Zefir

Belma Baş : 2010
Zephyr

Zefir, the headstrong 11-year-old single daughter of an İstanbul mother, is spending her summer holiday with her grandparents, up in their mountain village. Inquisitively roaming the countryside, often alone, sometimes with her grandfather, she observes nature at work and the cycles of life and death. Every once in a while she retreats into her room with a portable record player to listen to the echoes of the city where she emotionally belongs. Zefir impatiently awaits her mother's return to take her back home again. But when the mother finally arrives, it is to announce that she has to go abroad for an indefinite period of time, possibly forever. No arguments can convince her to give up the trip and when she sets out on her way, it is Zefir who takes the final step to prevent it. Set in the majestic, mist-shrouded mountainous landscapes of northern Turkey, Belma Baş's beautifully shot, slow-paced debut feature examines the psyche of a young girl deeply damaged by emotional emptiness and unbearable loneliness.

Kotoko

Shinya Tsukamoto : 2011

For Kotoko, a young mother who suffers from double vision, caring for her baby is a nerve-wracking task that eventually leads her to a nervous breakdown. With a fragile grip on reality, she fiercely protects her son from what she imagines are constant predatory threats. Even when he is in her arms, Kotoko's fraying mind envisions death around every corner. As fantasies overwhelm her, she is suspected of being a child abuser and is forced to give up her child to face her manic highs and terrifying bouts of paralysis alone. She cuts herself, hoping to feel her body and jump-start its survival mechanisms. The sudden appearance of Tanaka, a novelist who has followed Kotoko's deterioration from a distance, offers momentary relief before her instability overwhelms her. This tightly crafted, sharply edited and visually startling film creates a harrowing vision of a world where nothing you see can be trusted.

Avé

Konstantin Bojanov : 2011

Kamen, a young art student, sets out to hitchhike from Sofia to Ruse in order to attend his best friend's funeral. Out on the road waiting for a ride, he encounters a 17-year-old runaway girl named Avé who tells him that she is going to visit her terminally ill grandmother, which he believes. But when they get a lift in the same car, and with each ride they hitch, Avé invents new identities for them, and her compulsive lies get Kamen deeper and deeper into trouble. Reluctantly drawn into this adventure, Kamen begins to fall in love with the fleeting Avé. An intimate portrayal of a coincidental meeting between two opposite personalities who are drawn together on a journey of discovery. A beautifully shot road movie, Konstantin Bojanov's debut feature is the recipient of numerous European festival awards.

The Sound of Light

Yamasaki Juichiro : 2011
Hikari no oto

The Kariya family has run their dairy farm for generations in the mountains, now carved into pieces by an expressway. Their eldest son, Yusuke, had dreams of becoming a musician in Tokyo, but has been called back to the farm by an injury to his father. But his dreams of making music have not faded, and uneasy thoughts about the future with his girlfriend Yoko are making him question whether he can handle life as a dairy farmer. Yoko and her former husband Natsuo had a young son, Ryota, before Natsuo was killed in an accident. Natsuo's mother wants Ryota to carry on the family name. Before his death, Natsuo wanted to be a dairy farmer as well. He often helped Yusuke's uncle Yoshiyuki on his farm. This tangled net of relationships and obligations has left Yusuke feeling trapped. The Kariya family has a tradition of watching the first sunrise of the New Year together. This time, Yusuke's sister Haruko is bringing her boyfriend back to meet the family. It seems like just another ordinary New Year's holiday until a fire breaks out on Yoshiyuki's farm. And something is changing in Yusuke.

Les adoptés

Mélanie Laurent : 2012
The Adopted

Vivacious and alluring, Lisa and her adoptive sister Marine have been inseparable since they were ten years old. With Lisa's mother Millie, they have forged a deep bond that protects them from life's hard knocks. Together, the three women offer Lisa's young son, Léo, the security and affection that allow him to blossom. When one of them falls in love, however, the quirky family's balance is thrown off. Before they can make individual adjustments to prolong their collective happiness, fate throws tragedy at them and the family must realign with a new reality in order to turn loss into hope and love. Mélanie Laurent's directorial debut is a heartfelt, hopeful and bittersweet take on love and rebirth.

Goodbye

Mohammad Rasoulof : 2011
Bé omid é didar

Noora, a young, pregnant lawyer in Tehran whose husband has been sent to work in the desert because of his critical journalistic activities, continually faces opposition from the regime and decides to leave the country. Without her husband and without her lawyer's licence, which has been withdrawn, Noora is left alone in her apartment. Her attempt to leave Iran develops into a battle with male chauvinism. A sober, frightening portrait of a society that is stooping under the continual control and threats of its religious regime. Already banned from making films, Rasoulof shot Goodbye partly in secret in the winter of 2010/2011. The result is a disquieting film that makes impotence and the desire for freedom painfully tangible in all its simplicity. It was the winner of the Un Certain Regard award for best director at Cannes 2011.

Sudoeste

Eduardo Nunes : 2012
Southwest

Set in a domain of the fantastic, the story unfolds beyond the frontiers of the visible. A young woman, Clarice, dies during childbirth in the early morning at an inn. Iraci, the wise-woman who was summoned to help the doomed mother-to-be delivers the baby in secret and takes it home to her house built on stilts in the middle of a lake. Left alone in the stilt house, the child Clarice gets into a boat and rows off to explore the nearby village. Throughout the day she ages gradually, and by night she's an old, grey-haired woman. In the village where everything seems motionless, Clarice grasps her life in a single day, unlike those she meets who are living this day like any other. As the woman-child's mystery deepens, she tries to understand her obscure reality and the destiny of the people around her. Gradually, in a circular narrative that haunts and disorients, the story of the dead woman at the inn is revealed.

Egg and Stone

Huang Ji : 2012
Jidan he shitou

Fourteen-year-old Honggui is forced to live with her uncle and aunt in the countryside. The girl is not wanted. Nor was she wanted by her parents, who apparently intended to farm her out to family for two years so they could work in the city. In the meantime, seven years have passed. When she tries to make contact, her real mother is too busy to take her call. As the tragedy of Honggui's personal story gradually unfolds, we see how other Chinese women are also often afflicted, not only by the widespread poverty, but also by the policy to restrict births which ensures that parents primarily want boys. Slow-paced and meticulously filmed in the village in Hunan Province where Huang Ji was born, her quietly disturbing debut feature was the winner of the Tiger Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012.

L'oiseau

Yves Caumon : 2011
The Bird

Anne is a woman in her early forties, living very quietly in her Bordeaux apartment. She is a woman who guards her secrets closely, keeping her distance from everyone in the restaurant kitchen where she works. In her private life, Anne wanders alone but makes the occasional attempt at contact with another person, such as the solitary cinema-goer whom she meets at a Mizoguchi film. Gradually it emerges that Anne had a young son, now deceased, and that this tragedy hastened the break-up with her husband Marc. Since then she has retreated into a life of simplicity and reserve. But a strange noise Anne keeps hearing in her flat works its way into her consciousness, and eventually she has to turn her attention to another living presence. A delicate and mesmerising psychological portrait that's all the more intense for its quiet detachment.

Hanezu

Naomi Kawase : 2011
Hanezu no tsuki

The Asuka region is the birthplace of Japan. Here, in ancient times, there were those who fulfilled their lives in the midst of waiting. Modern people, apparently having lost this sense of waiting, seem unable to feel grateful for the present, and cling to the illusion that all things will move constantly forward according to one's own plan. In ancient times, there were three small mountains that people believed were inhabited by gods. They were Mt Unebi, Mt Miminashi, and Mt Kagu, and they still stand. In that time, a powerful official used the mountains as a metaphor for a struggle inside his own heart. The mountains were an expression of human karma. Time has passed into the present. Takumi and Kayoko, inheriting the unfulfilled hopes of their grandparents, live out their lives. Their tale continues a story of the ages, representing the uncountable souls that have accumulated in this land.

The Fatherless

Marie Kreutzer : 2011
Die Vaterlosen

In a large, dilapidated house in the Austrian countryside, Niki, a doctor, arrives from Munich to the bedside of his father Hans, just in time to see the old man die. The rest of the family then begin to gather for the funeral. Niki's idealistic brother Vito, who seems the most affected by his father's death; the youngest sister Mizzi, who has suffered from a neurological condition since childhood; and to the surprise of the others, Hans's elder daughter Kyra, after having had little contact with the family for more than twenty years. Kyra is like a stranger to them now, but when she discovers that her very existence has been kept secret, she starts to uncover old mysteries and buried secrets. Soon all the brothers and sisters find themselves unearthing the roots of the childhood memories they had suppressed in order to survive. Marie Kreutzer's debut feature is an intriguing and disturbing journey into the past, exploring issues of family and freedom, belonging and solitude.

I Carried You Home

Tongpong Chantarangkul : 2011
Padang besar

A mother travels to Bangkok to visit her teenage daughter, Pann, who lies to avoid spending time with her. Soon after, Pann returns to her friends but then receives a phone call from her aunt telling her that her mother has suffered a terrible accident and is in a coma. Pann hurries to contact her elder sister, Pinn, who had run away from her marriage to Singapore to start a new life away from family constraints. Their mother's subsequent death forces the two sisters, alienated from each other, to accompany the body in an ambulance on a two-day journey from Bangkok to the birthplace of their mother in rural Thailand. During the journey home, they look back on what they shared and what drove them apart. Each is forced to confront the secrets and resentment they have been hiding their whole lives, and also the loneliness their mother must have felt without her daughters.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lynne Ramsay : 2011

Eva Khatchadourian puts her ambitions and career aside to give birth to Kevin. The relationship between mother and son is difficult from the very first years. When Kevin is 15, he does something unimaginable and unforgivable in the eyes of the entire community. A once-successful travel writer, Eva now lives alone in a run-down house and works in a travel agency in a town near the prison where she visits Kevin. As she looks back at her memories of him growing up, she grapples with her own feelings of grief and responsibility. Did she ever love her son? And how much of what Kevin did was her fault? This suspenseful and emotional psychological thriller, combining a provocative moral ambiguity with a compelling narrative, explores the fractious relationship between a mother and her malevolent son.

Sanam

Rafi Pitts : 2000

In a small valley, riders pursue and kill a man. A horse thief, so his assassins claim. But for his ten-year-old son Issa, the disappearance of his father causes an avalanche of problems. With the family name stigmatised, Issa is bullied by the other children in the village. The father's death forces Issa's mother, Sanam, to abandon their home and the two move in with an aunt. Desperate to provide a life and future for her son, Sanam must consider marrying a man who could readily support the family, even though she knows she does not love him. While his mother fights to clear her husband's name, Issa is left to his own devices, and in his solitude, becomes obsessed with the horse that he insists belonged to his father. Rafi Pitts' award-winning second feature is a beautifully shot, poignant depiction of injustice and its aftermaths in a child's heart.

Wild Side

Sébastien Lifshitz : 2004

Stéphanie, a 32-year-old transsexual, returns to her hometown in order to care for her dying mother. Fifteen years ago, then still a teenager named Pierre, she left her village deep in rural France to begin a new life in Paris. Stéphanie is accompanied by her two lovers, bisexual Djamel and her new Russian boyfriend Mikhail. Whilst battling with their own inner demons they also find solace in each other's arms. Forming a true ménage à trois, they are three lost souls who share an unbreakable bond – one that is made stronger by the risqué lives they lead as street prostitutes. The visit to Stéphanie's birthplace brings out strong emotions and memories, and delving into increasingly powerful images of her early life, she is again confronted with the death of her beloved sister. Once there, she begins to unravel some of the childhood events that have made her the person she is today. A tender, compassionate and realistically portrayed film of haunting images and beautiful cinematography, with an intimate awareness of the orientations of its characters and their life together on the fringes of society.