2020s

As many parents are, Sara’s are divorced. As few parents are, Sara’s dad is a professional clown. After a major life event, Sara has the opportunity to finally spend quality time with her dad and meet the person behind the clown.Read More »

Here is a beautifully crafted film, seemingly simple as ABC. It involves no tall tales, only modest work – we listen to Robert Schumann’s lieder at home or in the car, we eat, we wash, we celebrate, we weep, etc. Yet, the film is obviously based on some intricate knotwork, maybe like a nod in its own way to the famous double-helix staircase in Chambord, the magnificent castle where Jacques Demy filmed his Peau d’Ane, and where many scenes in this film were shot as well. What should we believe then? First, that there is no “we”, that women and men share, asymmetrically, the singing and the listening, the hunting and the defeat. Read More »

An immersive cinematic poem of a 7 year journey of return, “Kitâb al-Isfâr: Book of the Journey” weaves together stories of near-death and mystical experience in Andalucia. According to the director: “When I was 19 I set out, hoping I could learn the meaning of life by ‘experiencing everything’. I bought a car for 20 marks in a cafe in Ulm. I spray painted it yellow and green and drove it from Holland to Romania to Spain, sleeping in the back seat in a red blanket. Driving down to Málaga, at the crest of the mountains, the brakes went out. As the car sped down the mountain then crashed, I lost consciousness, followed by three days and nights of visions. What did I see, what did I understand? The Shaykh al-Akbar, Sufi mystic and philosopher Ibn ‘Arabî , writes that the journey only has true meaning if it brings a new beginning. In traveling, the heart becomes the goal of the journey”.Read More »

In this updated homage to the 1930 German silent film of the same title, Thai artist Tulapop Saenjaroen examines the paradox of people relaxing while being filmed. As a film shoot appears to be in perpetual delay, crew members kill time fiddling on their smartphones, all the while under the persistent gaze of the camera.Read More »

After 20 years of no contact, the Norwegian Dancer Øyvind is invited to Denmark to visit his old father and his new girlfriend in their isolated farmhouse, but nothing turns out as Øyvind expects.Read More »

In a sleepy provincial town, a Jehovah’s Witness community is attacked by an extremist group. In the midst of this conflict, the familiar world of Yana, the wife of the community leader, slowly crumbles. Yana’s inner discontent grows as she struggles to make sense of her desires.Read More »

Until the beginning of the 20th century in France, the game of hide and seek was called “cligne-musette”. In a winter landscape, the film follows five kids and a young man who wanders alone between the desolate buildings of the Valibout neighbourhood, located in the province town of Plaisir. They will not cross paths but seem destined to meet the same fate, that of being abandoned to themselves; to hide and not to be found.Read More »

A veil of sadness lies over the oppressively hot summer days. Cleo dives into daydreams with her cousins, the girls share secret signs and rituals. Flowing gently, in impressionistic images, the empty space that the death of Cleo’s sister has left in the family is poetically encircled.Read More »

When the communist government raises food prices in 1962, the rebellious workers from the small industrial town of Novocherkassk go on strike. The massacre which then ensues is seen through the eyes of a devout party activist.Read More »