Red Joan

Trevor Nunn : 2018

The year is 2000 and Joan Stanley is a retired scientist living in a London suburb. Her tranquil life is suddenly disrupted when she's arrested by MI5 and accused of providing intelligence to Communist Russia. We flash back to 1938, and young Joan is a new student at Cambridge, where a chance encounter with Sonya, an alluring fellow student, draws her into a circle of politicised youths supporting the Republicans in Spain and the Soviet dream of a classless society. Joan falls for Sonya's brother Leo, a dashing idealist in search of adventure. When the Second World War begins, Joan goes to work at a top-secret British intelligence project of great interest to Leo. Joan is soon facing several difficult choices: between national loyalties, between belief systems, between men. Confronted with an impossible question – what price would you pay for peace? – Joan must choose between betraying her country and loved ones or saving them. Trevor Nunn's feature premiered in Special Presentations at Toronto International Film Festival 2018.

Where Hands Touch

Amma Asante : 2018

Germany, 1944. 15-year old Leyna is German, born to a Caucasian mother and a black foreign fighter, whom she has never met. Her nightmare begins when she moves with her mother and little brother to the village where her relatives live. There, in Rüdesheim am Rhein, she experiences racism for the first time. Everyone calls her "the mongrel": her classmates, her teacher, even her uncle and aunt, and of course the SS patrols. Her mother has done her best to protect Leyna, but the racist credo of National Socialism has rendered her a pariah for the colour of her skin. Yet youthful ardour can bloom in the most unlikely places: Leyna is in love with Lutz, a member of the Hitler Youth – compulsory for all Aryan boys since 1936. Lutz toes the party line when it comes to antisemitism yet remains drawn to Leyna despite Nazi revulsion at the thought of a Black German. When that revulsion escalates to direct threat to her survival, Leyna and Lutz must face the seemingly inevitable outcome of their impossibly fraught romance. A coming-of-age story set in the most brutal of times. Amma Asante's feature premiered in Special Presentations at Toronto International Film Festival 2018.

Vita & Virginia

Chanya Button : 2018

The affair and the friendship of authors Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West – both uncompromising in their insistence to live, love, and create to the fullest – constitutes one of the most fascinating relationships in literary history. The year is 1922. Though happily married, Vita is as notorious for her dalliances with women and iconoclastic attitudes toward gender as she is famous for her aristocratic ancestry and writerly success. Virginia, meanwhile, is a celebrated writer, publisher, and member of the Bloomsbury Group, those innovative moderns already revolutionising literature. When Vita receives an invitation to Bloomsbury, she is elated at the thought of meeting the enigmatic Woolf and, not surprisingly perhaps, becomes obsessed with the notion of seducing her. Between Virginia's mental health struggles and Vita's impulsiveness – and the concern of their husbands, families, and mutual friends – their romance is bound to be tumultuous. Yet tumult can fuel creativity and Vita's singular persona will eventually be channelled into Orlando, the novel their relationship inspired and one of Virginia's greatest works. Chanya Button's feature premiered in Special Presentations at Toronto International Film Festival 2018.

Maya

Mia Hansen-Løve : 2018

Gabriel is a 30-year-old war correspondent taken hostage and repatriated to Paris after four months of captivity in Syria. He believes he may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and on the advice of a psychiatrist, he travels to India to visit his godfather, Monty. Having lived there until the age of seven with his mother – who still lives there and runs an NGO in Mumbai – Gabriel decides to settle in Goa, in a bungalow by the sea, while he renovates a small house in the countryside. He encounters Maya, his godfather's 17-year-old daughter, a student who is travelling between London and Sydney in the middle of her studies, and a relationship gradually begins to stir, despite the decade or so between them. As Gabriel slowly adjusts to safety and society in India, he also reintegrates into normal life – and back into parts of his past that resurface during his trip. Mia Hansen-Løve's feature premiered in Special Presentations at Toronto International Film Festival 2018.

Jinpa

Pema Tseden : 2018

On the path of life, sometimes we meet someone whose dreams overtake our own to the point that they converge. This is a story of revenge and redemption. On an isolated road passing through the vast barren plains of Tibet, a truck driver who has accidentally run over a sheep chances upon a young man who is hitching a ride. As they drive and chat, the truck driver notices that his new friend has a silver dagger strapped to his leg; he comes to understand that this man is out to kill someone who wronged him earlier in life. As he drops the hitchhiker off at a fork in the road, little does the truck driver realise that their short time together has changed everything, and that their destinies are inexorably intertwined. A journey of awakening on the road to the future, occupying a realm where the boundaries between dream and reality are blurred and irrelevant. Pema Tseden's feature was winner of the award for Best Screenplay when it premiered in competition in the Orizzonti section at Venice International Film Festival 2018.

C'est ça l'amour

Claire Burger : 2018
Real Love

Forbach, East of France. Mario, a man without much ambition, except where love is concerned, is back to square one after his wife left home. Now he must raise on his own his two daughters going through their adolescent years while going through some sort of a teenage crisis of his own. 14-year-old Frida blames her father for their mother's absence and she develops ambivalent feelings towards her new girlfriend. 17-year-old Niki will soon leave home. Until then, she lives the good life. Mario can't help but lose the women he loves. Yet they must all agree to let one another go. Can accepting to lose someone eventually lead to finding oneself? Claire Burger's first solo feature was winner of the Director's Award when it premiered in competition at Venice Days 2018.

Capri-Revolution

Mario Martone : 2018

It is 1914 and Italy is about to go to war. A commune of young Northern Europeans has found the ideal place for their exploration of life and art on the island of Capri. But the island has its own powerful identity, in the person of a young woman, a goatherd named Lucia. The film tells the story of the encounter between Lucia, the commune led by Seybu and the young village doctor. It also speaks of an island unique in the world, whose Dolomite cliffs plunge into the waters of the Mediterranean, and which at the start of the 20th century acted like a magnet for all those driven by ideals of liberty and progress, such as the Russians whom Maxim Gorky, in exile on Capri, was preparing for the revolution. Mario Martone's feature premiered in competition at Venice International Film Festival 2018.

Hello Apartment

Dakota Fanning : 2018

Ava enters the Brooklyn loft for the first time. It's empty. Freshly painted but old. Sun streams through the large windows, onto the hardwood floor, worn with marks from previous inhabitants. Ava sits down. This is now home. Her home. This is where she'll meet a boy and fall in love. This is where wine will be spilt at the party. This is where they'll scream at each other, and decide it's all over. The apartment will become a witness to Ava's personal history – her joy and sadness, hopes and disappointments – the kind of universal space we all find ourselves evolving into adulthood. The fifteenth commission from designer Miu Miu as part of "Women's Tales", a series of short films by women who critically celebrate femininity in the 21st century. Dakota Fanning's directorial debut screened at Venice Days 2018.

L'amica geniale

Saverio Costanzo : 2018
My Brilliant Friend

When the most important friend of her life appears to have vanished without a trace, Elena Greco, an elderly woman who lives in a house filled with books, turns on her computer and starts to write the story of herself and Lila, the story of a friendship born at elementary school in the 1950s. Set in a dangerous and fascinating Naples, the account that follows covers more than sixty years of life and attempts to unveil the mystery of Lila, Elena's brilliant friend, at once her best friend and worst enemy. Saverio Costanzo's TV drama was shown as a Special Screening, out of competition at Venice International Film Festival 2018.

Les estivants

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi : 2018
The Summer House

A large and beautiful property on the French Riviera. A place that seems out of time and sheltered from the rest of the world. Anna goes there with her daughter for a few days of vacation. Amidst her family, friends and the house staff, she has to handle her fresh break-up with her partner and the writing of her next film. Behind their laughter, anger and secrets emerge fears, desires and power relations. Everyone shuts out the rumblings of the world and must face the mysteries of their own existence. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's feature premiered out of competition at Venice International Film Festival 2018.

Roma

Alfonso Cuarón : 2018

A turbulent year in the lives of a family in 1970s Mexico City. A vivid portrayal of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst political turmoil, the film follows a young domestic worker Cleo from Mixteco heritage descent and her co-worker Adela, also Mixteca, who work for a small family in the middle-class neighbourhood of Roma. Mother of four, Sofia, copes with the extended absence of her husband, Cleo faces her own devastating news that threatens to distract her from caring for Sofia's children, whom she loves as her own. While trying to construct a new sense of love and solidarity in a context of a social hierarchy where class and race are perversely intertwined, Cleo and Sofia quietly wrestle with changes infiltrating the family home in a country facing confrontation between a government-backed militia and student demonstrators. Alfonso Cuarón's feature was winner of the Golden Lion when it premiered in competition at Venice International Film Festival 2018.