Xavier Rocher

In Kuala Lumpur, a Vietnamese door-to-door apartment housekeeper makes her ends meet while secretly meeting her daughter who lives with locals, until a Malay stranger mistakes her as his family during an immigration raid.

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.

The swimming pool has played an important role throughout film history – most often as a romping ground for the sophisticated and hedonistic Dolce Vita. But it can be so much more, even sinister, as in Sunset Boulevard. In Leyenda dorada a rather unglamorous swimming pool of diminished charm forms the focal point of the story. A lazy summer’s day in the Spanish village of Montánchez, and people of all ages enjoy themselves at the outdoor pool. It is an almost utopian depiction of community, under the lofty, watchful gaze of Our Lady of Consolation. While conflicts, aggression, rivalries and animosities have a siesta, the villagers take a well-deserved break. Formally, the film draws on the tradition of New Objectivity. But unlike Robert Siodmak’s Menschen am Sonntag (1930) and its lido sequence, this is a wee summer fairy tale.

This film follows Arturo Belano, alter ego of the writer Roberto Bolaño, shared with his creator a great part of his biography. The director searches for him in places where his stories and novels occur, meeting with real and imaginary characters, in a territory where reality and fiction have a diffuse frontier. A new form of literary biopic, where the writer and his character turn into one and only person.