Sto spiti

Athanasios Karanikolas : 2014
At Home

Up in a spacious house on the hills of Marathon. A beautiful view of the Aegean Sea. This is where Nadja lives. Along with Stefanos, Evi and their daughter Iris. The four of them are close. They are family. Or so it seems. This is also where Nadja works. She is cleaning, cooking, nursing. Nadja is the family's housemaid. She has been with them since the child spoke her first word. She has been there for Evi when she lost her second child. But in the wake of the country's crisis everything is turned upside down: Nadja is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Driven by financial angst and the fear of having to compromise their own lives Stefanos and Evi decide to let Nadja go. They make her leave. They replace her. Yet she shows no external sign of how these two traumatic events have affected her. Athanasios Karanikolas's third feature was winner of the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury when it premiered at Berlin International Film Festival 2014. His film screened at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2014.

Life in a Fishbowl

Baldvin Zophoníasson : 2014
Vonarstræti

Three stories about three people whose lives are intertwined and who must face decisive changes to find some sort of redemption. A formerly successful writer, Móri, now an alcoholic, is still dealing with a stroke of fate from twenty years ago. He has just handed a manuscript for a new book to his publisher. Eik, a young, single mother doesn't earn enough as a nursery school teacher to take proper care of her family. She moonlights as a prostitute to make ends meet. Finally, former footballer and upcoming banker, Sölvi, carries out immoral orders to please his boss. He becomes increasingly estranged from his family. On closer inspection, the stories unveil layer upon layer of meaning which become ever thicker and more complicated as we delve deeper into each character. What the main characters have in common is that they all lead a double life in one way or another. They all have daughters of a similar age and all have some sort of reckoning with the past, present or future looming over them. Baldvin Zophoníasson's second feature premiered at Reykjavik Film Festival 2014, and won the NDR Film Prize at Nordic Film Days Lübeck 2014. His film screened at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2014.

Strefa nagości

Urszula Antoniak : 2014
Nude Area

Love doesn't unfold like a story. Only the first and the last chapters are known. Love starts from Love and ends in Letting go. In between there is tenderness and cruelty, waiting and fulfilment, ecstasy and disappointment. If love is a discourse, these are her figures of speech. An adolescent love between two girls, Naomi and Fama, one Dutch, the other Arabic. Childish cruelty is mixed with full-blown sensuality. Dreams and life reflect and complete each other. The end is known, the story will be told after the love is gone. Urszula Antoniak's third feature premiered at Gdynia Film Festival 2014, and screened at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2014.

Des étoiles

Dyana Gaye : 2013
Under the Starry Sky

Between Turin, Dakar, and New York, Sophie, Abdoulaye and Thierno's three destinies cross paths and echo one another, delineating a constellation of exile. Sophie, 24 years old, leaves Dakar to join her husband, Abdoulaye, in Turin. Meanwhile, Abdoulaye has already left for New York through a smuggler's network. 19-year-old Thierno is travelling in Africa for the first time. With these three characters' destinies, the story takes us on a journey through the diversity of the cities the characters travel to, confronting us with the realities, hopes, and dreams of contemporary emigration. Dyana Gaye's feature premiered at Toronto International Film Festival 2013, and was winner of the European Jury Award at Angers European First Film Festival 2014.

He ovat paenneet

J-P Valkeapää : 2014
They have Escaped

A boy and a girl meet at a detention centre for problematic youth. The boy has come to serve his obligatory civilian service. The girl is constantly in trouble, with a fire inside her and a lust for life that can't be quashed or controlled. The boy becomes infatuated with the girl. He is a quiet one, but there is a fire inside him as well. Rules, laws, punishment: the shackles can be broken. One day they steal a car and run away together. Thus begins one long escape, without end. A cinematic fairy tale in which the main characters embark on a journey overland, through the woods and across the waters. Towards their childhood, towards their dreams and towards their selfhoods. Banal landscapes, hallucinations, and dreams during both day and night make up the worlds of the film. All the worlds are equally real. J-P Valkeapää's second feature premiered at Venice Days 2014.

Loin des hommes

David Oelhoffen : 2014
Far from Men

Algeria, 1954. While the rebellion rumbles in the valley, two very different men thrown together by a world in turmoil, are forced to flee together across the Atlas mountains. In the midst of an icy winter, Daru, the reclusive teacher, has to escort Mohamed, a villager accused of murder. Pursued by horsemen seeking summary justice and vengeful settlers, the two men decide to confront the unknown. Together, they fight to gain their freedom. In a land of colonisers and the colonised, a collision between two systems of law, two cultures and two moralities forced into coexistence by history. The story focuses on the exploration of the two characters, the relationship that develops between them and their moral motivations. David Oelhoffen's feature was the winner of numerous awards when it premiered at Venice International Film Festival 2014.

The Keeping Room

Daniel Barber : 2014

In rural South Carolina in the final days of the American Civil War, Augusta, her teenaged sister Louise, and their young African-American slave Mad have been left to maintain the family farm on their own. With all of the men – fathers, brothers, farmhands – long since departed for the battlefield and now presumed missing or dead, the three women harbour fears about the future, unaware that a greater peril is much closer at hand. When an illness sends Augusta to a nearby town in search of medicine, she finds a welter of death and terror wrought by two Yankee scouts, who have embarked upon some private pillaging in advance of the approaching Union Army. Though Augusta manages to escape their clutches, the renegades track her back to the farm. The ensuing battle between the young women and their assailants is fierce, furious, and unpredictable. A tale of survival capturing a transitional moment in history. As Augusta, Louise, and Mad combat the merciless marauders, their struggle takes place in the context of larger changes: the end of slavery, the end of an agrarian economy, and an end to these women's reliance on men for their safety and well-being. Daniel Barber's second feature premiered at Toronto International Film Festival 2014, and had its European premiere at London Film Festival 2014.

In der Stille der Nacht

Erich Steiner : 2014
In the Still of the Night

On a rainy autumn night, a storm approaches. Three children are waiting for their father, once again late from work. When the father comes home, he looks tired and sad but he brought gifts, and the children's eyes shine. Tension can be sensed between the parents: only the grandmother is loving as always but the eldest daughter is suspicious – deep inside she feels that her family is hiding something. Erich Steiner's film was winner of the Award for Best Actor at Cluj Shorts International Short Film Festival 2014, and screened in competition at International Film Festival Tofifest 2014.

La isla mínima

Alberto Rodríguez : 2014
Marshland

The Spanish deep south, 1980. Two adolescent girls have disappeared during local festivities in a remote and forgotten town in the Guadalquivir wetlands. Two policemen from the homicide division in Madrid are destined to take on the case. One, the younger, is idealistic and progressive and is going to be a father soon. The other, an old school opportunist, is keeping secrets that he would do well not to reveal. Two complex men who would never be friends or colleagues unless they are forced to take on a mission and to obey their superiors. A strike threatens the local rice harvest which complicates their investigations and they are pressed to solve the case as quickly as possible. What they do discover, however, is evidence that many more youngsters have disappeared and that there is another source of wealth: drug trafficking. With deep divisions in their ideology, detectives Juan and Pedro must put aside their differences if they are to successfully hunt down a serial killer who for years has terrorised a community in the shadow of a general disregard for women, rooted in a misogynistic past. Alberto Rodríguez's feature received the Feroz Zinemaldia Award when it premiered in competition at San Sebastián International Film Festival 2014.

Las horas contigo

Catalina Aguilar Mastretta : 2014
The Hours with You

Ema finds out she is pregnant with an unplanned child she's not sure she wants to keep, the same week her beloved grandmother becomes gravely ill. At her grandmother's side during her last days, Ema is forced to spend time with her estranged, larger-than-life mother, getting to know her and seeing her with new eyes. As she spends time with the people gathered around her grandmother, Ema re-evaluates her beliefs, her fears and her set ideas about family, love and parenthood. Catalina Aguilar Mastretta's feature debut was winner of the FIPRESCI Prize when it premiered at Guadalajara Mexican Film Festival 2014, and had its European premiere at Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid 2014.

La foresta di ghiaccio

Claudio Noce : 2014
The Ice Forest

A mystery surrounds the dam that overlooks a small village in the Italian Alps, on the border with Slovenia. Lana, a determined policewoman, passing herself off as a zoologist tracking bears, attempts to uncover the secrets of this rough and wary community. As a storm approaches menacingly in the background, Pietro, a young expert technician, comes to the valley to repair a malfunction at the high-altitude electrical plant. He is suddenly involved in a strange disappearance that leads him to clash with brothers Lorenzo and Secondo, who live and work in the area. When the young man understands the origin of the secrets hidden in the heart of the valley, the tensions explode with extreme cruelty and distorting mirrors make no one immune from suspicion, not even Lana, the bears expert zoologist. A slow-motion suspense thriller and noir, about borderlands and illegal immigrant trafficking; about a past that resurfaces and a cold-blooded vendetta, twenty years on. Claudio Noce's second feature premiered at Rome Film Festival 2014.

Fidelio, l'odyssée d'Alice

Lucie Borleteau : 2014
Fidelio: Alice's Journey

Alice, a mechanical engineer, joins the crew of the ship Fidelio. She leaves behind her loving boyfriend, Félix, who waits for her back at port. She soon realises that the Fidelio is an old friend: the first vessel on which she worked, and which is still captained by the man who was the first great love of her life, Gaël, with whom she had an affair that was left unfinished. The powerful return to the past mingles with what Alice reads in a diary she finds in her cabin, which belonged to her predecessor who died on board in strange circumstances. Reading the diary unexpectedly reveals to her aspects of her own life that are difficult to face. Torn between a powerful past love that she could never fully enjoy, the security of a stable relationship and her sometimes irrational desires, Alice risks going under, overpowered by the ghosts that linger onboard the Fidelio. As the days go by, on the high seas or in exotic ports, Alice's physical crossing becomes an emotional voyage from which she will emerge a different person. Lucie Borleteau's feature debut premiered at Locarno Film Festival 2014, and screened in competition at Sevilla European Film Festival 2014.

La ignorancia de la sangre

Manuel Gómez Pereira : 2014
The Ignorance of Blood

Javier Falcón, head of the Homicide Division in Seville, has to solve two different matters in very little time. On the one hand, the kidnapping of a child (the son of Consuelo, his girlfriend) by the Russian mafia, whom he is investigating. On the other, a case of espionage that has to do with an Islamic terrorist group, which an old friend of his has infiltrated, and which is now trying to recruit his adolescent son for the cause. Two active fronts, apparently unconnected, but there are more links between them than Falcón imagines. Based on the best-selling detective novel by Robert Wilson. Manuel Gómez Pereira's thriller premiered at Sevilla European Film Festival 2014.

Test

Aleksandr Kott : 2014
Ispytanie

In a modest house in the midst of the Kazakh steppe lives Tolgat and his gentle, beautiful daughter, Dinara. When he sets off for work she is left behind, and in the evenings she takes care of her weary father. They live a quiet life in the vast plain until two young men fall for the girl. This love triangle will lead to a wholly unexpected turn of events. In August 1953, Muscovite Maxim Smirnov, an assistant cameraman, travels to Semipalatinsk as part of a film crew with a secret mission. Here, in the open spaces of the steppe, he encounters his first love, the young Dinara. Celebrating the simplicity of a secluded life, the film's imagery gently follows the change of seasons, but amidst these idyllic scenes, the signs of Soviet interference appear with the visit of a Russian patrol. The girl discovers a barbed wire fence, which hides a forbidden zone in the middle of the desert. The young people do not know that very soon they will be at the epicentre of events which will forever change not only their lives, but also those of mankind. Here, in Semipalatinsk, in this hot summer, the test of the first hydrogen bomb will take place. A visually stunning and poetic work, shedding light on a dark chapter of Soviet military history. Aleksandr Kott's feature was winner of the Grand Prix and the prize for Best Cinematography when it premiered at Kinotavr Open Russian Film Festival 2014, and was named Best International Feature at Altın Portakal Film Festival 2014.

Karpotrotter

Matjaž Ivanišin : 2013
Karpopotnik

A road film about the passage of time and about memory. In the 1970s, young Yugoslav filmmaker Karpo Godina travels with an 8mm camera in his hand across the flatlands of Vojvodina's interior and its sleepy rural areas. The multi-ethnic character of the region was translated into a wide variety of faces, languages and customs. Only fragments have remained from his trip. Forty years later, Slovenian director Matjaž Ivanišin pays tribute to the acclaimed director Godina by retracing his steps through small, remote villages, using the rare preserved fragments and talking to the villagers who still remember Godina's visit. The film is divided in five parts, each about the local character of various villages. Using a multi-layered approach in terms of time and space, it functions as a kind of painful lament over the rural culture of Yugoslavia. Matjaž Ivanišin's documentary had its international premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2014, and won the award for Best Documentary at Zagreb Film Festival 2014.

L'altra frontera

André Cruz Shiraiwa : 2014
Another Frontier

A love story between a mother and her son. Hannah, a wealthy upper-class woman, and her son León flee from a domestic war that has isolated their country. They have set their sights on crossing the border, placing all their hopes on "No Man's Land", a refugee camp located at the border that hides a sinister surprise. After a long journey fraught with difficulties, mother and son are finally given shelter at the camp, where they find well-deserved stability but will be subjected to a severely oppressive system, forcing them to compete to be able to stay. Everything falls apart with the appearance of Claus, an old acquaintance who claims to know a secret about Hannah and León that, if brought to light, would endanger their lives. In their struggle to achieve their dream, Hannah and León will be challenged, and the situation will test the limits of their moral boundaries. André Cruz Shiraiwa's feature debut premiered at Sitges International Film Festival 2014.

En août

Jenna Hasse : 2014
In August

It is August, early in the morning. Six-year-old Margaux wakes up. She goes to the window and sees her father putting objects and boxes into his car. Her mother is still sleeping. A story about the final moments between a father and his daughter before he leaves their home – for good, as it seems. Although very young, children like little Margaux can ask very mature and "grown-up" questions and the film tackles the contradictions of Margaux's childish nature and her awareness of the serious nature of the situation she is in. She can smell changes in this August morning – a morning which promises to be a singular and significant moment for the little girl. Margaux will never again be a child in the same way. Jenna Hasse's debut short film premiered at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at Festival de Cannes 2014, and screened at Zagreb Film Festival 2014.

Children 404

Pavel Loparev & Askold Kurov : 2014
Дети 404

In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin passed a bill forbidding the "promotion of non-traditional sexual relations to minors". LGBT youth, now defenceless against insults and intimidation under this "gay propaganda" law, are considered sick, sinful and abnormal. Psychologists, teachers and even parents can be fined or imprisoned for supporting them. Forty-five Russian teens and tweens share their stories through anonymous interviews and video diaries. They detail their humiliations and discriminations, as well as their courageous stands against bullies. Their testimonies are collected online as the Children 404 project, named after the common "error 404 - page not found" web message. The support group's founder struggles within the system to bring public attention and empathy to the victims of this government-endorsed hate, while activist Pasha decides he must leave his homeland altogether if he hopes to find a boyfriend and lead a normal life. Has a new Stone Age arrived in Russia? Pavel Loparev and Askold Kurov's documentary premiered at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival 2014.

Die kalte Wahrheit

Franziska Meletzky : 2014
The Cold Truth

On a foggy winter night, a young doctor named Helen Liebermann accidentally runs over and kills 18-year-old Moritz Dombrowski. The criminal investigation against her is quickly dropped but the mysterious circumstances of how Moritz came to be alone on that night keep bothering her, leaving behind many unanswered questions which compel her to pursue. What was Moritz doing in the middle of the night in the freezing cold, ten kilometres from the next town, without a jacket, barefoot and cowering in the middle of the road? Neither her work nor her partner Dirk can give her back the strength and confidence that used to constitute her life. While Helen keeps pushing Dirk away, it is her lawyer, Wagner, who seems to be sharing a similarly tragic past that she confides in and asks for help. Together they reconstruct that fateful night and are confronted with the terrifying truth. Inspired by a real case, Franziska Meletzky's TV feature premiered at Filmfest Hamburg 2014.

Naked Island

Tiha K Gudac : 2014
Goli

Some sixty years ago, a man went missing for four years. He returned back a changed man carrying along a painful secret. He later built his family's life around this unspoken of secret. Talking about the past was forbidden in the family. It was his granddaughter, also the director of this film, who first started asking questions, wanting to find out what lay hidden beneath her grandfather's scar covered body ever since childhood. However, he died without revealing the entire story to anyone. Naked Island is an investigation built upon the remnants of the past, a mosaic made of clues – family photos and intimate testimonies of a tight-knit group of people who were brought together by the same place, an island of broken souls, and the consequences that this place left on three generations. At the same time, it is a fascinating portrayal of a moment in which a past can finally become history. Tiha K Gudac's directorial debut was winner of the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Film in Documentary Competition when it premiered at Sarajevo Film Festival 2014, and received a Special Mention of the Jury at Zagreb Film Festival 2014.