts to start a film only to come to the conclusion that it is impossible to continue. It features some of the most beautiful shots of tanks in the cinema.
A reworking of extracts from Andre Malraux, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, and GK Chesterton.
Nothing but silence. Nothing but a revolutionary song. A story in five chapters like the five fingers of a hand.
Jean-Luc Godard, and Anne-Marie Miéville Four Short Films
The official spot of 22nd Jihlava international documentary film festival, directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Also Directed by Angela Schanelec
Amidst the impersonal hubbub of Paris' Orly Airport, strangers meet, secrets are revealed, and sudden intimacies develop in this beautifully observed mosaic of lives in transit.
Mimmi is a very lonely girl not knowing what to do with her life. On the search for friends and boy-friends she strays lonely in different cities. Also Paris seems to be a place where nobody is interested in her..
Prompted by a seminar given by acclaimed German filmmaker Peter Nestler, Prague, March '92 combines 16mm footage shot over the course of a week in the title city with excerpts from Bohumil Hrabal's essay "The Magic Flute," which considers the 20th anniversary demonstrations in Prague to commemorate the death of Jan Palach, who immolated himself in January 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion.
Thirteen German directors present short films exploring the state of their country.
Sophie, a young photographer, exchanges her apartment with a student from Marseille. It is February and Marseille seems harsh and closed in the bright sun. Sophie dives into the city, she is alone, she takes photographs. In an auto-repair garage, she asks a young mechanic, Pierre, if he can get her a car. Two days later they meet again and spend the evening in a bar, captivated by the lightness of not knowing anything about each other. Sophie is happy. When she returns to Berlin, she is immediately immersed again in her former life. Her love for Ivan, the husband of her best friend Hanna, remains undeclared and the relationship between Hanna and Ivan seems to dominate. Sophie remains on the outside, yearns to leave, and decides to travel to Marseille for a second time.
Nadine is obsessed by a memory linked to a haunting tune she can no longer sing, until she hears someone else singing and everything falls back into place again. A melancholic observation of two young couples having difficulties trusting one another. They are full of skepticism and searching for a purpose in life.
A family spends three summer days in a beautiful lake mansion close to Berlin. Together with her new lover, Irene visits her brother Alex, who still inhabits the house with Irene's writer son Konstantin. Konstantin's girl-friend pops in, too, and all of them drift away from each other more and more. Based on Chekhov’s The Seagull
A story told in the off about the growing discomfort towards the new roommate Valentin. The camera pans through the empty room, over the shadows on the wall and the wallpaper, the yellow scarf and the postcard from Italy with the sunflowers
Short interaction in a bar.
Theres and Kenneth are both young when they first meet whilst on holiday. They fall in love but are unable to prevent themselves from losing each other. Thirty years later, in another country, another couple: Ariane leaves her husband David because she no longer loves him. The paths they both take lead them to Kenneth and Theres.
Also Directed by Ursula Meier
It’s training time at the Zetra stadium in Sarajevo. Ten-year-old Mujo misses his penalty kick. The ball flies over the goal and disappears among the tombstones of the graveyard that replaced the sports grounds during the war. “Go search among the Christians!” some of his playmates yell. “Seek among the Muslims!” others snicker. Searching for the ball, Mujo wanders in the kingdom of the dead.
A drama set at a Swiss ski resort and centered on a boy who supports his sister by stealing from wealthy guests.
On February 27, 2009, pupil Benjamin Feller commits a crime which he has meticulously described beforehand in a diary entry. He goes to the post office to send the diary entry to his teacher before he shoots his parents and turns himself in to the police. His teacher Esther Fontanel tries to understand the events in retrospect. But as the journal’s addressee, she is increasingly targeted by the police herself.
A group of friends get together for a birthday dinner. It's the end of the meal and the atmosphere's high: people are singing, drinking, hugging each other, telling jokes. Then someone asks a riddle: "In the Amazon, three ants are walking on a tree stump…". The evening will soon change tune.
After violently attacking her mother Christina during an argument, Margaret is arrested by the police and ordered not to go within 200 metres of the family home. “Locked out”, Margaret will never stop trying to make amends for her actions and this imaginary line will crystallize all the tensions in this dysfunctional family.
A body is growing and developing in front of the camera, absorbing sensations and emotions, confronting its limits and its darker hidden parts. A body that through the years abandons itself to the character, transforming what could be seen as simple (children's) play-acting into the true work of an actor.
Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) and Michel (Olivier Gourmet) live with their three children in a remote house next to an abandoned highway using it as an extension to their property. One day without warning, construction workers begin to upgrade the road and the highway becomes open to traffic. Their lives are forever changed.
A brother is reunited with his sister in their old family home after years of separation. In the still of the night, images and sounds from their childhood come rushing back, reminding them of a father who, although often austere, did on occasion seem to enter into the spirit of things.
A young woman obsessively trains to be a track-and-field star.
Also Directed by Cristi Puiu
Back from a professional trip to Paris, a neurologist at the pinnacle of his career has to pick up his wife so that they can attend a family meal to commemorate his father, who died a year before. At his mother's flat, the guests are waiting for the priest to arrive while arguing about all kinds of things connected and unconnected with the world’s events and wars.
The father, fired two years before retirement, wants to get rehired, requiring the support of his son. The action takes place in a restaurant in Bucharest.
A period piece set in 1900 and focuses on the concepts of economic materialism, Tolstoian abstract moralism, and Nietzschean hubris.
An apartment kitchen: a man and a woman discuss Little Red Riding Hood, their voices hushed, mindful of waking the little girl sleeping next room. Waste land on the city outskirts: behind a line of abandoned trailers, the man silently watches what seems to be a family. The same city, the same man: driving through traffic with two hand-made firing pins for a hunting rifle. The man is 42 years old, his name - Viorel. Troubled by obscure thoughts, he drives across the city to a destination known only to him.
In the Romanian town of Craiova, five hundred elderly people are passing their days in a home, for which they pay with their paltry pensions. Every day looks the same, every activity is predictable. Even the people‘s complaints are part of the daily routine. One of the residents hopes in vain that a lottery ticket will bring him refuge. For six days, filmmakers Andreea Paduraru and Cristi Puiu try to get through to these people, who are carrying their whole past on their backs. To the question what the best days of their lives was, nobody can or wants to give an answer. Nearly everyone immediately starts about the day-to-day worries and problems in the home. Finally, one woman tells about her activities as head of the research department of the government of Ceausescu, with whom she once had an argument. Another resident recalls his time as a soldier in World War II and proceeds to the order of the day.
Mr. Lazarescu is a retired Romanian engineer, spending his time in the company of his cats and booze. When he starts feeling unusually ill, he first seeks painkillers from his neighbors. It soon becomes apparent that Lazarescu is indeed sick, and an ambulance arrives with a nurse who has a few ideas about what could be the problem. However, a major traffic accident and poor organization leaves little room in Romanian hospitals for the fading Lazarescu.
On the night of 5th to 6th of May 1950, DGSP, the political police of the communist regime, which was recently installed with the help of the Red Army, arrested in Bucharest 69 former politicians, generals, secretaries of state, ministers and prime ministers, in an operation later called »The Night of the Dignitaries«. Due to the specificity of the NKVD modus operandi, the former officials arrested that night didn’t receive any kind of information regarding the reason of their arrest. Moreover, in the next days they were sent directly to Sighetu Marmatiei prison, without a trial.
A young man from Constanța who has his own business aims to expand, but he doesn't have the resources.
Three films based on Three Conversations by Russian writer and philosopher Vladimir Solovyov.The actors' 'exercises' develop into a minimalistic trilogy on cinema and literature, social and spiritual life, acting in film and in real life.
Oana Pfifer, a young therapist visibly distracted by some unknown reasons, is slipping little by little inside the net of the questionnaire she is supposed to submit to her patient. Mihai Dumitru, Oana’s younger brother, worrying about the preparations of his anniversary and not realizing how inappropriate his demands are, is stuck in a story far bigger than what he can handle. Septimiu Pfifer, Oana’s husband, concerned about his health regarding a possible Covid-19 contamination, is vaguely listening to a strange story his ambulance colleague was caught inside long ago, while waiting for the next emergency call. Narcis Patranescu, an organized crime inspector, perturbed by the recent death of one of his colleagues, is on the grip of an unsettling dark story while interrogating a young woman during a funeral. Four short moments in time that are capturing the wanderings of a bunch of errant souls stuck at the crossroads of history.
Also Directed by Isild Le Besco
A fun fair, on a wasteland, on the outskirts of a small provincial town in the south of France.
A famous retired opera singer reunites with her children.
On the outskirts of civilisation, three young women, Magalie, Marie-Steph and Barbara live a desperate life together. Drowning in alcohol, they both lust for and hate one another, coupling like animals. Yet gradually they become enmeshed in a complex game of love and domination. Magalie, the ringleader, subjugates through her male power, and bestial charisma. Simple Marie-Steph, her younger sister, remains in the background, and Barbara, unaware of her own prettiness, has joined the pack because she loves Magalie. One day, at Magalie’s instigation, and almost out of boredom, they hold up a bakery and kill the baker with a buckshot gun. Life gradually resumes, but nothing is the same.
No overview found.
Six stories, six films that follow on from each other; this is a glance at the childhood of renowned directors whose style has marked the history of film. A group of young directors focus their cameras on the story of these filmmakers, these childhood stories that sometimes shape an entire life and thus shed light on their cinematic works. The stories overlap to merge into one film about childhood, filled with emotional wounds, frustrations and encounters.
Demi-Tarif follows the low-key adventures of three young siblings, Romeo, Launa, and the youngest - Leo, left on their own in a rundown Paris apartment. One of them narrates, wistfully explaining how their mother abandoned them and calls them once in a while to see how they are doing or tell them she loves them. The three kids do as they please, roaming the streets, running out of restaurants without paying for food, and shoplifting from the local grocery store. They eat whatever and whenever they want, gorging themselves on sweets. They beg for change on the Metro and show up late for school in tattered, dirty clothes. All the while, they try to keep the fact that they are alone a secret from the world of adults.
Also Directed by Sergey Loznitsa
A remote village in the Northwest of Russia. A mental asylum is located in an old wooden house. The place and its inhabitants seem to be untouched by civilization. In this pristine setting, no articulate human voice is heard, and pain is muted. The landscapes and buildings are not so much inhabited as lightly entwined and then passed through by their anonymous residents, like some creeping mist. Phantoms half stuck, half undone in a phantom world—lost persons from a lost society?
In August 1991 a failed coup d'état attempt (known as Putsch) led by a group of hard-core communists in Moscow, ended the 70-year-long rule of the Soviets. The USSR collapsed soon after, and the tricolour of the sovereign Russian Federation flew over Kremlin. As president Gorbachev was detained by the coup leaders, state-run TV and radio channels, usurped by the putschists, broadcast Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" instead of news bulletins, and crowds of protestors gathered around Moscow's White House, preparing to defend the stronghold of democratic opposition led by Boris Yeltsin, in the city of Leningrad thousands of confused, scared, excited and desperate people poured into the streets to become a part of the event, which was supposed to change their destiny. A quarter of a century later, Sergei Loznitsa revisits the dramatic moments of August 1991 and casts an eye on the event which was hailed worldwide as the birth of "Russian democracy".
In the middle of June the village of Santo Antonio de Mixoes da Serra in the Valdreu region of Northern Portugal honours its Patron Saint with a very special festival. On this day the local farmers bring their animals to the church – cows, horses, dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits – to be blessed. This ancient tradition is passed from generation to generation, and today, just as hundreds of years ago, animals and people flock up the mountain roads to the church square to become a part of the religious festival. The film is about this miracle.
In 1930 in Moscow, USSR. the Soviet government puts a group of top rank economists and engineers on trial, accusing them of plotting a coup d'état. The charges are fabricated and the punishment, if convicted, is death.
A woman lives in a small village in Russia. One day she receives the parcel she sent to her husband, serving a sentence in prison. Confused and angered, she sets out to find why her package was returned to sender.
This film about the Baltic nation of Lithuania from 1989 to 1991, when it broke away from the Soviet Union. This period of peaceful protests involving lots of singing came to be known as the "singing revolution."
As he did with his critically-acclaimed "Blockade," a documentary re-creation of the WWII siege of Leningrad, which received its NY theatrical premiere in March 2007, filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa has once again scoured the Russian film archives for "Revue," selecting excerpts from newsreels, propaganda films, TV shows and feature films that present an evocative portrait of Soviet life during the 1950s and 1960s. With scenes taken from the length and breadth of the “Soviet Motherland,” "Revue" illustrates industry and agriculture, political life, popular culture, and technology. The film’s fascinating flow of disparate scenes representing typical Soviet life of the period is, seen from today’s perspective, alternately poignant, funny, and tragic
This movie is a collection of portraits of residents of Russian countryside. Not a single word. Only long look into the camera. Landscape. Flow of time.
The new film from Sergei Loznitsa (Maidan, The Event) is a stark yet rich and complex portrait of tourists visiting the grounds of former Nazi extermination camps, and a sometimes sardonic study of the relationship (or the clash) between contemporary culture and the sanctity of the site.
A routine run for a truck driver turns into a nightmare he can’t escape in this psychological drama from filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa. Georgy (Viktor Nemets) is driving a load of freight into Russia when, after an unpleasant encounter with the police at a border crossing, he finds himself giving a lift to a strange old man (Vladimir Golovin) with disturbing stories about his younger days in the Army. After next picking up a young woman (Olga Shuvalova) who works as a prostitute and is wary of the territory, Georgy finds himself lost, and despite asking some homeless men for help, he’s less sure than he was before of how to make his way back where he belongs. As brutal images of violence and alienation cross the screen, Georgy’s odyssey becomes darker and more desperate until it reaches an unexpected conclusion.
Also Directed by Teresa Villaverde
The story of a child who faces the emptiness that surrounds the figure of his parents, disappeared in Africa.
Part of the collective film Visions of Europe that celebrates the creation of European Union.
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Several images follow one another to the work of António Pinho Vargas, Six Portraits of Pain, played in full.
This dark and intense drama follows the slow and painful destruction of a young, passive woman as she watches her family fall apart. Maria is the shy and dutiful daughter upon whose shoulders the family traumas have fallen. In addition to a regular job she cooks, cleans, and studies. Her parents offer no assistance as her father is blind, with a tendency towards violence when drinking. His wife, the focus of his violence is terribly unhappy. After a particularly brutal beating, Maria's brothers rise up against the father and end up leaving the home. It is up to Maria to try to bring the factions together. Maria's pressures increase after she calmly stabs her boss during an attempted rape, and then copes with her mother's suicide.
In Rio de Janeiro, people from the Mangueira neighbourhood follow the television broadcast on a big screen as the juries vote on each samba school. In 2019, Mangueira took to the Sambadrome a strong, bold samba of resistance to what’s taking place in Brazil right now. The film witnesses the tension while waiting for the final score, and the great joy of people from every generation when Mangueira wins and becomes champion of the 2019 Carnival.
Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.
Vera is a singer in her thirties; she is back in Lisbon for the final performance of her concert tour. The heat and beauty of Lisbon makes one want to be happy. Pablo, the companion she selected from among the many who answered her questionnaire, helps her through the sleepless nights. He has no family, but wishes he had. Vera concerns herself with the mysteries surrounding Pablo's life. Vera is not afraid of the night; she is not afraid of anything.
Three homeless teenage rejects struggle to survive together. Of them, Andreia is pregnant, while Pedro and Ricardo hustle, steal and are exploited by a pornographer.
Also Directed by Marc Recha
The life in a Catalan (Southern France) village near the border may be quite boring. A young man who is escaping from his homeland is seeking for something and may find it in this weird place. You see the relationship between the people in the village, their dreams, their past and their perspectives in life. The foreigner is hosted there and is messed in the deep whereabouts of these people and tries somehow to fit in.
In addition to an incipient fondness for greyhound racing, the young Arnau has two inseparable companions: a songbird and a fox. Both accompany him in his journey to adolescence, a difficult transition due to some hard circumstances: the mother of the boy is locked in prison, and he is forced to live with his uncles.
Confused after months of work searching for material to write about a time in history that a journalist had often spoken about, Marc calls his brother David and they set off on a short vacation. But Marc cannot switch off and David takes him further south, to a place where they have heard people come to from far a field in pursuit of a fish with cat-like whiskers. Without realizing, the two brothers travel into unknown countryside where many ups and downs befell their grandfather, and come across a series of drifting characters that submerge them in a lost paradise.
The story takes place between December 1994 and February 1995 in a small village near Valencia, Spain, where the lives of four people - a child, a thief and two doctors - intersect. At the same time, the great love of one woman's life suddenly crumbles and a young girl pays a high price for learning how to love.
A short film by Marc Recha
A death in the family brings a man back to his family and his hometown in this drama. After his brother Alex goes missing under hazy circumstances, Pau gets the bad news that Alex has died after a successful suicide attempt. Pau travels to the village in Spain's Pyrenees mountains where he was born to break the sad news to his mother Merce; hoping to spare her feelings at a difficult time, he tells her that Alex was killed in an auto accident. As Merce mourns the death of her son, she and Pau set out to find Alex's friends and acquaintances and tell them of his sad fate. In their travels, they encounter Sara, Alex's girlfriend, who planned to move away to the city with him; Emil, an engineer who will be putting a highway through the town; Marta, Emil's daughter; and Toni, one of Emil's co-workers. Circumstances bring Pau and Marta together again when Emil disappears, and Marta finds herself searching for her father.
Two little siblings live in the island of Menorca at the turn of XX century. Their parents are gone so they live in the countryside with their uncle, “Es Conco”, who takes care of them while he cultivates the farm in the raw nature. The kids play around learning all about the island in a kind of a magic mode- not only by the things you see but by the stories related to them and all the legends that grow around in the stunning environment. The past, the present and the future meet in one place where tales and real facts intermingle. One day, the children discover a ship on the bay, which is like an icon of a human wish- present while unattainable.
During the summer of 1957 a man called Juan de Dios goes through a convalescence in a country hotel. Following the prescriptions of the doctor, he must take complete rest, "not a single movement, not a single thught". Stretched on a hammock, Juan de Dios must resign to "sinking himself in the boredom, just like a castaway at sea". But suddenly he realizes that immobility is something impossible: Juan de Dios sees himself overwhelmed by a myriad of physical, sound, optical and olfactory sensations,which awaken his spirit. After three hours of this contemplation, he announces his departure in the next day. Back in Barcelona, Juan de Dios gives himself over to the sensationsof the city.
In a lonely spot near the sea, a boy flies a kite made by his father. It's windy and the kite has become entangled in the vegetation. The boy needs an adult to help him keep it flying. Together, lost in the middle of nature, they will launch into the narration of a tale with myriad episodes.
Also Directed by Kamen Kalev
Men, women, gathered in a room, standing, petrified, staring… Incapable of moving, blocked from something powerful, something dreadful! Would it ever set them free & for how long?!
We follow the life of a man at eight, eighteen and eighty-two years old: in his village, outside the village, in the heat of the sun and the icy snow. The course of his monotonous life seems to be written in advance and meaningless. And yet an invisible force exists in him and in a mysterious way pushes him forward, towards death.
Two estranged brothers are brought together when they have opposite roles in a racist beating: while Georgi who's recently joined a neo-nazi group participates in the violence, Hristo witnesses and rescues a Turkish family. Georgi, now being asked to participate in larger events, starts to question his implication in the movement and Hristo wonders if the beautiful Turkish girl he saved could be his ticket out of his sad life in Sofia. Only by reuniting will the two brothers be able to assess what they really want from life.
Samy is a Frenchman accused of smuggling counterfeit money from Bulgaria to France. To avoid jail, he becomes an informer for the French police, joining under cover a Bulgarian channel for human trafficking. Gradually, he falls in love with Elka, an underage gypsy prostitute. Torn by the pressure from all sides, he almost turns into an unscrupulous pimp. His feelings for the girl will help him keep the last thing he has – his dignity.
In Paris, Sophie and Daneel make a solid couple. Nothing, it seems, can separate them - until the day when Sophie tells her partner she has organised a surprise trip to Bulgaria. Daneel refuses to go, but Sophie insists and soon discovers just why her soul mate was so reluctant to set foot in the country...
Also Directed by Vincenzo Marra
A civil servant (Michele Lastella) uses shady methods to become a powerful businessman.
Tough, gripping drama about a committed, principled priest taking on the Mafia and risking his life in a poverty-stricken parish in Naples.
Acclaimed documentarist Vincenzo Marra's work This Session Is Open constitutes an exercise in cinema direct filmmaking at its purest. Sans narration or any discernible viewpoint, the picture remains stringently objective in its inside portrayal of an Italian courtroom, during the assassination trial of a mafia unit called the 'Neapolitan Camorra.'
Life of an apartment block administrator in Naples.
Four Neapolitan and a Tunisian fishermen risk their lives by fishing in waters not far from Sicily. Before long, the camorra learns of their actions, and their licenses to fish the local waters are revoked. With nowhere to turn, they head back to North African waters, but the behavior of one member of the crew starts to endanger the others on board. The partially improvised dialogue by the cast of mostly untrained actors is delivered in the local Neapolitan dialect, which lends great authenticity to the story.
Vento Di Terra (wind of the earth) is an Italian film about an 18 year old boy (Vicenzo Pacilli) from a poor suburb of Napoli, Italy who finds himself burdened by expectations of supporting his mother after his father dies from an unexpected heart attack. Working in a blue-collar factory job, Vince soon finds that he does not have enough money to support himself, let alone his frail recently widowed mother. His sister departs to Cassano to finally end her employment drought by getting a job in the local FIAT factory. Vince is left alone to support his mother. He gets involved in a heist, and then out of guilt confesses his sin to a close family friend, who suggests he joins the Italian army. In the army Vince meets a new found friend through his training period, and they are soon deployed together to the war torn state of Kosovo in the Former Yugoslavia, where he is exposed to the brutality of war.
Marco, a cynical and ambitious young lawyer, lives in Bari with his partner Martina and their eight-year-old son Mateo. Martina had left Chile and moved to Italy when she met Marco. Their relationship has run its course, however, and Martina longs to go back to her country with Mateo, but Marco, the loving father left out of the equation, is adamantly against the idea. The couple clash for weeks on end, until Martina abruptly leaves the country with their son, goes back to Chile and virtually vanishes. With no news of Mateo, time seems to stand still for Marco. Anguished and unable to cope, he finally rallies and sets off in search of his son.
Also Directed by Vladimir Perišić
The story of a soldier faced with mission of executing prisoners in an unspecified place and time. The film follows a hot summer day in the life of Džoni, a twenty-year-old recruit, who is sent to an abandoned farm on an unknown mission. The soldiers wait to battle unnamed terrorists, but instead, a bus full of prisoners arrives to the barracks. The commander orders the soldiers to execute the prisoners. At first, Džoni is shocked by the cruel killings, but as more prisoners arrive, he begins to enjoy the executions.
Belgrade, 1996. During the student demonstrations against the Milosevic regime, 15-year-old Stefan leads his own revolution in the heat of events: accepting the unacceptable, seeing his mother as an accomplice in the crime and finding, despite the love he he feels for her, the strength to confront her.
Also Directed by Aida Begić
A microcosm of the fathomless suffering that remains more than 16 years since the siege of Sarajevo ended, writer-director Aida Begic’s follow-up to her 2008 Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize-winning debut Snow tells the story of two orphaned siblings struggling in a transitional society where only the fittest survive.
Dado Bratovic is comic-strip artist from Sarajevo. In 1996, after the war, he goes to get his ID card issued and finds out that he was reported dead just after the war started in 1992. Now he has to prove that he is alive.
Selma, an eighteen years old girl is murdered during a football game. Her dead body is being past form hand to hand. Everyone who cames in touch with her dead body thinks that he/she murdered Selma. In the meanwhile, at home, Selma’s Mother is finishing her Prom Dress…
This is a story about pain, search for meaning in life and friendship of orphaned. Syrian boys - Isa, Ahmed and Muataz - who live a difficult life as refugees in the magical, mythical Turkish city of Sanliurfa. In their search for recovery from traumatic past, the children will cross the path from destructiveness and hostility to meaningfulness and love. By finding friends in each other, the boys will find their inner peace.
Merjem-Meri, an unambitious, 30-year-old homemaker and mother to 8-year-old girl Mila, moves back to her parental home after 10 years of marriage. Soon after, Meri realizes she is stuck in a circle of provincial rules and expectations and a complex relationship with her ambitious mother and spoiled younger brother. Her hope to get the custody of her daughter wanes from day to day because she has no chance of finding a permanent job. The only thing that makes her happy, but also makes everyone else look down on her, is participation in an audition for a film role in her neighborhood.
The daily hardships of a war-scarred Bosnian village, where all that remains are widows and orphans, are painstakingly documented in this first feature from director Aida Begic. Snow offers insight about the psychological aftereffects of the 1992-95 civil war from a distinctively female point of view without showing any of the brutality or carnage.
Also Directed by Leonardo Di Costanzo
Naples. Present day. Giovanna, a combative 60-year-old social worker on the frontline of the daily war against pervasive criminality, is confronted, like a modern Antigone, with a moral dilemma that threatens to destroy her work and her life. Giovanna runs an after-school centre that takes care of underprivileged children; a grassroots alternative to the mafia dominance of the city. But one day, young Maria, wife of a ruthless Camorra criminal on the run, and her two children take refuge at the centre, and ask Giovanna for protection.
A boy and a girl are locked in an enormous abandoned building in a rundown area. She is a prisoner and the local clan leader has forced him to be her warder. Despite their youth, both of them have grown up too fast. Veronica acts like a mature and open-minded woman whilst Salvatore is like a man who wants to hold on to his job and lead a quiet life. Thus, when faced with the violence of this incarceration, the two young people have different reactions: Veronica is restless and rebellious; Salvatore is more remissive and accommodating, either out of fear or realism. They are both victims but it is almost as though each blames the other for their reclusion. However, as the hours go by, their mutual hostility is transformed into an inevitable intimacy, consisting of reciprocal discoveries and confessions. Between the walls of that isolated and frightening place, Veronica and Salvatore fi nd a way to rekindle those adolescent dreams and ideas put aside too soon.
The story of the crew of the Odessa, a Ukrainian ship blocked in Italy because of the bankrupcy of its owners. For several years now they are stuck without a salary in a foreign land, taking care of the ship while it waits for a buyer.
The film to show a school in Naples, in an area where schooling is given no value, as is perhaps, the case in problem areas in other large Western cities.