Àlex Brendemühl
Stories from the intimacy of a private space launched to the screen. How we are as mothers, as fathers or as children. Stories of pain, of hope, of love, or of facing that which was never faced. Disturbing testimonies, but also full of humanity. Crises make us reflect and leave a record of who we are, in case we cease to exist. Visual notes that make up a film about our being and what we say when all certainties collapse.
As far back as Julia Saurel can remember, she’s had a difficult relationship with her father. Three days before she is supposed to get married, she receives a phone call – just as she had predicted, her father will not be able to attend her wedding. For once, Julia has to admit he has a really good excuse – he just died. But the day after his funeral, Julia discovers that her father has one last surprise in store for her when a tall wooden crate is delivered to her home – inside it is a life-size android, a carbon copy of her father. The android explains to Julia that he contains the memory of her father and has a battery life of seven days. After that, “Michel” will automatically turn off. He is so convincing that he talks Julia into embarking on a road trip, as father and daughter, to make up for lost time.
In 1588, a castaway from the Spanish Armada, sent from Portugal by Philip II of Spain to conquer England, is captured on an Irish beach. There he is tried, declared guilty and hanged to death. All of this would be reasonable according to the laws of war and hatred among humans. The problem is the prisoner is a monkey.
French Basque Country, year 1609. The men of the region have gone to sea. Amaia participates with other girls of the village in a coven celebrated in the forest. Judge Rostegui, who has been charged by the king with ridding the country of the devil's wiles, arrests them and accuses them of witchcraft.
Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country, Spain, 2016. Two corpses appear in the crypt of the Old Cathedral. Police officer Unai López de Ayala, an expert in criminal profiling, must hunt down the ritual murderer who has been terrorizing the city for two decades…
The family, the tenant, the wedding, the businessman, the neighbors, the poor child and the run over. 7 black comedy stories of a dysfunctional society.
Ten years have gone by since Elena's six-year old son has disappeared. The last thing she heard of him was a phone call he gave her, saying that he was lost on a beach in France and couldn't find his father. Nowadays, Elena lives on this same beach and manages a restaurant. She is finally beginning to emerge from this tragic episode when she meets a French teenager who strongly reminds her of her lost son. The two of them will embark on a relationship which will sow chaos and distrust around them.
Petra doesn’t know who her father is. Her entire life, it’s been hidden from her. After the death of her mother, she embarks on a search that leads her to Jaume, a famous artist and a powerful, ruthless man. On her path to uncovering the truth, Petra also meets Jaume’s son, Lucas, as well as Marisa, his mother and Jaume’s wife. That is when the story of these characters begins to intertwine in a spiral of malice, family secrets and violence that drives them all to the edge. But fate’s cruel logic is derailed by a twist that opens a path to hope and redemption.
While investigating of a murder case, widowed police commissioner Lenders makes a confusing discovery; one of the victims comes from a different time. Did an implanted chip make this time travel possible? More victims follow. What is the motive behind the murders? And what is the connection between the victims? Can he use the chip to change his own life story?
Thomas is a drug addict. In an effort to put an end to his habit, he joins a community of former addicts who live isolated in the mountains and use prayer as a way to cure themselves.
Alicia and Carla are two young girls who suffer from eating disorders. This is the reason of their friendship and together they will search a way out of their illness. We travel through their minds, their doubts, insecurities, feelings and expectations and arrive to an apparent vicious circle. It is a fight against themselves that leaves traces of the adult person they are going to be in our imaginary.
Alma and Jan are having an affair and yet Jan does not want to admit it. In order to force him to recognize their relationship, Alma secretly takes Jan's small son, Juri on a trip. Accompanied by the delivery man Bruno, the two drive in the direction of Berlin. At a rest stop, he tries clumsily to get closer to Alma but she rebuffs him. In doing so, Alma unwittingly injures him in such a way that he drops all his inhibitions. Whereas Bruno until now was acting covertly in the hope of establishing contact, he now wants to take for himself what has been denied him.
Pregnant, and at that age! This is the case twice with the Rosemeyer family. Both 16-year-old Viola and her mother Doris, in her mid-40s, are unexpectedly pregnant. Yet family life is already difficult anyway: teenage daughter Viola wants to go to London to play school and at the same time prove that she is very old enough to start a family with her boyfriend Jo. But Jo would not necessarily be in such a hurry to be a father.
An adaptation of Milena Agus' eponymous novel set after WWII, "Mal de Pierres" ("Mal di Pietre") spans 20 years, following the destiny of a passionate, free-spirited woman who is in a loveless marriage and falls for another man.
A documentary about the technological progress responsibility in employment destruction, analyzed by philosopher Zygmunt Bauman and others.
The drama is centered around four friends and business partners who in one evening are forced to find a way to save their company and themselves. The impossible decision they face is agreeing on who will be the one to sacrifice their freedom to save the others from personal and financial demise. It is a race against time that will put their friendship and sanity to the test. Who will take the fall?
The duo of investigators, Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein, has to solve a case of a dead girl found on the river Main, while digging deeper into a chasm of viciousness and brutality.
When Julián receives an unexpected visit in Madrid from his lifelong friend Tomás, who now lives in Canada, the encounter is bittersweet. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Julián is focused on putting his affairs in order, while Tomás is still grasping at hope. For four intense days, the two men, accompanied by Julián's faithful dog, Truman, tour the city, sharing emotional, hilarious and surprising moments.
Vicenç is a politician with mayor aspirations married to Carme. She is unhappy with their marriage and lives obsessed about having children. A young boy who was a part of their lives fifteen years ago starts a process that will destroy Vicenç in a professional and personal way.
One year after Stine's husband died, she reclusive lives with her daughter Stephanie in a suburban villa which falls into disrepair. She encounters the charming craftsman Roger, who makes her an offer right on cue: He consents to carry out repairs as much as necessary, which have to be paid back, only when Stine has the ability to. Instead, he just wants to get a warm meal and an shower at times. Eventually one night. Stine accepts that deal despite she risks her daughter's relationship. Written by Anonymous
As the life of Charles of Habsburg is told since his arrival to Spain, it can be seen how the heir to the crowns of Germany, Burgundy, the Netherlands, the Free County, Artois, Nevers and Rethel, of the territories of the Crown of Aragon and its related Italian territories, and of the territories of the Catholic Monarchs in Castile, North Africa and the Americas, matures as a statesman and gets stronger in face of menaces around him and good and bad advice from his counselors.
A model family's happy life unexpectedly goes off the rails when the carefree Hedi, played by Laura Tonke, suddenly starts having panic attacks. First mental illness and then drug dependency – the happiness that these happy-go-lucky thirty-somethings once took for granted suddenly seems unattainable, and their world fragile and uncertain.
A girl on the run, a villain in the making, a faux cowboy, and Claudia Cardinale as Claudia Cardinale starring in a post-modern homage to cinema.
After finding a lump in one of her breasts, Magda goes to visit her doctor who gives her bad news: she needs a mastectomy, preceded by severe chemo treatments. While she ponders this ill fortune at a soccer game where her son Dani participates, she attracts the attention of talent scout Arturo, who is looking for talented young players to enroll them in the junior leagues.
This colourful feature debut from experienced producer Luis Miñarro offers an almost hallucinatory look at the world of Amadeo of Savoy, who was king of an ungovernable Spain for two years around 1870. This intriguing episode is transformed into a plea for beauty, creativity and joy. The film functions as a metaphor for contemporary Spain and its ongoing state of crisis.
Isaki Lacuesta presents a social satire in which five common or garden citizens, from a country pretty much identical to our own, see their lives ripped apart by the economic crisis. With nothing more to lose, they come up with a crazy plan to save the Spanish and world economy: kidnap the chairman of the Central Bank and demand that he return everything to the way it used to be.
Right out of jail, Dima tries to make a new beginning in Berlin, Germany. But his past holds him back. His criminal associates continue to rely on Dima and his father wants to take his family back to their native Russia. Only the relationship with art student Nadja gives Dima hope. If only there wasn't his ciminal past.
Patagonia, 1960. A German physician meets an Argentinean family and follows them on the long desert road to Bariloche where Eva, Enzo and their three children are going to open a lodging house by the Nahuel Huapi lake. Unaware of his true identity, they accept him as their first guest.
Christine and Conrad are what we call modern parents nowadays: While he stays home to raise children, she makes a career as a doctor, earning big money. When Konrad with comes home with the offer to act as a theater director again, organizing the day-to-day family life becomes increasingly difficult. Who will take care of their daughters Emma and Kate? As it turns out, it is in fact not that easy to find a competent girl.
Set in Catalonia, Painless weaves two stories: in one, starting during the Spanish Civil War and running through to the '60s, an asylum attempts to rehabilitate children who feel no pain, by teaching them physical suffering. In the second, in the present time, a brilliant neurosurgeon who needs a bone marrow transplant, discovers this dark past when he searches for his biological parents.
Germany in the early 19th century. "Die Vermessung der Welt" follows the two brilliant and eccentric scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss on their life paths.
The life of a spanish couple gets complicated when the Civil War begins and a strange green light appears in the woods, opening the door to the world of the Bream Lords.
Fifty years ago, five young men crossed Africa from south to north riding three prototypes of a motorcycle that eventually would become legendary: the Impala model. The story of a real adventure, the portrait of an era, the success of the industry. A well-designed machine.
In an unknown place a young boy dreams of a better place for him and his mother, but everything changes once a stranger arrives.
La Casita Blanca is about to close its doors. What still on any given day in any of the forty rooms? Meublé tells six stories about desire, the game, the need for companionship and madness, as necessary to live and they do not understand the crisis.
Maria suffers from Alzheimer's disease. Luis, Maria's fifteen-year-old grandson, doesn't say very much either; he shuts himself off in his own silent world to escape his parent's marital crisis, spending time instead picking up stray cats and dogs off the street. His father, Miguel, wants to put a stop to this eccentric behavior, but his protective mother Alice indulges him. Nevertheless, the animals begin to appear at home in increasing numbers, making life complicated for the family in their flat.
A young publicist, with a successful professional life but with an empty personal life, finds himself on a trip against time to get to an important business meeting. During the trip, he meets a girl and, although they are very different and have opposite ways of life, they click when recalling the most mythical and emotional time of their childhood: the last summer they spent with their gang
Entre lobos (Among Wolves) tells the remarkable story of a poor country boy named Marcos, who at the age of 7 is handed over to his father's employer, a rich landowner, who in turn delivers him to a life of labor with a hermetic goatherd in an isolated valley. The old man, who lives in a cave, is unused to human company and at first seems not very interested in having a live-in apprentice. The boy, who was abused by his parents, is frightened and equally aloof initially. Despite this, the shepherd begins teaching Marcos how to herd the goats, as well as how to care for himself and how to survive in the wilderness by trapping and fishing.
Two single parents decide to move in together and their two teenage children fall in love.
A prostitute looking for clients interested in Dante in museums. In "Plou a Barcelona", fragile, dark triangle that make up the three protagonists (a prostitute, her pimp partner and one of its customers) whose background is particularly close, so characteristic of Raval in Barcelona, between the signs of the hidden city, the globalization of consumerism and the world of high culture.
Fascinating journey through the life and work of the prestigious Catalan poet Jaime Gil de Biedma, both marked by sexuality and eroticism. Charismatic and somewhat eccentric, brilliant intellectual with extraordinary sensitivity and member of Barcelona's 'gauche divine' in the 60s, Gil de Biedma liked to describe himself as a 'poet of experience' while he suffered dreadfully from the dichotomy strangling him: bourgeois and executive for a multinational by day, communist and homosexual poet by night.
A Chilean couple, Tomás and Helena, living in Barcelona in the grip of a heat wave receive an unexpected visitor: Sandra, the girlfriend of Helena’s recently deceased younger brother. Nymph-like Sandra is in no hurry to leave and slowly manages to wind both Tomas and Helena around her little finger. Tomas is trying to finish his self-help book in spite of his writers’ block and Helena can’t get her dead brother out of her mind. Sandra provides a welcome distraction, and soon becomes the object of the couples desire. With relationship boundaries blurred, passions are ignited in this erotic arthouse drama. ~ sydneylatinofilmfestival.org
Marriage of Vienna, theater director, and Daniel, a geriatric physician, is in crisis. Both cling to their professional activity to fill the void in their lives agonizing. Their worlds seem antagonistic, their needs, different. Account of the worst loneliness: loneliness in the company, and on promises unfulfilled desires can not be met, but it becomes a good excuse to continue living despite everything.
This latest feature from the eccentrically experimental Catalan director Portabella is a beautiful, sometimes faintly bonkers celebration and contemplation of the role Bach’s music plays in the world today. Blending historical reconstruction with very loosely linked ‘dramatic’ scenes and documentary sequences, the film constitutes a playful, painterly sequence of variations on the argument that Johann Sebastian changed the way the world hears thanks to his extraordinary ear for harmony.
About Crying is a story about a relationship that is close to end. Vera and Alejandro are facing a long night with decisions, doubts, fears, lies, silence and arguments. This story is a trip from the high Barcelona to the sea.
Karim, a boy from illegal Maghreb, lives of hawking CDs in a Spanish city, and takes extra money boxing under the name of Omar Martinez. Train in the gym of his only friend's uncle, Toni, who lives, and dreams of returning to Morocco. He also dreams of winning the love of Olga, another immigrant from Ukraine who is hoping to become a lady"". Among them establish a triangle of love and friendship where dreams collide with each reality than live.
Three characters meet on a winter night at a bus stop and attend to the abandonment of a dog. Mila, a teacher who has been a year off after being attacked by one of his students. Celso, security guard, married, father of a child with serious economic problems, about to learn that is going to be father again, but this time with twins. And Valeria, a cello student, with a murky relationship with her family and her love. The three set out on a journey that will take them to confront their fears and frustrations and to make each a decision that will change their lives.
When Ana married Felix, the leader of a rock band and son of a travel agent, she thought her life would be plenty of excitement and travels. Now, in her forties, she leads a monotonous life with her husband and her daughter, giving cooking lessons and taking French courses. But one day she receives an invitation to give a cooking course in Paris.
Luna, an amateur producer, meet Chico Ocaña after a concert and becomes fascinated with him. Both are well suited and decide to take foward an ambitious plan: to make a documental about "flamenco".
Armed robbers take cash from a department store, but they are killed or fatally wounded in their escape. A dying thief stashes a valise with a million Euros in the old car of Julia, a single parent who dances at a Barcelona peep show. She decides to keep the cash, but her suspicious babysitter tips off a nasty private investigator hired by the store's security firm to recover the cash. Julia manages to fight off the private eye the first time he confronts her, and she bolts with her daughter after asking a neighborhood bar owner for aid. He's Luis, quiet and helpful; he takes her to his mother's house in a small town. Can Julia evade the various bad apples on her trail?
A Freudian comedy set in Barcelona, 1913, that playfully questions sexual taboos through a Sherlock Holmes-style investigation.
The film portrays the daily lives, secrets, lies, loneliness and frustrations of a group of eight thirty-something friends living in Barcelona.
Abel lives with his mother in a small town on the outskirts of Barcelona. His life, grey and boring, is based on the small family business, his mother's house, his girlfriend's bed, and the town bars. However under an appearance of quiet and gentle man, Abel hides a dark and morbid personality.
Spain 1952. The country lies in the grip of Franco's ruthless dictatorship. In a Spanish police station, Francesc Viel, a left-wing republican, is forced to recount his past.
Marga is having a streak of bad luck. Through her friendship with Rosa, she tries to regain her self-confidence, but love interests again create conflict. It is while developing a relationship with a handsome gay sculptor ten years her junior: Iñaqui, that she starts to improve. However, Marga and Iñaqui go beyond friendship, but are frustrated by their limitations. Ultimately, the two may have to settle for an "impossible" love relationship, as their unique best road to happiness
Mario, a young and uprooted Menorcan fisherman, falls in love with Irene, a Barcelona socialite who spends her holidays on the island with her young daughter. After the ambiguous initial relationship, victim of the rumors and slander, she decides to leave him. Mario, unable to resign himself, follows her to Barcelona, where he finds her imprisoned in a marriage lacking in love, in which her husband, a rich and powerful industrialist related to shady business, holds her under the threat of separating her from her daughter.
A man has died under unknown circumstances. His friends, two men and a woman, mourn his death. A threatening black car appears from somewhere in the distance. Confused, scared, they decide to run away. They travel through different landscapes, avoiding civilization. Little by little, they reach the sea. In front of them there is a small island. They undertake a new path to a different life.
In a hyperconnected world, where our personal relationships, leisure, education, love or business are completely linked to technology, we have believed the promise that we were walking towards a better future. What if this technology, which promised to make everything easier for us, is really the cause of so much unrest and loneliness?
