Painkillers (2014)

As every year Carlos is spending the summer in the country with his family in order to help out with things. Perhaps he won't even be returning to Madrid, as economic prospects are hardly rosy there. In addition, his father's health is failing and he needs Carlos to help. In this town, where the elders still celebrate the medieval rites, Carlos meets a young policeman Juan and they fall in love. A friendship ensues amidst age-old rituals and a crisis of a nation, all this set against a spectacular backdrop which seems somehow not of this world.

Told via flashback, this raw, emotional drama chronicles the events that led a 22-year-old Czech Gypsy to prison. Marian was born to an alcoholic father and a terrible mother. As a result he is sent to a government orphanage where he is labelled a problem child for his inability to speak Czech. Life in the orphanage is devoid of love and offers only minimal physical comforts. Sometimes life there is brutal. His one bright spot was the time he first spent with a kindly and encouraging teacher who inspired in him hope for a better future. One day something goes wrong and the teacher is forced to punish Marian who retaliates by stabbing her. Marian is a teen by the time he is released from a juvenile reformatory. He falls in love for the first time, but because it is a foreign emotion, he doesn't know how to deal with it. By this time, the cruelty that has marked his life in institutions seems to have fated him to be a criminal and for Marian there can be no turning back.

Set in Prague during the years leading up to World War II, this family saga tells the story of a cobbler named Vincenc Bursik (Vladimir Mensik), who uproots his clan from the country to the city, only to suffer the loss of his wife and the failure of his shoe business within months. When his daughter moves away to go live with a wealthy businessman as his mistress, Vincenc is left to take care of his two sons, who spend their days in a secret garden vying for the affections of a teenage girl.

Eduard Zuiderwijk (Marco Borsato) runs a restaurant in Africa. When his wife (Ricky Koole) suddenly dies, he is left to take care of his son Thomas (Siebe Schoneveld) on his own. When his son's best friend Abu (Andrew Kintu) is abducted by a rebel leader to be trained as a child soldier, Eduard goes in pursuit to save the boy and regain his son's respect.

Vlado, an intelligent boy living in a small village, has fantasies that take him away from his humdrum life. But as the Nazi occupation begins to encroach on the townsfolk his fantasies and reality begin to merge.

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.

Andrés and his son Pedro live in a working district of Caracas and hardly ever see each other. While Andrés fills his time doing different jobs, Pedro wanders the streets playing with friends and learning from the violent atmosphere around him.

Armin Steeb is adrift: just finished with school, living with his middle-class parents, clueless about finding work. He tries connecting with a girl, he engages in risky sex with strangers in public toilets, he goes to job interviews. He also sends an anonymous letter to a local Munich newspaper, claiming responsibility for a fatal road accident. He fitfully pursues notoriety as he goes through life nearly without affect. What will it take to get Armin to smile?

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.

Juraj Jakubisko's first feature film after a forced nine-year-long break is a story about an unconventional man, Jozef Matúš. He arrives to a small village in eastern Slovakia to settle down and start a family. He is ready to subordinate everything to his goal. It all starts with stealing building material and ends with him disregarding those close to him to a point where his ambitions are turning against him. Build a House, Plant a Tree is a viewer-friendly film with a plot resembling a western, including several attractive action sequences.

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.

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.

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.

A family of a father, a mother and their son is looking forward to go on vacation. On the way they experience an accident, and their lives are suddenly and unexpectedly turned upside down.

An Air Force officer returns to his father, son and remarried wife in Vermont after 17 years in Vietnam.

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.

Stanko (30) has to kill a man, for the first time. The same day, his younger brother Vojo (16) has to have sex for the first time. Roads of the two brothers will cross the same day several times, in an unusual way

The screen story of four teenagers, on whom the horrors of war had left an indelible mark. Their relatives’ deaths and their yearning for fighting the Nazis led them, one way or another, to a sea cadet school that had been opened on Solovetski Islands at the start of the war. This film tells of men’s friendship, the boys’ first baptism of fire, and the victory…

The trenches of World War I provide for a captivating backdrop to the drama of Corporal Hoferik. In his devotion to the Habsburg Monarchy, he fanatically carries out his military orders, but he ultimately suffers the Empire's disfavor.