23 MAY — 02 JUNE 2024

23 MAY — 02 JUNE 2024

Samsara

Lois Patiño

Spain

Fiction / Documentary / Experimental, 2023, 113'

The concept of the bardo in Buddhism is that of a transitional state, between death and reincarnation. This film is an exploration of that transitional space, that liminal moment of transformation. We first follow a teenage monk in Laos who reads to an elderly woman every day to prepare her for her journey to rebirth. When her spirit begins this journey, we join in an experience of light and sound, in which the circle of life is mirrored by that of the cinema.

International Competition

SCREENINGS

May 03, Wednesday, 22:00 (113')

Cinema Ideal • C.592

May 05, Friday, 17:00 (113')

Cinema São Jorge, Room 3 • C.595

INFO

PREMIERE TYPE

National

ORIGINAL TITLE

Samsara

LANGUAGE

Lao / Swahili

SUBTITLES

Portuguese / English

SCRIPT

Lois Patiño, Garbiñe Ortega

CAST

Amid Keomany, Toumor Xiong, Simone Milavanh, Mariam Vuaa Mtego, Juwairiya Idrisa Uwesu

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jessica Sarah Rinland, Mauro Herce

SOUND

Xabier Erkizia

EDITING

Lois Patiño

PRODUCER

Leire Apellaniz

PRODUCTION

Señor y Señora

SHARE

SAME SECTION MOVIES

International Competition

A Season in Hell

Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine had a tempestuous love affair in the 19th century that lasted almost two years and ended with a pistol shot and two years in a Belgian prison. This film reimagines this relationship through a modern lens and with a splash of color.

Fiction, 2022, 16'

International Competition

About the Clouds

A film with four central stories that portray a middle class and its relationship with work, whether because of its precariousness, instability, the weight of routine or the illusions still cherished. An urban fable where a cook, an unemployed technician, a nurse in a public hospital, and a bookseller only meet through the black and white gaze of the camera, amid the rain of the passing days.

María Aparicio

Fiction, 2022, 143'

International Competition

Achewiq, The Song of the Brave Women

In the north of Algeria, we find a region, Kabylie, where the Berber culture is linked to its traditions. But last summer was hard and a lot of suffering resulted from a fire. Now women deal with loss through music.

Documentary, 2022, 16'

International Competition

After

Between blaring techno music, discreet visits to the bathroom, more or less strong drugs and bodies like bumper cars, the club is perhaps the purgatory that entertains and distracts from the repetition of everyday life — with a soundtrack that reflects the jubilation and immersion of a night out. In this setting, between heaven and hell, Félicie and Saïd meet and go home together. The encroaching light of dawn illuminates their very different views on life.

Fiction, 2023, 69'

International Competition

Alpha Kings

A group of boys discover the easy money to be made on the Only Fans platform. They feel they don’t have to do much to be in a better financial position than their parents. But the naivety of youth has not evaded them yet.

Enrique Pedráza Botero, Faye Tsakas

Documentary, 2022, 15'

International Competition

Amiko

In this film, we spend time getting to know Amiko, a young girl with a way of looking at the world that makes her unique among her schoolmates and even her family — father, mother expecting a new baby and her older brother. However, her frank and somewhat eccentric way of seeing life, resistant to the decorous way of behaving of those who live around her, will bring some challenges when her inner circle is faced with a tragedy.

Fiction, 2022, 104'

International Competition

Backflip

The idea is simple: try to do a backflip. But in order not to get hurt, the easiest thing is to create a digital avatar with the help of a processor and a machine learning system. So the avatar learns to do a backflip in no time. And nobody gets hurt.

Germany / France

Animation / Experimental, 2022, 13'

International Competition

Black Mouse

A documentary that explores the construction of a structure, in the 1960s, designed by the Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer in Tripoli, Lebanon. A project that is seen with ambiguity by the locals and that is “explained” by a fictional audio recording of the architect.

Documentary / Experimental, 2022, 21'

International Competition

Brighter than hypernova

Being a teenager is never easy, especially when someone doesn’t fit the mold of what is expected. In this documentary, we follow a young person who doesn’t want to be constrained by any limit other than what makes sense when it comes to being comfortable in one’s skin.

Vladimir Simonovich

Documentary, 2022, 24'

International Competition

Cupid’s bow

Jess and Alana are two friends who went out the night before. Today, at the beach, Alana tries to talk about what happened between Jess and Léo.

Animation, 2022, 4'

International Competition

Dancing on the grave

The summer season is coming, it’s hot and there’s not much to do. Two siblings fight for their mother’s attention, playing more or less innocent tricks.

Fiction, 2022, 19'

International Competition

Daydreaming So Vividly About Our Spanish Holidays

What if the demand for the Balearic Islands by British tourists was because they felt an almost shamanic appeal for the sun and the need to live according to the sun? This film captures the (very real) phenomenon of jumping from balconies to swimming pools to imagine a bizarre and dreamlike world.

Christian Avilés

Fiction, 2022, 24'

International Competition

Eeva

A bird brings a message in morse code. A man surprisingly dies. A woman deals with the death of her husband. Nothing is as simple as it might seem.

Morten Tšinakov, Lucija Mrzljak

Estonia / Croatia

Animation, 2022, 16'

International Competition

Endless Sea

A day in the life of an elderly New York woman in need of her medication is portrayed by Sam Shainberg with all the chronic anxiety and haste that permeate this city that never sleeps, in a demonstration of the need for universal healthcare systems.

Fiction, 2022, 18'

International Competition

Euridice, Euridice

Ondina lives a beautiful, intense and sensual love for Alexia. Until the day her girlfriend doesn’t return from a trip to Greece. And Ondina finds herself haunted by the love she still feels.

Lora Mure-Ravaud

France / Switzerland

Fiction, 2022, 40'

International Competition

Fantine’s Big Day out

When everything goes wrong, all we have is a sense of humor. Jeanne and Piero want to spend the weekend in the country with their baby Fantine. After the confinement and the pandemic, they want to leave Paris. But nothing is simple for these young parents.

Fiction, 2022, 29'

International Competition

Gods of the Supermarket

The male body and notions of beauty are the starting point of a film that discusses the extent to which fantasy is unattainable.

Alberto Gonzalez Morales

Documentary / Experimental, 2022, 8'

International Competition

Growing Up Absurd

Tolstoy College was an anarchist education community that operated at the University in Buffalo, from 1969 to 1985. The film shows the space, but above all the unifying principle: a group of people who trust each other, with the intention of working in unison.

Ben Balcom, Julie Niemi

Documentary / Experimental, 2022, 15'

International Competition

Heartbreak Hotel

In a hotel that pays homage to Elvis Presley, five women come together to complete a mission: remove a corpse from the premises. Female solidarity has never been so aesthetically pleasing.

Emma Axelroud Bernard

Fiction / Experimental, 2023, 16'

International Competition

Hotel Kalura

A woman finds someone who lights her cigarette and thus begins a romantic night, on acid.

Sophie Koko Gate

Animation, 2022, 5'

International Competition

Howling

A surreal and melancholic film that plays with japanese ghost stories and where the characters question whether they are alive or already on another plane of existence.

Fiction, 2022, 23'

International Competition

It is Night in America

The film’s premise is described in a newspaper headline: are animals invading our cities or just reclaiming their natural habitat? The blue color and the grain of the 16mm give texture to a narrative of displacement and violence that gives space to the perspective of the animals that inhabit Brasília — sometimes in captivity, sometimes roaming the city — who observe us as much as we do them.

Italy / France / Brazil

Documentary / Experimental, 2022, 66'

International Competition

Marinaleda

Hitchhiking in the back roads of France in search of a communist retreat in Andalusia is perhaps not where we imagine two vampires might be strolling. One night, they take shelter at Lise-Marine’s house, where they pass the time between wine and conversations.

Fiction, 2022, 51'

International Competition

Mission to Mars

A post-apocalyptic Basque Country is the perfect setting for the story of Txomin, an unemployed archaeologist who is given the mission to go to Mars. But the adventure begins before that take-off, on a journey through northern Spain with his brother Gene, whose health deteriorates, creating the need for a detour that could put the mission at risk. The music mirrors the punk spirit of a film that has a DIY attitude, including the use of the director’s family members.

Amat Vallmajor Del Pozo

Fiction / Documentary / Experimental, 2022, 72'

International Competition

Nous enfuir sur un char ailé

It’s the 1970s in Geneva. Women’s work is constant: whether in the factory, or at home, the world turns because it’s on their shoulders. If they stop, everything stops. And a strike is the perfect motto to use their voices. An inventive look at issues that are still so pressing.

Fiction / Documentary, 2022, 17'

International Competition

Otro Sol

Between fiction and reality lies Alberto Cándia, whose myth according to the film involves the Chilean thief robbing the Cathedral of Cádiz, in Andalucía, in the late 1980s. On the beaches and rivers surrounding the Atacama Desert, the search for this thief is done through the stories the director discovers and the possibilities woven from them. The film’s humour does not mask the colonial connection, through the flow of gold, between Spain and the Chilean lands.

Francisco Rodríguez Teare

Chile / France / Belgium

Documentary / Experimental, 2023, 86'

International Competition

Pentola

A man in a not very pleasant relationship, who wants to be Superman, dreams of the romantic moments he can spend with his own Batman, or rather, a superhero resembling the dark knight.

Animation, 2022, 7'

International Competition

Rodeo

Motorbikes are the new horses and not exactly legal motocross races and stunts are the new rodeos. In this film, Julie Ledru is Julia, a woman with a hard shell and no fear, marked by her passion for motorcycles, their speed, and the feeling of freedom they provide. But the ultra-masculine world of the Paris suburbs that Julia wants to inhabit requires increasingly risky tests and her place in this community is not an easy one to secure.

Fiction, 2022, 106'

International Competition

Rough red

At a time when Brazil was becoming a democracy (1985-1995), four women — Jô, Eunice, Alessa and Fabiana — became mothers while still in their teens. Political evolution and the abrupt entry into adulthood and motherhood are mixed in a film that shows their domestic space, built from personal archives, as well as contemporary images, filmed by the protagonists in 2018, during the election campaign of Jair Bolsonaro.

Amanda Devulsky

Documentary / Experimental, 2022, 205'

International Competition

Runaway

A family owns a cafe (a building that is also their home) where they end up being forced to shelter a man on the run from justice. The ten-year-old son tries to deal with the changing dynamics in his life.

Salome Kintsurashvili

Georgia / Russia

Fiction, 2022, 25'

International Competition

Safe Place

A stark, raw portrayal of a tumultuous 24-hour period that throws a small family’s life into disarray. Damir, a man with mental health weakened by depression, tries to commit suicide. His brother (portrayed by the director, in what is an autobiographical work) and mother try to tether him to life, but the systemic protocols Damir is placed in, sterile, impersonal, and devoid of empathy, underline the lack of truly safe spaces.

Fiction, 2022, 102'

International Competition

Something You Said Last Night

A family vacation at a resort where the activities are designed either for the older or the younger, and Ren in her mid-twenties, her desire to be a writer and having just been fired not being able to entertain her. Between keeping secrets, hers and her sister’s, and putting up with parents who are overly happy, but with a sometimes-sharp tongue, this is not your typical story about a trans girl and her relationship with her family.

Luis De Filippis

Canada / Switzerland

Fiction, 2022, 96'

International Competition

Suddenly TV

A revolution in Sudan is filmed twice: by the imaginary camera of the interviewer and by the documentary camera of the director of the documentary we are watching. In both, the urgency of the regime’s violence is reflected.

Documentary, 2022, 18'

International Competition

The Dam

Maher is the protagonist of this story that takes place on the banks of the Nile in Sudan, dealing with the imagination of this brick worker living in exile in Darfur. Days of exhausting work are punctuated by the exercise of a peculiar post-work activity: the construction of a structure made of mud and other materials. Everything takes place in the desolation of normality until the day his creation disappears.

France / Sudan / Lebanon / Germany / Serbia

Fiction, 2022, 80'

International Competition

The Garden of Fauns

A documentary about Nazario Luque, an emblematic figure in Spain’s most transgressive underground comix movement in the 1970s, closely linked to the world of counterculture. His art, archives and life are seen through the prisms of love, desire and loss.

Germany / Spain

Documentary, 2022, 24'

International Competition

The Inheritance

Petre tells the police that the elderly man he was taking care of died that morning. Along the way back to the house, he tries to handle the logistics. But he has a surprise waiting for him.

Marian Fărcuț

Fiction, 2021, 14'

International Competition

The Mechanics of Fluids

Gala Hernández López does a job of deep empathy in this documentary about a young incel (“involuntary celibate”, a misogynistic online culture that defines itself as unable to develop romantic relationships) and his suicide letter, “America is responsible for my death” .

Gala Hernández López

Documentary, 2022, 39'

International Competition

The Silence of the Banana Trees

A father and a daughter separated by something that remains unspoken, but palpable throughout the film. Memories are all we have access to. Memories and letters that point to a less distant future.

Albania / Hungary / Portugal / Belgium

Documentary, 2022, 24'

International Competition

Today, I Will Be The Bread

A delirious animation to the rhythm of a matryoshka that’s being deconstructed, among buns, hands, and the consumption of cigarettes.

Animation, 2022, 10'

International Competition

Uncle Vakho’s Dream

Vakho lives a secluded, penitent life in a deserted village in the Kazbegi mountains in Georgia. The trauma that haunts him has no resolution.

Documentary, 2022, 22'