Patrick Tresch

In 1975, French Oscar-winning director Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau travelled to Panama to film the Kuna community, where women are sacred. Gaisseau, his wife and their little girl Akiko lived with the Kunas for a year. The project eventually ran out of funds and a bank confiscated the reels. Fifty years later, the Kunas are still waiting to discover “their” film, now a legend passed down from the elders to the new generation. One day, a hidden copy is found in Paris…

Twenty-year-old Rosa leaves her two children in Cape Verde and relocates to Lisbon in the hope of giving them a better life. Caught between the harassment of gangster bosses and daily police violence, Rosa tries to find comfort in the women of the community. But her real escape is music.

Mojtaba, Hamzeh, Zar are among other individuals who have been thrown into prison and ideologically interrogated in Iran. In this documentary, the director wants them to interrogate him as agents of the Islamic Republic might. He would like the real torturer in Iran to see himself through the film as if in a mirror. The violent experience of putting themselves in the torturer's head confronts them with their own limits and the ambivalence of the project itself.

A prison cell is set up in an empty room on the edge of Paris. Three former political prisoners from Iran re-enact how they were once interrogated and tortured. With quiet scepticism, the film asks whether their experiences can be accessed in this way.

The village of Poschiavo and its valley as a new Far West, more than six years after the killing of the M13 bear.

After May 1968, they experimented with communities, squats or free love, with the hope of real change. Today, at retirement age, they live in new places and promote ways of living better and growing old together. What if they were right, these former protesters whose utopias have been muted by triumphant individualism?

Jorge leaves his home and family in the outskirts of Lima to try his luck in the goldmines of the Andes, chasing the promises of the mother lode. We follow Jorge through a journey full of omens, where reality and magical thinking blend together, as he discovers that the myth of wealth is built on sacrifices that become ever more tangible – while the boundaries between victims and oppressors get progressively vague and blurred. Mother Lode is a fable about the banality of the descent to hell in times of neoliberalism; it is a paradigm of a relentless world in which everything can be sacrificed in the name of profit.

The small regional hospitals of Vevey, Montreux, Aigle and Monthey are closing in favor of the new, larger, more adapted and more modern hospital in Rennaz. As the construction of the new hospital progresses, emergency physicians Eric and Frédérique tell us about their daily life in the face of illness and death.

In 1946, Heidi is entrusted to a Swiss family by her father. He will never come back for her. Today, François Yang questions his mother about her past. What follows is a journey to China, a quest to reconstruct memory. Through contact with her brothers and sister, Heidi measures the extent of the drama experienced by her family that remained in China, persecuted by the Communist Party.

Full of hope, Fahed arrived in England from Algeria back in 2001. Fifteen years later, his dreams of prosperity have evaporated and he finds himself in a midlife crisis, no longer knowing where his home is. Will Fahed, the director's cousin, return to his place of birth?

Simon has a love-hate relationship with his father. When his parents go on holiday, Simon initiates a seductive game of cat-and-mouse with his father’s mistress and gets disastrously tangled up in the sticky family network.

She was a muse, model and performer – a star, dazzling and intense. Lady Shiva managed to rise from street prostitution to the top. She lived in the fast lane and died tragically young. Her dream was to become a singer. With her companions, we trace her life during a vibrant time that kindles a yearning and provokes until today. The story of a woman’s meteoric fate and a great dream. An irrepressible desire for freedom in all its beauty and destructive force - and a stirring friendship and love.

She was a muse, model and performer – a star, dazzling and intense. Lady Shiva managed to rise from street prostitution to the top. She lived in the fast lane and died tragically young. Her dream was to become a singer. With her companions, we trace her life during a vibrant time that kindles a yearning and provokes until today. The story of a woman’s meteoric fate and a great dream. An irrepressible desire for freedom in all its beauty and destructive force - and a stirring friendship and love.

Algiers, 2015. Adlan and Terrorist navigate the Sacré Coeur neighborhood, desperately trying to make a few dinars.

Boys On Film's twelfth collection of gay short films exposes private lives, uncovers secrets and presents a choice — to conceal or to confess? Volume 12: Confession features nine new stories, including: Robert Hawk's "Home From The Gym" starring Jake Robbins; Samuel Leighton-Dore's "Showboy" starring Lucas Pittaway and Malcolm Kennard; Bobby de Groot and Arjan van Meerten's animated "Cruise Patrol"; Denis Theriault's "I Am Syd Stone" starring Gharrett Patrick Paon and Michael Gaty; Dustin Shroff's "Deflated" starring Carson Trinity Haverda and Greg Baglia; Filippo Demarchi's "Age 17" starring Fabio Foiada and Ignazio Oliva; Christophe Prédari's "Human Warmth" starring Thomas Coumans and Adrien Desbons; Dominic Haxton's "Tonight It's Me" starring Jake Robbins, Caleb James, and Christian Patrick; and Peter Knegt and Stephen Dunn's "Good Morning" starring Peter Knegt and Oliver Skinner.

Matteo is a 17-year-old boy who comes to the realization that he is in love with Don Massimo, a young priest of the village that leads the marching band in which Matteo plays the drum. He sees in Massimo a person willing to listen to his fears and desires. For the first time in his life, Matteo feels ready to open up to someone...

Straight out of jail, Sombra returns to his life as a drug dealer in the creole slum of Lisbon. In between the money he has lent and can't get back, the money he owes, a fanciful iguana, an invasive little girl and a ringleader who begins to mistrust him, he starts to think that he might have been better off in the clink...

Thirty female prisoners share the convicts’ ward of Tuilière Prison at Lonay. More than half of them have one or more children being raised elsewhere: with a sister, in a foster family, or – further away still – in their countries of origin. In portraying some of these women, the film sheds light on these mothers and the bond that ties them to their children.

Zé, a 50-year-old alcoholic, works in the port of Lisbon where he loads and unloads containers. Zé never left his neighborhood and is hiding his savings so that one day he'll be able to board one of the huge cruise ships he sees everyday. When his jealous wife steals his money, Zé will do everything to fulfil his dream.

Serguei is a 50 year old railway worker, seemingly cheerful and sociable. But within the intimacy of his gloomy apartment, he lives a terrible loneliness that he tries to make up for by watching funny shows on television. When it breaks down, he tries to repair it and overhears a couple’s argument in the apartment next door. Driven by a growing fascination for the woman’s voice, he starts to vicariously share her everyday life, till the day he walks through her door…

A documentary film