Secção: Competição Internacional | International Competition
(10.000 euros)
Takumi left Toyama, on the coast of Japan, some time ago. He returns after the death of his father, who never wanted him to leave. He now visits the places and relationships he left behind, with the melancholy of someone who looks differently at what was once familiar.
Who are we? What space is there, for each person, within that word? The RER B train runs through Paris into its suburbs. This is the line where Alice Diop draws isolated portraits that make up a whole. A film-essay that questions a French nation haunted by divisions and fractures whose healing seems complicated. But there is space for gestures that unite human beings, regardless of what separates them.
In this ethereal and modern version of a free love film from the 1960s, we find a moody biologist and his graduate assistants trying to develop a summer project in the wild nature of the Appalachian forest. There, they encounter three mysterious figures who will change their lives.
Queralt, the mother, and Gemma, the daughter, paint in their respective spaces. One in Barcelona, the other in Athens, the distance between them is more than just geographical. Queralt’s calls are the conduit through the 20 minutes of quotidian moments.
Jason and Kevin are two friends with a relationship in dire straits. Jason wants to go parrot hunting in order to sell the birds and buy a bicycle. Kevin wants him to shut up. The search for the birds ends up triggering a confrontation, where tenderness and violence mix.
A documentary that explores all facets of the flower as a concept, reflecting on its beauty, its history and its commodification. From experiments to achieve a specific color to an auction, the semiotic world of the flower is encompassed in the chapters of this visual essay.
Sam works in a kennel in Ostend, where canine therapist Koen teaches owners how to take care of their four-legged friends. Sam and Eva, the owner of a restless dog, get close as a friendship, and perhaps a new safe haven for both, develops.
A common family nucleus, but with a lunar aspect: a domineering father, a distant mother, a teenage daughter unsure of her boyfriend, and the smallest one, perhaps in an identity limbo. Each of them overflowing with their own frustrations and desires.
Faruk has the responsibility of delivering parcels as his first job in Germany. Today, his eight-year-old daughter, Kati, hides in his van to spend the day, and time, with him. But a moment of cloaked racism tests their relationship.
At first nothing seems to load Anna with worries or weights during a short trip, in the company of her dog. But the environment begins to change when entering the supermarket. While viewing the shelves, the displays, she does mental calculations. Until the call.
A synesthetic experience that, between the story of a couple who broke up and a phone call to Fedex asking if they would transport people, meditates on what are the best methods of getting closer to those you love.
Diana Lin (Lu Jian in The Farewell by Lulu Wang) is the protagonist of a dinner that is, at the same time, an unpleasant business meeting and an awkward family reunion. The latter is between the daughter who went to live in America and her father, mother (Lin) and brother.
A virtual journey through the dreams and desires of a group of queer teenagers from New York, a Generation Z that sees the world with different eyes and with hope for the future. A movie that illustrates the importance, and the power, of finding a community.
An extremely personal documentary in which Firouzeh Khosrovani intimately reveals the life and marriage of her parents, people who couldn’t be at more opposite poles regarding secularism and religious Islamic ideology. A story told through archival images, letters and conversations, in a radiography that goes beyond the particular to also illustrate conflicts at the heart of Iranian society.
The players of the Japanese women’s volleyball team that won the gold medal at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo were known as “The Witches of the Orient”. Even today, they maintain a record of 258 consecutive victories. Now in their seventies, they are reunited on a walk down memory lane, which includes an anime sequence and a playful look, full of pop culture references.