2011-2020

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High school can be horrible, especially when your classmates make you feel like a freak. But sometimes that pain only means that finding the person who gets you is all the sweeter. Loner Sara is in her last year of high school and is miserable. She is shunned by the girls in her class for being “weird” and spends her lunches smoking in a hiding place behind the school. That is, until the new girl, Andrea, invades her hideout one day. Andrea and Sara fall for each other instantly, bonding over their love of books and solitude. Things might actually start to look up for Sara, but then the world intrudes and threatens their happiness. Can their love survive homophobic classmates and parents?Read More »

Despite harsh condemnation and denunciation from society, a heterosexual female pastor founded Taiwan’s first LGBT-affirming church in May 1996. For LGBT Christians, who had been rejected by the Christian community for a long time, they finally have a church that offers them a safe haven. Though the founder has passed away, the church members continue to make their voice heard, confronting the unjust social institutions while struggling with religious conflict at the same time. Come hell or high water, they strive to make a difference in the lives of others by telling their own life stories, in hope that love will eventually trump hate and solve misunderstanding someday.Read More »

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Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a series of rituals in which an old trauma is remembered and exorcized.Read More »

A dying town in the lush, water-fed mountains of Japan’s southeastern Nara Prefecture inspires Mexican multihyphenate Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio to ruminate on natural wonders and the melancholy inevitability facing an aging population in “Inori.” Produced by Naomi Kawase as part of her Nara Film Fest’s Narative project, the docu adheres closely to the Kawase model of nature lensed in a minor key, and fans of Gonzalez-Rubio’s “Alamar” will find gentle pleasures in this agreeable yet slight work.Read More »

After seven years of dictatorship, a remote village in Argentina formally becomes a town with the birth of its 501st inhabitant. Hidalgo, a slick and ingratiating scion, is eager for the new post of mayor. Smelling a rat, Baldomero (a beloved natural leader with a habitually tapping digit) opposes him with his own candidacy—and soon turns up dead. His shopkeeper brother vows revenge, keeping Baldomero’s severed finger in a jar, initially as a remembrance, but eventually as an absurd icon of leadership that spurs the town to defy crooked elections, interloping powers and Hidalgo to go its own way. Based on real events, this charming dramatic comedy pokes fun at small town ways while celebrating true democratic values.Read More »

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A woman’s past as a convict follows her everywhere and because of this she doesn’t open up to others. But then she strikes up a friendship with a broken child who has suffered from domestic violence and decides to save the girl from the cruel world. A man who holds feelings for the woman, tries to protect her in his own way.Read More »

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The foolish servant Pulcinella is sent from the depths of Mt. Vesuvius to present-day Campania to honor the last wishes of the poor shepherd Tommaso: his mission is to save a young buffalo called Sarchiapone. Pulcinella finds the animal at the former royal palace of Carditello, where Tommaso had looked after the ruined Bourbon estate in the heart of the Land of Fires. He takes the buffalo off to the north and the two servants, man and beast, travel through a beautiful and lost Italy, but their long journey’s end does not bring what they were hoping for.Read More »

A man with no emotional ties, a survivor of a long journey, collects giddy images, scattered fragments of a splintered identity like the regions he crosses through. He wears himself out with the strangeness of signs, places, and unfathomable languages. There is no god or indulgence in his nights, but the acceptance that there is only flesh.
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Working in an insular farming community in Appalachia, Sal Damon, a modern-day Thoreau, seeks solace from a past relationship. After a sudden death in the community and the discovery of a feral child living on the lam, Sal must reconcile his place in a world that lives outside of the law.Read More »