Alexandra Strauss

Acts of violence bring repercussions for exterminator Chua and his son Meng, who has been under pressure from bullies. Military service offers Meng escape into the jungle, an unknown world which could bring him closer to understanding his own nature.

The philosopher Edmund Burke has fled London, debt collectors and a ramping midlife crisis to go on a grand tour of the Alps to rewrite his book on the Sublime in this 18th-century road movie.

A historic drama with musical Bollywood scenes. Kabul in the early 90s. Soviet values rule the country. Women can wear miniskirts, children can go to school and people can go to the cinema, concerts as well as universities. Life in Afghanistan is similar to life in the Western world. 14 years old Qodrat sells cinema tickets on the black market in the streets of Kabul. After selling a ticket to a secret police officer by mistake, he ends up at the Soviet orphanage, where he fakes his identity at the registration, in hope of getting more power. Everyday life for Qodrat is about friendships, falling in love, doing naughty things and going on adventures – just like it is for children in other parts of the world. However, behind the safe walls of the orphanage the world they once knew is drastically changing as the Mujahideens start the civil war.

In 1973, five men and six women drifted across the Atlantic on a raft as part of a scientific experiment exploring the origins of violence and sexual attraction. Nobody expected what ultimately took place on that 3-month journey. Through archive material and a reunion of the surviving members of the expedition, this film tells the hidden story of the project.

South Africa, July 11th, 1963. Several members of the African National Congress, an organization declared illegal, are arrested in Rivonia, a country house near Johannesburg. The detainees, along with Nelson Mandela, imprisoned since 1962, are charged with serious crimes for their radical activism against the apartheid regime…

¡Las Sandinistas! uncovers the disappearing stories of women who shattered barriers to lead combat and social reform during Nicaragua’s 1979 Sandinista Revolution, and who continue to lead Nicaragua’s current struggle for democracy and equality.

A group of young women from Ouagadougou study at a girl school to become auto mechanics. The classmates become their port of safety, joy and sisterhood, all while they are going through the life changing transition into becoming adults in a country boiling with political changes. In a country with youth unemployment at 52 percent, jobs are a hot issue. The young girls at a mechanics school in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou are right in the middle of a crucial point in life when their dreams, hopes and courage are confronted with opinions, fears and society’s expectations of what a woman should be. Using interesting narrative solutions, Theresa Traore Dahlberg depicts their last school years and at the same time succeeds in showing the country’s violent past and present. This is a feature-film debut and coming-of-age film with much warmth, laughs, heartbreak and depth.

Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the United States.

In rural Afghanistan, people are storytellers who make up and tell each other tales of mystery and imagination to explain the world in which they live. The shepherd children own the mountains and, although no adults are around, they know the rules; they know that boys and girls are not allowed to be together. The boys practice with their slings to fight wolves. The girls smoke secretly and play at getting married, dreaming of finding a husband soon. They gossip about Sediqa; she’s eleven years old and an outsider. The girls think she is cursed. Qodrat, also eleven years old, becomes the subject of gossip when his mother remarries an old man with two wives. Qodrat roams alone in the most isolated parts of the mountains, where he meets Sediqa and they become friends.

An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, a middle-aged Port-au-Prince couple come face to face with the stark contradictions of Haitian society when they are forced to rent out their villa to a foreign aid worker and his enterprising local girlfriend.

Haitian born filmmaker Raoul Peck takes us on a 2-year journey inside the challenging, contradictory and colossal rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Haiti.

In the Swedish city of Lethe, people from different walks of life take part in a series of short, deadpan vignettes that rush past. Some are just seconds long, none longer than a couple of minutes. A young woman (Jessica Lundberg) remembers a fantasy honeymoon with a rock guitarist. A man awakes from a dream about bomber planes. A businessman boasts about success while being robbed by a pickpocket and so on. The absurdist collection is accompanied by Dixieland jazz and similar music.

The unhappy love lives of Paul and Marcus, two artists and friends who are neither particularly young or successful anymore.