Mapa (2012)

Mapa (2012)

Director: León Siminiani
Country: Spain | India
Runtime: 85 min



Midway between documentary and fiction, this is a road-movie narrated in first person about a young filmmaker who travels to India in search of a new “map” for love, for life.

A young director is fired from his job in television. Returning to his dream of making films, he travels to India to “find” his first feature film, only to realise that his true search is not in India, but in Madrid: he was running away. But things don’t go exactly as he’d expected on his return.

My Dog Killer (2013)

My Dog Killer (2013)

Director: Mira Fornay
Country: Slovakia
Runtime: 90 min

Marek has no real friends except his guard dog and hangs out with skinheads. When his dispirited mother reappears in his life, Marek faces a horrible predicament. An authentic and hypnotic chronicle of a sluggish existence always on the verge of explosion.

A small village on the Slovak-Moravian border. Strangers are not welcome here. Locals seem to be suspicious even of each other. This is where eighteen-year-old Marek lives. His guard dog is his only true friend. Neglected by his relatives, he has found an illusory escape in the company of local skinheads. Nazi without a cause, he blindly follows them, and they train him exactly like he trains Killer, his dog. When his mother and young half-brother suddenly appear in his life, Marek faces a terrible dilemma. Either he will violently explode or he will find an inner capacity for the compassion he is so scared of.
This subtle, sensitive film is not just about racists and ethnic conflicts in contemporary Europe. First of all, it is about wrong choices that, once made, cannot be altered. It is about chances that appear, only to be missed. Mira Fornay captures this state of terrifying apathy in a series of long contemplative shots. Calm on the surface, they are full of hidden anxiety and disturbing uncertainty.
With no music, just natural sounds and real settings, Fornay makes what is almost a documentary portrait of totally lost human beings. The leading characters are very competently portrayed by native non-actors, and their huge contribution makes the film very authentic.

Priest's Children (2013)

Priest's Children (2013)

Director: Vinko Bresan
Country: Croatia
Runtime: 1 hour, 32 min.






 Don Fabijan is a young priest who comes to serve on an unnamed small island in the Adriatic. In order to help increase birth rate on the island, he decides to pierce condoms before they are sold. He therefore teams up with the newsagent Petar and the pharmacist Marin. After they abolish all forms of birth control on the entire island, the consequences become more and more complicated.

Jîn (2013)

Jîn (2013)

Director: Reha Erdem
Country: Turkey
Runtime: 122 min

Jîn is something of a Red Riding Hood, a 17-year-old girl determined to live, to participate in life no matter what it takes; and to this end she finds herself battling her way bravely through dark forests.

The film opens with Jîn fleeing an armed organization in the mountains for an unknown reason. She spends solitary days in the mountains and forests hiding both from organization members and from security forces. Her aim is to get to the big city, to achieve her dreams of new and wider worlds unknown to her until now. Armed with a small but robust body and a fresh but powerful sense of resolve, she manages to create a space for herself in the dark and forbidding wilderness. She gets caught in crossfire and courageously dodges the bullets, she knows fear and cold, she finds things to eat. The animals she closes ranks with, perhaps because they face similar threats, are her greatest source of strength and consolation. She shares a cave with a bear to escape a shelling, she finds an ally in a deer, she treats an injured donkey, she makes a pact with a savage bird whose egg she eats, shes consoled by a wildcat, alerted by a snake and protected by a horse...

Eventually, she lays her hands on some civil clothing and makes her way down from the mountains. But for Jîn, the plains are more dangerous than the mountains, more threatening and more hurtful. No matter how hard she tries, how resolutely she struggles, she cant break through the barricade closing in on her, and the world of her dreams remains elusive. She continues to take a battering both to her willowy frame and to the feelings and sensitivities inside. She returns, deeply disillusioned, to her solitary existence in the mountains and reaches out mournfully to the natural world. She finds herself caught once more between toppled trees and dismembered animals as the shells and bullets rain down. By now her sense of rebellion has turned to despair. Stuck in an impasse, Jîn has no one but the trees and animals to nurse her wounded body and soul.

Turtles do not die of old age (2010)

Turtles do not die of old age (2010)

Directors: Hind Benchekroun, Sami Mermer
Country: Canada | Morocco
Runtime: 92 min

*Turtles do not die of old age* takes a look at a vanishing generation. This film invites us to share in the lives of three elderly men from northern Morocco. Hovering around 80 years old, each of the three men: Chehma, a former master fisherman; Radi, a solitary innkeeper; and Laroussi, a street musician, still works to earn a living. The film illustrates their desire to continue living, presents their outlook in the face of an approaching death, and reveals their courage to ceaselessly work... despite their age. Chehma, Radi and Laroussi's predicament reaches beyond Morroccan geographic boundaries. It ushers us through the universality of life, old age and death. This is a documentary anchored in the men's daily rituals, enveloped with a compassionate humanity.

Lucia(2013)

Lucia(2013)

Director: Pawan Kumar
Country: India
Runtime: 135 min






From the director of smash hit Lifeu Ishtene, Pawan Kumar, comes Lucia, heralding a new direction for Kannada cinema, being the industry's first crowd funded film. An usher at a decrepit cinema suffers from insomnia. His life changes when he starts getting weird and wonderful dreams but with a caveat. Set in the teeming young metropolis that is Bangalore, the film is a turbulent ride where the lines between dreams and reality are blurred to delirious effect.

The Patience Stone (2012)

The Patience Stone (2012)

Director: Atiq Rahimi
Country: Afghanistan
Runtime: 102 min

Somewhere, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, in a country torn apart by a war... A young woman in her thirties watches over her older husband in a decrepit room. He is reduced to the state of a vegetable because of a bullet in the neck. Not only is he abandoned by his companions of the Jihad, but also by his brothers. One day, the woman decides to tell the truth to him about her feelings about their relationship to her silent husband. She talks about her childhood, her suffering, her frustrations, her loneliness, her dreams, her desires... She says things she could never have done before, even though they have been married for the past 10 years. Therefore, this paralyzed man unconsciously becomes syngue sabour, a magic stone which, according to Persian mythology, when placed in front of a person shields her from unhappiness, suffering, pains and miseries. In this wait for her husband to come back to life, the woman struggles to survive and live. She finds refuge in her aunt's place, who is...

8-Ball (2013)

8-Ball (2013)

Director: Aku Louhimies
Country: Finland 
Runtime: 107 min


Pike has just been released from the penitentiary, and is now a mother of a beautiful baby girl. Leaving behind her torn youth, she now marches towards the great unknown - to her future. Only one thing is certain: she can afford no more mistakes.

Pike's ex-lover, Lalli, shows up ruining her plans for a clean start. The passion that once bound the two lovers together is still there.

Lalli is not the only man interested in Pike's destiny; crime inspector Elias has decided to find out how Pike is doing after her release. Or maybe he's in love? Elias is partnered up with another police officer, Olli, who is recuperating from a severe occupational accident, and trying to get on his feet after a breakup with the mother of his child.

While Pike is looking to forget her past, Olli is scrambling to find his way back to the way things were. But in life there's no turning back - what lies ahead, must be faced.

Gloria(2013)

Gloria(2013)

Director: Sebastián Lelio
Country: Chile
Runtime: 110 min










A story set in Santiago and centered on Gloria, a free-spirited older woman, and the realities of her whirlwind relationship with a former naval officer whom she meets out in the clubs.

Oh Boy (2012)

 Oh Boy (2012)

Director: Jan Ole Gerster
Country: Germany
Runtime: 83 min



The tragicomedy “Oh Boy!” is a self-ironic portrait of a young man who drops out of university and ends up wandering the streets of the city he lives: Berlin. The film deals with the desire to participate in life and the difficulty to find one's place. Black and white, tragic and funny, Oh Boy! is a winning debut from director Jan Ole Gerster and was released on November 1, 2012 in German cinemas. It stars Tom Schilling in the lead whose character Niko’s thought are for example as follows: “Do you know that feeling, that people around you seem to you to be strange? And the longer you think about it the clearer it becomes that not the people, but you yourself are the problem?”