Lore

Cate Shortland : 2012

In spring 1945, at the close of the war in Germany, a group of children set out to cross a devastated country to reach their grandmother some 900 kilometres to the north. The eldest, Lore, is left in charge of her four younger siblings when their SS Nazi parents are taken into Allied custody. The children must make a journey that exposes them to the reality and consequences of their parents' actions. In meeting the charismatic and intriguing Thomas, a young Jewish refugee, Lore soon finds her world shattered by feelings of both hatred and desire. She is transfixed by her fear of the young man, but must trust the one person whom she has always been taught is the enemy in order to survive. An accurately detailed and beautifully shot portrayal of a time of lawlessness, starvation and depredation. Winner of the Audience Award at Locarno Film Festival 2012.

Camera Obscura

Maru Solores : 2011

Ane, 13 years old, has just had an operation on her eyes, but she can't see. In her inner "camera obscura", recurring images flash into her head, as if they were pursuing her. Into the stressful environment of the family summer holidays, after the failure of the operation, steps her father's cousin, Antonio. Antonio is an enigmatic photographer who has been around half the world and has now returned to the town after many years. Ane is reaching puberty, she is growing, she has lots of questions, but she lacks all the visual information that assails the rest of us. Antonio is a breath of fresh air; he's someone who seems to see her differently. Ane is attracted by him and by the art of photography. He lends her a camera which helps her perceive the world around her in a different way, to discover, to understand what is happening in her family, and also Antonio himself. Camera in hand, like a detective and to the chagrin of her mother, she captures their daily life, until she comes upon what no one wants to see or acknowledge. Rather than see herself as a victim, Ane fights to forge her own path, as an adolescent and a blind person.

Katmandú, un espejo en el cielo

Icíar Bollaín : 2011
Kathmandu, a mirror in the sky

Laia, a young Catalan teacher, moves to Kathmandu in the early 1990s, to volunteer in a local school. She will soon discover extreme poverty and a devastatingly bleak educational system that excludes the most needy. She initially protests and later decides to marry Tsering out of convenience, in order to legalise her status and take on an ambitious educational project in the slums of Kathmandu. She immediately realises that she can't do it all by herself. She also discovers a beautiful gift she had never expected: to fall in love with the stranger she marries. She finds herself torn between her love life and her commitment to the children she helps. Laia and Sharmila, another young teacher who becomes her dearest friend, work side by side to launch a new project that will distance Laia from her partner beyond repair. It will, however, always unite her to Sharmila and small Kushila, in a personal journey into the depths of the Nepalese society and also to her most inner self.

Au cul du loup

Pierre Duculot : 2011
Miles From Anywhere

Christina, almost thirty, lives in the Charleroi region in Belgium, with Marco, her boyfriend. After the death of her grandmother, she inherits a house in Corsica. Nobody around her seems to know how and when the old woman acquired the house. Everyone in her family, and Marco too, try to convince Christina to sell the house, but she refuses. She wants to understand why her grandmother wanted her to have it. This inheritance gives her the opportunity to put into question the monotony of her life. On a whim, she leaves on her own to discover the house, but this trip is going to turn her life, and that of those close to her, upside down. Winner of the Grand Prix and Prix du Public at Festival d'Amiens 2011.

Syvälle salattu

Joona Tena : 2011
Body of Water

Julia Mannerla is a young, successful lawyer whose life is a balancing act between motherhood and career. Divorce and battles for custody of her son have added to her complicated and hectic life. For many years she has been in conflict with her father, believing him to be partially responsible for her mother's mental illness and subsequent committal to an institution. Taking her son with her, she returns to her childhood hometown to assist a team of environmental activists in their struggle against exploitation of the area's natural resources. But in the middle of the Finnish woods there is a small, dark lake cloaked in superstition. In the little town Julia is not welcomed by the inhospitable locals, and the old house by the lake where she stays, seems to have a life of its own. Beginning to doubt her sanity, she gradually uncovers an unpleasant family secret hidden within the house. As myths and old superstitions float to the surface in this psychological thriller, Julia is forced to confront the greed of the locals and their trust in the spirit believed to be attached to the lake.

Yeoja, Jeong-hye

Lee Yoon-ki : 2004
This Charming Girl

In her mid-twenties, Jeong-hye is a postal worker who lives a monotonous daily routine. She is kind, detached and delicate, but trapped in an inner world of melancholy and psychological trauma. She accepts being cut off from the outside world as natural. When she takes in and adopts a stray kitten, events begin to bring her out of her shell, leading her to a more conscious interaction with the world around her. An equally timid aspiring writer who often comes to the post office then expresses an interest in her. As she reaches out to him, Jeong-hye's unexplained peacefulness is shaken, and hidden trauma begins to make its way to the surface of her emotions. This gentle, slow-paced character study following a young woman's simple, quiet life reveals the complex landscape of her hidden internal world. Lee Yoon-ki's award-winning debut feature is an extraordinary and detailed portrayal of a human being's inner space.

Polvo

Julio Hernández Cordón : 2012
Dust

Ignacio is 30 years old and already the father of a ten-year-old girl. He has remarried Alejandra and they are expecting a baby. But even if they are both excited about the news, they fear the ghosts of their previous relationships. While trying to come to terms with their new life, the couple produces a documentary about women looking for their husbands and fathers who disappeared during the Guatemalan Civil War in 1982. Amongst the families, they meet Delfina and Juan, mother and son. Sixteen years after her husband's disappearance, Delfina still hopes to find him. Juan is almost the same age as Ignacio and they both share a distant relationship with their mothers. The director's debut feature premiered at Locarno Film Festival 2012.

Shell

Scott Graham : 2012

The tale of Shell, who lives and works with her father in their small remote petrol station in the Scottish Highlands, of their fight against the elements, and of their impossible love for each other during a winter that will be her last one at the fuel stop. They spend their days tending to domestic chores and to the needs of rare passing motorists. At night they are forced together by the cold and by their loneliness. Shell is a teenage girl giving people fuel to move on with their lives while she cannot. An intense story of two people who struggle to keep their longings for freedom under control, set against a beautiful and remote landscape that reflects their isolation back at them. The director's debut feature, a Scottish 'roadside' movie, premiered in competition at San Sebastián Film Festival 2012.

El artista y la modelo

Fernando Trueba : 2012
The Artist and the Model

Occupied France in 1943. An old renowned sculptor, tired of life and mankind's folly, rediscovers the desire to work again and sculpt his last piece after the unexpected arrival of a young Spanish woman. Marc Cros lives in a small town near the Spanish border. Now 80 years old, he gave up his lifetime's work some years ago. One day his wife and former model, Léa, brings home a Spanish peasant girl, Mercè, who is fleeing Franco's army and has escaped from a refugee camp. Léa offers Mercè refuge in the sculptor's studio and during her stay there, to become his model in what will be the last work of a man who has devoted his life to a search for beauty. Throughout his life, Cros has worked entirely in one direction, trying to achieve through simplicity, the essence of form – beauty in its purest sense, stripped of all artifice. Gradually, a beautiful relationship is born between the girl whose life is just at its beginning, and the artist who sees the horizon near the end. The film won the Silver Shell for Best Director at San Sebastián Film Festival 2012.

Obaba

Montxo Armendáriz : 2005

Lourdes, a young film student, has travelled to Obaba in the Basque regions of northern Spain for a college project. A place full of mystery and charm, she wants to capture Obaba's reality, its world and its people. She wants to catch the present, and show it the way it is. But Obaba is not the place that Lourdes had imagined, and she discovers that the people who live there are trapped in a past they cannot, or they do not want to escape from. Through them and Miguel, a happy and easy-going young boy she strikes up a close friendship with, Lourdes comes to know small pieces of their lives – from before, when they were children or adults, and from now, when they barely have any dreams. These are small fragments of lives that lead to passions, envies and violence. With all this, Lourdes tries to reconstruct the puzzle that gives sense to their lives and that will allow her to catch the reality with her video camera. But still, she has difficulty capturing the essence of Obaba on camera. There is always something missing, something that escapes, and something she cannot understand.

No tengas miedo

Montxo Armendáriz : 2011
Don't Be Afraid

Silvia is a young girl marked by a dark childhood, having been molested and raped by her father from the age of seven. As time goes by, Silvia withdraws from him into an asocial, somnambulistic world of addiction without those around her even noticing. When she is hardly twenty-five, she decides to start over and to face people, feelings and emotions that keep her bound to the past. In her fight against adversity and against herself, she will learn to control her fears and become an adult, responsible for her own actions. It is a story that preserves the harshness and truth of a terrible situation and portrays the anguish and state of unease in which victims live, with practically no social support, in total anonymity and silence, without daring to say anything. A subtly told, yet intense human drama examining a dark truth that society insists on ignoring. The film screened in competition at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2011.

La demora

Rodrigo Plá : 2012
The Delay

María, a forty-something, separated, mother of three in Montevideo is driven to abandon her senile father so she can take better care of her children. Her trip to the social security office reveals that she is too poor to afford to put her father in a home, but still too wealthy to qualify for benefits. A perfectly eligible friend who brings her father back from yet another extended wander turns out to be married, whilst the father's lonely wait at a housing estate is leavened by the heartfelt concern of the local residents. The deeply affecting mixture of tenderness and exasperation with which María helps her father shower and dress, quietly underlines what becomes the film's central theme of the intense, painful ambivalence of family responsibility. Winner of two Jury awards at Berlin International Film Festival 2012.