2011-2020

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Victoria, a young woman from Madrid, meets four local Berliners outside a nightclub. Sonne and his friends promise to show her a good time and the real side of the city. But these lads have gotten themselves into hot water: they owe someone a dangerous favor that requires repaying that evening. As Victoria’s flirtation with Sonne deepens into something more, he convinces her to come along for the ride. And later, when things become more ominous and possibly lethally dangerous for Sonne, she insists on coming along. As the night takes on an ever more menacing character, what started out as a good time, quickly spirals out of control. As dawn approaches, Victoria and Sonne address the inevitable: it’s all or nothing and they abandon themselves to a heart-stopping race into the depths of hell.Read More »

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Based on fragments from Günther Anders’ novel The Molussian Catacomb, which was written between 1932 and 1936, Nicolas Rey’s captivating nine-part film presents allegorical stories and musings by political prisoners sitting in the pits of an imaginary fascist state called Molussia. Shown in random order whenever it is screened (there are 362,880 potential versions of the film), the film’s nine 16mm reels ruminate on capitalism, imperialism and resistance—accompanied by gritty, unsettling self-processed images of undefined landscapes. A haunting and moving meditation on brutality and control, differently, Molussia has galvanized audiences at festivals around the world.

Since 1993 Rey has been making films that hover between photography, documentaries and the avant-garde. He is one of the founders of the Paris-based artist film lab L’Abominable. (synopsis from Northwest Film Forum)Read More »

Wild Relatives follows the matrix of hierarchies and relationships involved in a transaction of seeds between the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen in Svalbard, an island in the Arctic Ocean, and the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.Read More »

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The spirit of youth and the thirst for knowledge are palpable in Júlia ist, which was written by four screenwriters – the director herself,– Pol Rebaque (also director of photography), Marta Cruañas (also producer), and María Castellvi – who adapted the story to their modest production means. Shot in Berlin and Barcelona, the film stars Elena Martín herself who, despite having trained in theatre, has shown with this film and Las amigas de Ágata that she has a telegenic face and a particular skill at conveying the fears, anxieties and confusions of the “Skype generation”.Read More »

The film is built around Anna (Valeria Golino), a woman who has become so disconnected from life she can only see in grey. She works as a television show prompter, and is by all accounts pretty good at her job. She also has a comfortable existence and several children who love her. The same cannot be said for Anna’s husband Gigi (Massimiliano Gallo). An unscrupulous loan shark, he spends his days screaming abuse at her and their deaf-mute son Arturo (Edoardo Crò) before heading out to ruin the lives of the desperate.Read More »

Stars of the 1940s and 1950s, were they cast for their mutual affinities or for their commercial appeal? If and when they were re-starred years later, did the magic still work? Did sparks still fly? The movie business, a machine that manufactured romance and desire at the same time that it documented the process of aging. A meditation on youth and beauty, aging and box office.Read More »

Ciao Ciao, as arrogant as she is beautiful, grew up in remote village nestled in the heart of Southern China. She goes to Canton and transforms herself into a sexy urban woman. She returns to her village and gets involved with Li Wei, a useless, mostly drunk son of a local moonshine distiller. A Tennessee Williams style drama takes its course.

This movie addresses issues facing young women in Chinese villages, the conflicts they face due to social and familial expectations that stem from ancestral Confucianism, especially as it relates to self sacrifice for elders.Read More »

WOMAN SUN tells the romantic story of two sisters who have left the hustle and bustle of the city. Somewhere beyond the noises of the city, they both seek happiness, but each one in her own way.

The film won the World Premiere Feature prize at Avanca International Film Festival in Portugal.Read More »

An unnamed young man arrives in the foreign city of Strasbourg for reasons unstated. He waits at a hotel, visits a café, sketches passersby… Eventually his motives are revealed, but it is not a traditional narrative that Guerín is after so much as the urban experience of watching, waiting, absorbing. Out of these materials Guerín builds a spellbinding film that reminds us of cinema’s powerful ability to evoke the tugs of memory, desire and the transitory. An extraordinary city film, Sylvia almost entirely eschews dialogue to instead give a symphonic voice to the city itself through a rich and fully immersive soundtrack of urban sounds, explosions of music and strangeRead More »