Le diable dans la peau

Gilles Martinerie : 2012

Brothers Xavier and Jacques, aged eleven and seven, are inseparable, bound closely to one another through a violent family environment. They live in the countryside in a land full of gorges, plateaux and vast expanses that offer the thrill of freedom and the primitive pleasure of a poetic relationship with nature. A place where they may find a semblance of freedom and escape their bleak daily lives. It's the eve of the holidays and summer looks promising. Then they accidentally learn that the next school year will separate them: Jacques will be sent away to a special institute. This is their last summer before everything changes and their world collapses forever. Gilles Martinerie's debut feature premiered in competition in the Alice nella Città section at Rome Film Festival 2011.

Miel de naranjas

Imanol Uribe : 2012
Orange Honey

Andalusía in the 1950s. Enrique and Carmen are a young couple. In a society permeated by fear and held in check by terror, Enrique is doing his military service in the office of Don Eladio, a military judge who orders summary executions of suspected rebels following the farcical trials over which he presides. Eladio is also Carmen's uncle. Discovering the brutal truth of the Franco regime, Enrique realises that he can no longer stand on the sidelines and watch innocent people be sentenced to death. It is the beginning of a dangerous double life, in which love, loyalty and betrayal become matters of life and death. Winner of the Silver Biznaga for Best Director at Málaga Spanish Film Festival 2012, and the Special Grand Prize of the Jury at Montréal World Film Festival 2012.

Control Tower

Takahiro Miki : 2011
Kanseitou

The story of two lonely teenagers, Kakeru and Mii, who cannot find their place in life, but who gradually discover a common empathy through music. Junior high-school boy Kakeru Fujita was born in Wakkanai, Japan's northernmost town on the island of Hokkaido. Very much a loner, he lives an alienated and directionless life, drifting through school. One day he meets Mizuho Takimoto, a female transfer student, who reminds him of the character from the Moomins, Little My. She has nothing in common with her classmates and keeps her feelings firmly locked away. Discovering a guitar in storage at his house, Kakeru enlists the help of piano-playing Mii to help him form a band. Both solitary by nature, they find in each other someone with whom they can connect, and through their music, the two form a friendship which will develop into the timid feelings of first love. Based on the song Kanseitou by the band Galileo Galilei, it is a beautifully shot, tender love story expressing the loneliness of its teen characters and the lack of control that adolescents have over their own lives. The film's European premiere screened at Raindance Film Festival 2011.

Grape Candy

Kim Hee-jung : 2012
Cheong-po-do sa-tang

Sun-joo is an office worker at a bank who is preparing for her upcoming wedding with Ji-hoon, an employee at a publishing company. However, Ji-hoon, who has recently become the liaison to popular female author So-ra, does not attempt to show an enthusiastic interest in married life. One day, Ji-hoon causes a traffic accident, and rushing to the hospital, Sun-joo comes face-to-face with So-ra. In actuality, Sun-joo and So-ra were classmates in school. Sun-joo befriends So-ra, with whom she has had no contact until now, suspecting that Ji-hoon's indifference to getting married might somehow be connected to her. The meeting will reawaken a memory of the tragic accident that happened to a mutual friend. However, they come to realise that their memories of the accident are quite different. What really happened to them? Can they reveal the untold truth? Seventeen years later, both women are still haunted by this event from their past. The film's international premiere screened in competition at Warsaw Film Festival 2012.

Mea Maxima Culpa

Alex Gibney : 2012
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

Using personal stories to explore larger systems of corruption, the director follows the five deaf men who led the first known public protest against clerical sex abuse in the United States. At St John's School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin, Father Lawrence Murphy preyed upon more than 200 of his most vulnerable students beginning in the 1950s. His actions came to the attention of the Vatican in 1963 and he remained at the school until 1974, when he was transferred to another parish. Finally, one of the five deaf survivors of Murphy's abuse launched a lawsuit against the pontiff himself and the ensuing investigation uncovered documents linking the Vatican to a worldwide cover-up of abuse. Alex Gibney's investigation leads from Wisconsin to Washington DC, Ireland, Rome and beyond. He delves into the unsavoury role that Pope John Paul II played in cover-ups and examines the pivotal position occupied by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – the recently resigned Pope Benedict XVI – a former Vatican overseer of sex abuse cases. The documentary is a damning indictment of how the Vatican consistently failed to protect children and the supreme efforts it made to cover up those failings. The film premiered at Toronto International Film Festival 2012 and was the winner of the Grierson Award at the British Film Institute Awards 2012.

River

Ryuichi Hiroki : 2011

Hikari lost her boyfriend, Kenji, to a massacre that occurred in Akihabara a few years ago, something she has yet to come to terms with within her heart. Still suffering from the shock of her loss and unable to accept this reality, she has cut herself off from the outside world. Hikari eventually manages to muster the courage to visit Akihabara, the scene of the incident. Walking around as if she were searching for the shadow of Kenji, she encounters a variety of people instead. A female photographer, a scout for a maid café, and a girl just as young as Hikari who works at that café. Before long, she meets Yuji, a young man living in an underground tunnel who ran away from home after quarrelling with his parents and ended up in Tokyo. The film poignantly depicts the heartbroken young woman's gradual discovery of her own means of living through her encounters with those also suffering from the after-effects of the incident. Ryuichi Hiroki's feature premiered at Tokyo FILMeX 2011.

Oasis

Lam Sum : 2012

Fish, an aspiring painter, leaves the safe haven of home and moves into a dwelling unit inside an industrial building. Carrying a mixed bag of ambivalence and possibilities, her new independence shares the upsides and downsides of a subsistence living in the enclave of artists and musicians, where the strains of life – dissatisfaction with the government and an ever-looming threat of eviction – are tempered by a healthy dose of optimism and humour. The habitat of Fish and co may not be the land of la dolce vita but it's an oasis of dreams in a desert of reality, however transient and haphazard. Lam Sum's film received a Special Mention in the Fresh Wave Short Film Competition, Hong Kong 2012.

De Menor

Caru Alves de Souza : 2013
Underage

Helena is a recently graduated young lawyer who divides her time between her work as an advocate for young children and adolescents in the city of Santos, and the care of Caio, the teenager with whom she leads a harmonious and honest life. However, their relationship is put to the test when Caio commits an offence and Helena is in charge of defending him. Caru Alves de Souza's first feature was presented in Films in Progress at San Sebastián International Film Festival 2012, and screened at Cinélatino Rencontres de Toulouse 2013.

Miłość

Sławomir Fabicki : 2012
Loving

Maria and Tomek are in their thirties and have been married 10 years. They live in a small town. Both find professional fulfilment in their jobs – he in a design company, she at the town hall. They are working together on the decoration of their apartment and are expecting a baby. It seems that nothing is capable of disturbing their peaceful lives. But one day the mayor, who has long lusted after Maria, rapes her. She decides not to report this to the police. Nor does she tell her husband. From that day forth, their love is put to the test. A story dwelling on very intimate issues, exploring the various aspects of love: responsibility, jealousy, fear, forgiveness, empathy and the absence of love. The film premiered in competition at Warsaw Film Festival 2012, and was winner of the Best Film prize at Vilnius International Film Festival 2013.

Eun-gyo

Jung Ji-woo : 2012
A Muse

A highly respected national poet in his seventies, Jeok-yo, adopts an untalented but eager student, Ji-woo, whose wish is to become a novelist. Ji-woo has recently published his first book, described as a genre novel with psychological insight, and it has shot to the top of the bestseller lists. Only later will it be clear how great his debt is to the poet laureate. The relationship that grows between the two is complicated, with an equal measure of love and hate and their bond is tested further when 17-year-old Eun-gyo seeks out the poet, entrancing both student and teacher immediately. As Jeok-yo spends more time in Eun-gyo's company, long-lost feelings are awakened within him, and her exuberance, lust for life, sense of fun and genuine warmth towards him quickly strip the years away in his mind. A love triangle forms with a growing sense of resentment between Ji-woo and his mentor, forcing them to decide between salvaging their father/son relationship or sacrificing the possible love of their lives for the other's happiness. Winner of the Grand Bell Award for Best New Actress in Seoul in 2012.

Alienation

Milko Lazarov : 2013

A man driving an old-fashioned car is crossing the border. He is Greek and past his fifties. He is coming to Bulgaria to buy a child. The price is 10,000 euros. To smuggle the child Jorgos has prepared a secret compartment in the boot of the car masked as a fuel tank. The baby hasn't been born yet and the Greek needs to wait in a secluded house in the mountains together with the mother, her deaf-mute brother and the midwife. The birth starts during a stormy night. Milko Lazarov's first feature premiered at Sofia International Film Festival 2013, where it won the Award for Best Bulgarian Feature Film.

Honour

Shan Khan : 2013

A story centred on a young woman who is targeted by her family for an honour killing and the bounty hunter who takes the job. Mona, a young British Asian woman, is on the run from her family after they find out about her plans to run away with her boyfriend. In a desperate bid to save face and their family honour, her mother and older brother enlist the help of a bounty hunter to track her down. A thriller set in London, writer/director Shan Khan's debut feature premiered at Sofia International Film Festival 2013.

Le temps de l'aventure

Jérôme Bonnell : 2013
Just a Sigh

One day, on a train, two strangers. Exchanged glances, accelerated heartbeats. Watching him leave, will she lose him forever or allow herself a moment of adventure? The story of Alix, a stage actress, who, between two performances of a play in Calais, meets a mysterious Englishman on the train bringing her back to Paris for the day. Attracted to him, she follows him and for the most fleeting of afternoons, loves him, before confronting what could be a different future. Jérôme Bonnell's fifth feature premiered internationally at Tribeca Film Festival 2013.

The Mirror Never Lies

Kamila Andini : 2011
Laut bercermin

The sea and a mirror are what sustain the life of 12-year-old Pakis, who lives on the small Indonesian island of Kampung Bajo. Pakis sits in the midst of the floating village, waiting for her father who simply doesn't come back from fishing one day. The other children say he's dead, but Pakis refuses to believe this. Instead she searches for the truth in a small mirror her father once gave her. Pakis is full of hope that one day he will return; she cannot forget his stories of the wind and the sea. Her young mother has painted her face white and Pakis chides her for having given up on her father. When her mother breaks the mirror and falls for young Tudo, a dolphin researcher from Jakarta, Pakis despairs. Together with her best friend, Lumo, she continues to seek answers in the sea. Kamila Andini's debut feature paints a wonderfully detailed portrait of the pain and hope experienced by a young girl who must now come to terms with her loss. Its serene images portray the lives of the Bajo people today, sea nomads who have developed a unique way of life that is perfectly attuned to the sea. The film premiered at Busan International Film Festival 2011.

Nuit #1

Anne Émond : 2011
Night #1

Clara and Nikolaï meet at a rave. They return to Nikolaï's apartment and frantically make love. Afterwards, instead of parting, the two lovers divulge their deepest secrets to one another, revealing astonishing insights about their lives as they both venture willingly into the darkest parts of themselves. Nicolaï is a beautiful loner, one with great ambition which he's unable to articulate to his peers. At thirty-one years old, he leads a simple and frugal life. He applies himself to reading the great classics of literature but never finishes a book he has begun. Unable to submit to any schedule, he finds himself unfit for work. He envisions big projects and has expansive ideas but, inevitably and despite himself, loses sight of them before they are realised. Clara, like Nikolaï, seems not to be made for this world. She leads a double life. By day, she works as a third grade teacher; by night, she is a compulsive party-girl, exorcising or forgetting her vaunted hopes. She goes out every night, gets drunk and high, invites high-voltage sexual combinations, all the while desperately trying to fill an emotional void yet never succeeding. Though they are tempted to animas by all-too-common and divisive gender politics, politics they simultaneously fear and embrace, the friction between them is trumped by a common determination to bridge the gap that they realise afflicts the women and men of their lost, but far from hopeless, generation. Anne Émond's award-winning directorial debut premiered at Toronto International Film Festival 2011.

Gf*Bf

Yang Ya-Che : 2012
Girlfriend Boyfriend

In the 1980s, Taiwan is still under martial law and people are locked in the battle to have it lifted. A social revolution is set to take off. Kaohsiung high school students Mabel, Liam and Aaron are best friends and three sides of a love triangle. Spurned by Liam, Mabel has settled for Aaron, but in Taipei during the reform movement, Mabel catches Aaron with another girl. Later still, at a friend's autumn wedding, the three reunite and Liam and Mabel reconcile their complicated feelings, Liam finally urging Mabel to be happy with Aaron if he cannot. After becoming pregnant with Aaron's child, Mabel realises the tremendous barrier before her, and in summer 2012, Liam and Mabel raise Aaron's child together. Unfolding against the backdrop of Taiwan's democratic movement of the 1980s and 1990s, a powerful and moving coming-of-age story exploring the deep and complicated emotional turmoil of three tragic souls growing up during a period of immense social change. The film focuses on the intersection of friendship, love and the internal struggles of the three characters and their misguided emotions, over the course of twenty years. Yang Ya-Che's award-winning second feature premiered at Taipei Film Festival 2012 and screened at Busan International Film Festival 2012.

La richesse du loup

Damien Odoul : 2012
Rich is the Wolf

Olaf is gone. The only thing he left his partner Marie is a box of videotapes with a hundred hours of rushes of the last seven years of his life, together with a notebook. Marie decides to investigate. Day after day she watches the footage, these fragments of a life, and attempts to reconstruct the journey of the man she loves in order to better understand his departure. Marie does not expect her lover to return, nor does she question his sudden unexplained disappearance. She tries to get close to him, to experience him by imagining herself seeing through his eyes. The film premiered in competition at Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille 2012.

Boa sorte, meu amor

Daniel Aragão : 2012
Good luck, sweetheart

Dirceu, 30 years old, has origins that go back to the aristocracy of Northeast Brazilian backlands. Settled in a kind of subjective amnesia, Dirceu tries to bury his family's past. He is a demolition man in Recife, an urban landscape undergoing an uncontrolled process of transformation. Maria shares the same country origins, but she uses the city for a different purpose. She is a carefree and joyful music student. If Dirceu aspires to a world that is stable and present, Maria lives in discord with the present. For her, nothing is as it should be. Maria's presence, almost an apparition, unleashes in Dirceu an urge for being somebody else. On a route of escape through the desert of the backlands, a unique encounter is set to happen. Daniel Aragão's first feature is an anti-romance of the impact between music and silence. The film premiered in competition at Locarno Film Festival 2012, and won the Candango Trophy for Best Director at Brasília Festival of Brazilian Cinema 2012.

Rebelle

Kim Nguyen : 2012
War Witch

Komona, a 14-year-old girl in Sub-Saharan Africa, tells her unborn child the story of how she became a rebel. After her village is burned down by rebels during the civil war and her parents are killed, Komona is kidnapped and forced into the jungle as a child soldier. Her brutal commander not only trains her in the use of arms but also orders her to sleep with him. But Komona is no ordinary soldier. Due to her ability to see gray ghosts in the trees that warn her of approaching enemies, she is deemed a sorceress and bestowed the title of War Witch. Searching for shelter amidst the horror, she turns to a slightly older boy with white hair whom she calls Magicien and falls in love with. After they escape from the camp together, Komona does her utmost to return to her village to make amends with her past. She wants to bury her parents to prevent them having to eternally wander the wasted land as ghosts. Told throughout from the perspective of an adolescent girl, visualising the horrors of civil war and the suffering of children and civilians, it is a powerfully poignant tale of human resilience. A love story between two young souls caught in a violent world, yet one also filled with beauty and magic. Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlin International Film Festival 2012.

The Loneliest Planet

Julia Loktev : 2011

Alex and Nica are young, in love and engaged to be married. The summer before their wedding, they are backpacking in the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. The couple hire a local guide to lead them on a camping trek, and the three set off into a stunning wilderness, a landscape that is both overwhelmingly open and frighteningly closed. Walking for hours, they trade anecdotes, play games to pass the time of moving through space. And then, a momentary misstep, a gesture that takes only two or three seconds, a gesture that's over almost as soon as it begins. But once it is done, it can't be undone. Once it is done, it threatens to undo everything the couple believed about each other and about themselves. All the while, they are not alone. They are always with the guide, who witnesses their every move. The film explores the relationship between young travellers and the places they travel to, between guide and guided. But it is also a love story, a tale about betrayal, both accidental and deliberate, about gender roles, failure and the ambiguities of forgiveness. The film premiered in competition at Locarno Film Festival 2011.

170 Hz

Joost van Ginkel : 2011

The unconditional love between 16-year-old Evy and 19-year-old Nick has no voice and no sound: they are both deaf-mute. The whispering young lovers communicate in sign language, with their gaze, lips and touch. Evy's upbringing has been sheltered, she attends secondary school, but feels like an outsider. Nick is a non-conformist, a rebel and a thorn in the side of Evy's father. When they sense their parents' opposition to them being together, they develop an audacious plan: they will flee and hide in a special place, where Evy will become pregnant and have a baby. They are convinced that once they have a child together nothing and nobody will be able to keep them apart. Nick takes the initiative and drives off with Evy to the hiding place he has meticulously prepared, the wreck of a former Soviet submarine in a distant part of the harbour. Within that metal casing full of sounds and tremors they cannot hear, but with their strongly developed remaining senses, can feel all the more, they concentrate on their baby project. But as Evy slowly discovers, Nick had another reason to disappear and she begins to realise that their freedom is just an illusion. 170 hertz refers to the topmost bass frequency that Nick can still hear. Sound, and its absence, is an important part of the film. Told from the point of view of the deaf characters, the sound design clearly demonstrates the impact of living without the sense of hearing. Joost van Ginkel's debut feature premiered in competition at Nederlands Film Festival 2011.