Uskyld

Sara Johnsen : 2012
All That Matters is Past

Two brothers in their forties are found dead in the forest. By their side lies a woman, very weak, but still alive. William and Janne grew up together in an isolated rural area and became sweethearts when they were teenagers. They were left mostly to their own devices as kids – Janne's window to the wider world was largely provided by magazines she scavenged from a nearby dump – and their outlook is somewhat skewed, to say the least. Reunited after several years apart, their love seems inextricably bound to the wild landscape where they met and the special bond they have with nature. Janne leaves her family to live with William in a cabin by the river. They recreate the feeling of love and lust that they had as children, playing in the woods. The days they spend together in the countryside seem idyllic, as the wind blows gracefully through the reeds as if to welcome them. Yet this idyll hints at events they refuse to speak about and when William's psychologically damaged, perpetually resentful older brother Ruud resurfaces once again, William and Janne are forced to confront the dark secrets of their past.

Foto

Carlos Saboga : 2012
Photo

The story of Elisa's return to the past, to the turbulent 1970s, in the footsteps of her recently deceased mother Elsa. When, looking at photos and reliving memories of her mother, she starts to suspect that her biological father is in fact not Tom after all, Elisa travels from Paris to Lisbon to meet the group of revolutionaries that accompanied her mother in the period during which she was conceived. Elisa's strong resemblance to her mother provokes a strange effect on this group of comrades, rejection and attraction in equal parts. One is now a respectable university professor, another has been committed to a mental institution, while another still, now a right-wing government minister, tries to avoid her at all costs. Collective and historical memory of a complex and violent political past becomes entwined with Elisa's intimate and personal memory of her mother, as she is startled to discover an episode in the latter's life that she could never have imagined. Carlos Saboga's first feature premiered in competition in the CinemaXXI section at Rome Film Festival 2012.

Operation Zucker

Rainer Kaufmann : 2012
Silent Children

The promise of a better life is pivotal in ten-year-old Fee's decision to travel from her home in Romania to Germany. But she falls victim to child traffickers and is forced to work in a Berlin nightclub fronting for a child prostitution ring. She is freed, however, after a police raid. When commissioner Karin Wegemann takes up this serious case of sexual abuse, there's a shocking discovery: a respected judge is a customer of the crime ring, and the state attorney helping her is a good friend of the judge. Are the police capable of protecting the young girl? Who can be trusted in this web of lies and corruption? Rainer Kaufmann's crime drama addresses the serious flaws in society and their weakest victims: children. The film premiered at Filmfest München 2012.

Vergiss mein nicht

David Sieveking : 2012
Forget Me Not

David Sieveking left home years ago to make films. Now he has returned to help his mother, Gretel, who has Alzheimer's, and relieve her long-time carer and his father Malte for a few weeks. David's parents were active in the student movement of the 1960s and had an open relationship, which the disease is now dramatically putting to the test. His mother's changes force the family to deal with their conflicts and to adopt a cordial approach, which leads to a new bond. The filmmaker takes on the role of carer and documents this encounter with his camera. Gretel no longer knows the people around her, but her puns and charm have not faded. The time spent with his mother becomes a journey into David's unexpected family history. Presented with openness and a sense of humour, David's family chronicle is characterised by unaffected sympathy and loving affection, with a constant focus on the people rather than on the disease. Winner of the Semaine de la Critique award at Locarno Film Festival 2012.

W sypialni

Tomasz Wasilewski : 2012
In a Bedroom

Edyta is forty and in the midst of a crisis. She has left her family, her husband and son and their house on the Baltic Sea behind her. She spends her nights in a Warsaw hotel room and her days driving around the unfamiliar city. When she runs out of cash, she places an ad in the newspaper and arranges meetings online with strange men with implied sexual intentions. Edyta never lets things get that far though, as she drugs her clients and uses their apartments as a refuge for the night. Then she meets an artist, Patryk, and Edyta can no longer maintain her dismissive attitude. This enthralling character study, using filmic minimalism to ensure that glances and gestures say more than words, portrays a lonely woman in both fragility and strength. Tomasz Wasilewski's debut feature screened in competition at Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival 2012.

Lovable

Park Chul-soon : 2011
Da-seul-i

Nine-year-old Da-seul lives in a seaside town with her grandmother who works at a factory and her uncle who is a waiter at a nightclub. Whilst they think she is merely a mentally challenged child, Da-seul has actually inherited a special talent for art along with her autism. She draws pictures everywhere in the village during the day, and watches a snowman cartoon over and over again on video at night. When the long-awaited snow falls in the village, Da-seul makes a snowman and looks after it affectionately and starts to cover the town with black paint. Focusing on the young girl, this drama sensitively depicts the life of a child with Savant syndrome, a diagnosis within the autism spectrum, and the particular difficulties she faces every day. Da-seul makes a lot of trouble, but her grandmother and uncle don't get angry with her. Even with her many problems, she is lovable and she is loved. The film highlights how savants often demonstrate profound capacities and abilities far in excess of what would be considered normal, and how these skills improve if they are given a setting where the individual can focus.

Where the Fire Burns

İsmail Güneş : 2012
Ateşin Düştüğü Yer

Sixteen-year-old Ayşe lives with her family on a Turkish farm and is her father's favourite daughter. One day, unexpectedly taken ill, she is brought to a hospital for emergency heart surgery. During the operation the doctors also discover that Ayşe is pregnant. Once recovered from the successful surgery, she refuses to reveal the identy of her baby's father, and Osman, Ayşe's father, is ordered to kill his daughter by the family council. Supposedly taking her to her uncle's until she gives birth, he embarks instead on an ominous journey with the serenely unsuspecting Ayşe, a pick and shovel in the car boot, beside a bottle of poison. In reality, this should be her last journey, but during their trip along the Turkish coast the father and daughter rediscover their true relationship – his anguish growing as she starts reacting to the poison slipped into her water bottle. Will Osman be able to break through the constraint of the ritual honour killing before it is too late? Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at Montréal World Film Festival 2012.

Bez wstydu

Filip Marczewski : 2012
Shameless

The story of a love between a brother and sister, their painful growing up, their defiance of cultural taboos and finally, about the freedom of finding their own way in life. Eighteen-year-old Tadek is a boy rebelling against the world. Right before the end of the school year, he runs away from his aunt to his elder sister Anka, who is his only love. He is ashamed of these feelings and tries to fight them, to no avail. Heedless of the moral and social consequences, he wants to prove worthy of this forbidden love. Anka, also emotionally broken, in an unhappy relationship with the leader of a local neo-Nazi group, finds it difficult to reject her brother's adoration. She needs love and warmth as badly as her brother. At first, Tadek, fighting for the love of his sister, ignores Irmina, an uncompromising Romani girl who seeks his attention. In Tadek, Irmina sees the only one who could help her free herself from the taboos of her people – the law requiring the Romani woman to obediently accept an arranged marriage to a man whom she has never met. Filip Marczewski's formidable debut feature fearlessly yet tenderly explores one of society's last taboos. An incendiary story of love, desire and betrayal between siblings, set to the background of growing European extremism and xenophobia.

Fjellet

Ole Giæver : 2011
The Mountain

Two years ago, Nora and Solveig's five-year-old son, Vetle, died on a mountain hike. Their grief over his death has weighed heavily on their relationship ever since. For Nora, the child's biological mother, the pain of her loss has caused her to become increasingly bitter. Although Solveig loved Vetle just as much, Nora begins to question the sincerity of Solveig's grief. The boy's death has changed Solveig and she now finds that she can't imagine a life without a child any more. But how would Nora react? Would it ruin their relationship if Solveig were to have a child? Together, the two women set off on a journey to the mountain where their child died. Solveig hopes their return will be cathartic, helping them to cope with their grief and giving their relationship a chance. But as all the suppressed bitterness, hurt feelings and fears gradually surface the closer the women get to the site of the accident, the more they seem to be drifting towards the end of their relationship.

Chaika

Miguel Ángel Jiménez : 2012
Seagull

Α love story between a prostitute and a loser sailor, rebuilt between two seasons: the eternal winter of Siberia and summer in the dusty steppes of Kazakhstan. It's the story of three ways back home. Aysha's return to the steppes of Baikonur. Asylbek's trip to the innermost mountains of Seit. And Tursyn's way home to face what remains of his family: an old nomad about to die and a shipwrecked father. Both of them will bring back the vague memories that Tursyn has of his mother. It is the adventure of joining those memories that life left scattered in the most distant tundra, almost at the end of the world. The film premiered in competition at San Sebastián Film Festival 2012.

Dear Betrayed Friends

Sára Cserhalmi : 2012
Drága besúgott barátaim

Andor Czettl, in his early sixties, visits the declassified Communist archives one day to read the reports filed about him by the secret police. To his surprise he discovers that even his best friend János Pásztor informed against him, for decades. Focusing on the contradictory relationship of the two protagonists rather than the bare act of the problem, the film reflects on those chapters of Hungary's recent past that are still unclear. How can an informer live with himself? How can the one who was reported on cope with this state? Can a close friendship that began decades ago last if such betrayal comes to light? This disturbing psychological drama confronts a sensitive topic from the not-too-distant past that Hungary has yet to give due attention, bravely asking unpleasant questions but avoiding absolute judgements. Sára Cserhalmi's debut feature was winner of the Competition 1-2 Award at Warsaw International Film Festival 2012.

Noor

Çağla Zencirci & Guillaume Giovanetti : 2012

Shafiq is known as Noor in Pakistan's Khusras transgender community, where he found the kind of love that changed his life. Now, however, he will appear as a man and take on a man's work for a company that ornately decorates transport trucks. He even finds a girl who loves him as he is. And despite objections from Yasmeen's brother, Noor goes ahead with the wedding plans. But a scuffle with a drunken rapist sends him on a journey in a stolen truck that forces him to redefine his own identity and his place in the world. Noor's destination is a mountain lake. According to his wise old boss Babu, the lake is shrouded in legend and will allow Noor to magically bring about a definitive transformation. Inspired by real events in the lead actor's life, the directors' debut feature premiered at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2012.

Camion

Rafaël Ouellet : 2012

Widower Germain has been a truck driver all his life. After being involved in a road accident that causes the death of a woman, Germain's world collapses. He feels an overwhelming sense of guilt and remorse that keeps him away from the wheel. His state of mind soon starts to worry his younger son Samuel, who puts his own janitor job in Montréal on hold to track down his older brother, drifter Alain, in New Brunswick, hoping to head back together to their hometown to give some support to their father. By turning their family's dynamics upside down, Germain and his sons struggle to retrieve the ties that bound them earlier in their lives and to find hope for the future. With its captivating camerawork and formal and narrative purity, the film addresses, unsentimentally, life's most basic issues. Winner of Best Director and Ecumenical Jury Awards at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2012.

Kebun binatang

Edwin : 2012
Postcards from the Zoo

The zoo – a place of yearning. The zoo animals are yearning for freedom and many of the visitors long for adventure and the call of the wild. It is in these surroundings, where imagining yourself into other worlds is easy, that Lana grows up. When she was a little girl, her father left her behind in the colourful Jakarta zoo to be raised by zoo keepers. What dreams and longings does a young woman have who has grown up among giraffes, elephants and hippos? Is the cowboy who appears one day and is able to do magic merely a wish summoned into solid form, or is he real? Lana will assist him, and take her first steps outside her familiar world. But as suddenly as he appeared, the cowboy will disappear again by magic. On her own now, Lana begins to work as a masseuse at a spa. But the memory of the cowboy and nostalgia for the seemingly enchanted zoo will not leave her alone. The film premiered in competition at Berlin International Film Festival 2012.

Le sac de farine

Khadija Leclère : 2012
The Bag of Flour

Alsemberg, December 1975. Eight-year-old Sarah lives in a Catholic foster home. One day, her biological father, whom she has never met, comes to take her for a weekend in Paris. But it is in Morocco that Sarah wakes up to the call to prayer, in a little town lost in the foothills of the Atlas. Very soon, her father leaves, abandoning her without any discussion or explanation. She does not even know the language of the country, nor those people who present themselves as her family. Resigned, she slips into the life of a little girl where the only schooling she is offered is that of knitting. Time passes and Sarah, now 17, has became a Moroccan girl like any other, or nearly so. She has learned Arabic and appears to be fully assimilated. But her one desire is to leave, to find her lost Belgian childhood, her school and her books, and what she imagines is a life of freedom. Now she will fight for the right to choose her own life and not suffer one that has been chosen for her.

Sekret

Przemysław Wojcieszek : 2012
Secret

Ksawery and Karolina are visiting Jan in the country. Ksawery is a dancer who performs as a drag queen and Karolina is his agent. Jan is Ksawery's grandfather. Ksawery is gay, Karolina Jewish. Jan, over 80, is a former resistance soldier but guards a dark secret from the time of the Holocaust. Karolina knows that the house witnessed a murder which has gone unpunished for seventy years and she wants answers. Ksawery's love for his grandfather is in conflict with his urge to find out what happened back then. Identity here is composed of different layers that do not always harmonise according to background and allegiance. The film taps into the seam of our identity that is passed on by preceding generations, a process that can hurt but also heal. In experimental form, it immerses us in a questioning of individual and collective identities which goes far beyond the historical aspect – there may be no answers, but the questions resonate long after. The film premiered at Berlin International Film Festival 2012.

Un mundo secreto

Gabriel Mariño : 2012
A Secret World

María's last day of class marks the start of a journey. She'll cross Mexico but doesn't really know why. What she does know is that it isn't a fun trip. She knows it's not something to write home about, it's something else, it's a journey that began in the depths of her dreams and in her broken heart. Eighteen-year-old María is a solitary and promiscuous dreamer, struggling to make sense of her life in a harsh and vibrant Mexico City. Leaving her world behind, she embarks on an epic road trip, a secret and mysterious journey of self-discovery, from the city's urban chaos to the deserts of Sinaloa and the vast oceans of La Paz. Within these immense and shifting landscapes, María comes of age. She has one intimate, secret dream that only she knows about, and then she meets a young man who is different from all the rest. In a spectacular and spiritual conclusion, the natural world embraces María with pure poetic force. The film premiered at Berlin International Film Festival 2012.

Back to Your Arms

Kristijonas Vildžiūnas : 2010
Kai apkabinsiu tave

It's 1961. A father and his daughter are trying to meet in Berlin seventeen years after they were separated by fate during World War II. The father is from Soviet Lithuania and the daughter an émigré living in the United States. Despite the fact that there is a "thawing" period in the Soviet Union and the wall has not yet been erected in Berlin, the Cold War is approaching its culmination. As soon as the father arrives in Berlin, undercover employees of the KGB begin taking care of him. They try to entice the daughter to come to the East. However, the atmosphere of the city seeped with mistrust has affected her, and she is afraid to step across the boundary line of West Berlin. The few kilometres that now separate them have become an immeasurable distance. In order to help each other escape any potential KGB entrapments, both father and daughter are prepared to renounce the meeting they've been yearning for for so long. Winner of the Silver Crane at the Lithuanian Film Awards 2011.

Hara

Elias Yannakakis : 2012
Joy

Hara leaves the maternity ward with a baby in her arms. She spends her days looking after her newborn. Daily scenes of affection, familiarisation, devotion, but also acquaintance with the infant, to the melody of a lullaby. Everything seems cosy and warm, and the days spent with her baby, whom she cherishes, bring Hara much happiness. But the recurring news report about a baby that has been kidnapped from the maternity ward brings us back to reality with a jolt. We feel torn as we watch Hara go to extremes to protect her baby. Like any mother would. When Hara ends up in police custody, locked up in a cell, face to face with her own truth, she chooses silence. Regardless of an impending life sentence, she shows no interest in defending herself. And when the hearing begins, she remains silent during proceedings. Besides the abduction of the baby, she is accused of murdering a man (allegedly her accessory) and for having planned the kidnapping with the aforementioned victim. It is only ourselves who know that nothing of all this, is true. The film premiered at Thessaloniki International Film Festival 2012.

La clé des champs

Claude Nuridsany & Marie Pérennou : 2011
The Field of Enchantment

A deserted pond. Two lonely children fall under the spell of this wild place that, little by little, draws them closer to each other and gives them the strength to cope with life. The pond, a place they have chosen as a sort of virgin paradise, a refuge far from the world of grown-ups, becomes a magical mirror through which they discover unknown beings that will return them anew to their own lives. Seen through their eyes, and through their imaginations, the pond becomes a secret kingdom, both marvellous and frightening, thronging with creatures born from dreams or nightmares. The children experience an initiation, brief and intense, from which they will emerge transformed. Both in love with the same kingdom, they break free from their solitude and little by little discover friendship. The film premiered at La Biennale di Venezia 2011.