Les Apaches (2013)

The difficult conditions of modern Georgia are explored through the eyes of young teenager working in an illegal distillery near Tbilisi.

In 1916, Vincent van Horst leaves Europe to return to his Canadian homeland. There, he seeks his former love, Maria... but the lady's pride is hurt and she refuses to see him. Vincent then falls for a younger woman, Annie.

When the police find Simone seated near her husband's corpse it is predictable that she is charged with the murder. Jean-Pierre Laubray is appointed counsel for the defence. He begins an inquiry into the case and he finds out that the murdered man had killed a barman in a robbery the night before. He finds out as well he was a leg-man of Cristiani's for his election campaign. He tries to contact Juliette, Cristiani's daughter, and he discovers that Bruno, Juliette's brother, also died that same night in a car accident...

An intense and solitary teenager, Paul finds himself caught up in a journey for freedom, full of violence, betrayal and hope. Abandoned by his father, torn between his mother, with whom he maintains a tender if tormented relationship, and his punk friends, with whom he hangs out at concerts, parties and street fights, he lives fully in the present. At a concert, Paul meets Louis and falls in love. But something is missing, and he continues searching for the father who never recognized him.

A pair of childhood friends spend a spring together before the summer Algeria's war of Independence.

Môj pes Killer is a one-day drama portraying eighteen-year-old Marek living near the Slovak-Moravian border with his dad and his racist friends. However, Marek's best true friend is his dog. His life is shaken up when he discovers the secret of his lost mother Marika.

An adopted boy who, as a taciturn adult, visits his birth mother and strikes up a relationship fraught with tension and emotion.

The story takes place in a small village on the beach of Sea of Azov at the beginning of 1960s. Adolescents passionately dream of love about which they have heard from their elder experienced friends. 16 year-old Ignat is the first to find out what the real feeling is. His love for an adventuress who pretends to be a singer from capital becomes destructive.

“Freud established that jokes were structurally akin to dreams in their use of condensation, displacement, representation by opposites, punning and ‘nonsense’. All of these strategies are much in evidence in (Land’s) marvelously duplicitous ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE… [...] so clever and original a filmmaker as to make most others – not to mention his critics – seem flat-footed by comparison. ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE harks back to Bunuel’s early work. Not only is it structured like a dream and filled with sexual imagery, but like Un Chien Andalou, it smacks of being an insider’s joke played upon the avant-garde. Where Bunuel used the insights of psychoanalysis to satirize Christianity, Land– with an almost equal perversity – reverses the process and uses Christianity to send up Freud.” – J. Hoberman, American Film

A science fiction story about a young boy who discovers and befriends a small robot at a shopping arcade. The robot is hungry and he grows in size as he devours a number of machines of increasing size.

If the scorpion could see and the viper could hear, there would be no escape". The viper is deaf and the scorpion can't see, so it is and so shall be, the same way the countryside is peaceful and the city bustling and the human being impossible to satisfy. Lacrau demands the return "to the curve where man got lost" in a journey from the city towards nature. The escape from chaos and emotional void we call progress; matter without spirit, without will. The search for the most ancient sensations and relationships of mankind. The amazement, the fear of the unknown, the loss of basic comforts, loneliness, the meeting with the other, the other animal, the other vegetable. A dive looking for a connection with the world. Where beginning and end are the same, but I am not.

In 1939, José Garcés is in French prison camp after the defeat of Spain's Republicans. To entertain and inspire his fellow prisoners, he tells the story of becoming a man in 1919, the year he realized that learning to live is the same as learning to die. His stiff and demanding father loses a fortune in German war bonds, takes a job in Caspe, and leaves José on his own in Zaragoza to finish high school while apprenticing in a pharmacy. José courts his beloved Valentina via letters, becomes intimate with Isabel, a maid he meets in a cinema who shares his ideas of free love, and comes under the influence of El Checa, an anarchist and gentle teacher who leads a doomed revolt.

A young Jewish boy travels europe in search of the grave of his Great Grandfather who was killed by the Nazis in the War.

The story begins with an experiment. A filmmaker in the country of Georgia posts an ad inviting youth to audition for her film. Facing the camera, the hopefuls confess their struggles and dreams. These raw interviews unfold seamlessly into cinematic slivers of Georgian life.

Alejandro Gerber Bicecci's "Vaho" (Becloud) tells the story of three childhood friends, Andres, Felipe, and Jose, and their lives in a dusty, run down corner of Mexico City. The boys were inseparable until they witnessed a tragedy that haunts them to the present day. The tragedy shaped each boy differently, and had a profound effect on their lives.

Surreal tale of a 14 year-old boy who dreams of escaping the loneliness from an unhappy home & sexual abuse (from his mother's boyfriend who is also his school swimming coach). One day his back mysteriously sprouts feathers and he can metaphorically fly away from it all.

“My best friend, Anna, asked me if I would mind taking her fifteen-year-old son Itvan to Berlin with me. I accepted immediately.” An elegant, refined man in his forties sets off with Itvan on a long, enjoyable journey, his Winter Journey. They cross snowbound Germany by car. As the man drives the boy through cities and countryside, Itvan discovers the past and the vast job of reunification now underway. Poetry and culture are also part of the journey, which is accompanied by classical German music. When their paths cross with the man's former lovers or the journey provides unexpected encounters, Itvan also gets to know more about the man's own life. When they finally arrive in Berlin, their ways must part. Itvan watches the man leave, taking the melancholy of his existence with him. However their journey together has created an unbreakable tie between the two men. Itvan will never be the same again.

Perhaps the most ebullient “musical” you’ll see this year, Marc-Henri Wajnberg’s singular documentary/fiction hybrid follows a group of street children in the Congolese capital.

15-year-old Moritz lives in a posh area of Hamburg, but his parents did not care about it. The teenager suffers from ridicule of his classmates and finds refuge in his dreams and playing the saxophone. Only when he joins a band and began performing there Moritz pulled out of the vicious circle, and finds love with new friends...

Although he was once a colonel in Argentina, the principal character in this film is now a wealthy exile living in Paris with his beloved wife, who has been unable to bear children. To fill this void in their lives, he feeds and clothes abandoned children, raising them in his mansion as if they were his own. As would never be the case in real life today, in this fantasized story set in 1925, no one objects to this behavior, and they live pleasantly and enjoyably together. Things grow considerably more animated when a stage magician places his very attractive daughter in the colonel's household, which stirs a lively romantic interest from his boys and from the great man himself.