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?”

Fair Sex (2012)

Fair Sex (2012)

Director: Martin Laroche
Country: Canada
Runtime: 89 min




Sophie underwent genital mutilation in Africa at the age of four and then immigrated to Quebec. Twenty  years later, having graduated with a degree in film, she gets a summer job in a travelling amusement park. When her boss finds out about her film background, he asks her to make a short video about his company.

Sophie gets caught up in the game with her camera, filming everything – even things that have nothing to do with her work. She films her friends, and also herself, and gradually she sees that she is creating something else -- that she is making a film about her own life and about the secret that she has kept since her childhood.

La Sirga(2012)

La Sirga(2012)

Director: William Vega
Country: Colombia
Runtime: 88 min





Alicia is helpless. Fleeing the armed violence that has claimed the lives of those dearest to her, she ends up in La Sirga, at the guesthouse of Oscar, the only family she has left. Here, on the shores of a great lake in the Andes, she tries to rebuild her life. But this place, where she feels safe, is not spared by the fighting. The return of Freddy, the son that Oscar has been awaiting for years, his enigmatic intentions and his possible link with the warring factions bring La Sirga what Alicia fears the most.

The Secret Society of Fine Arts (2012)

The Secret Society of Fine Arts (2012)

Director: Anders Rønnow Klarlund
Country: Denmark
Duration : 1h 15mn




A group of underground artists blow up Berlin's zoological museum and declare it "a work of art". Their goal is to set beauty free. The unrelenting passion fascinates actress Eva Kovacs, who joins the group. But how do you draw the line between art and terror?

The Secret Society of Fine Arts is unparalleled in Danish cinema. Anders Rønnow Klarlund eliminates the medium's most vital element - moving images - and tells his story through 3D processed still photos. The intention is to make us sharpen our senses.

It's inspired by Chris Marker's French still photo film La jetée, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012)

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012)

Director: Sophie Fiennes
Country: UK
Runtime: 136 min









The sequel to The Pervert's Guide to Cinema sees the reunion of brilliant philosopher Slavoj Zizek with filmmaker Sophie Fiennes, now using their inventive interpretation of moving pictures to examine ideology - the collective fantasies that shape our beliefs and practices.

Stories We Tell (2012)

Stories We Tell (2012)

Director: Sarah Polley
Country: Canada
Runtime: 108 min 

In this inspired, genre-twisting new film, Oscar®-nominated writer/director Sarah Polley discovers that the truth depends on who's telling it. Polley is both filmmaker and detective as she investigates the secrets kept by a family of storytellers. She playfully interviews and interrogates a cast of characters of varying reliability, eliciting refreshingly candid, yet mostly contradictory, answers to the same questions. As each relates their version of the family mythology, present-day recollections shift into nostalgia-tinged glimpses of their mother, who departed too soon, leaving a trail of unanswered questions. Polley unravels the paradoxes to reveal the essence of family: always complicated, warmly messy and fiercely loving. Stories We Tell explores the elusive nature of truth and memory, but at its core is a deeply personal film about how our narratives shape and define us as individuals and families, all interconnecting to paint a profound, funny and poignant picture of the ...

Meghe Dhaka Tara (2013)

Meghe Dhaka Tara (2013)

Director:Kamaleswar Mukherjee
Country:India
Runtime: 02:34

To Ritwik Ghatak film was not merely a form of entertainment, but a weapon, a medium to portray struggle of common men. He was successful neither in his career nor he could he become a good family man or husband. Still he was an artist who never compromised for personal gain, fame or profit. The story of the film starts in 1969 and deals with Ritwik Ghatak's time spent in a mental asylum. It shows Nilkantha being admitted to mental asylum under the supervision of Doctor S. P. Mukherjee. S. P. Mukherjee learns that the Prime Minister of India knows Nilkantha and is fond of his works and may request the hospital authority to take special care of him. In the hospital a police officer sees Nilkantha and tells Doctor Mukherjee that he is a wasted drunkard. Another patient of hospital mocks Nilkantha as "disgraced intellectual". Even he was undergoing treatment in the hospitals, he writes a play and stages it with other asylum patients. The film shows how Durga (Nilkantha's wife) wants to ...

Wadjda (2012)

Wadjda (2012)

Director:Haifaa Al-Mansour
Country: Saudi Arabia
Runtime: 98 min 

 WADJDA is a 10-year-old girl living in a suburb of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Although she lives in a conservative world, Wadjda is fun loving, entrepreneurial and always pushing the boundaries of what she can get away with. After a fight with her friend Abdullah, a neighborhood boy she shouldn't be playing with, Wadjda sees a beautiful green bicycle for sale. She wants the bicycle desperately so that she can beat Abdullah in a race. But Wadjda's mother won't allow it, fearing repercussions from a society that sees bicycles as dangerous to a girl's virtue. So Wadjda decides to try and raise the money herself. At first, Wadjda's mother is too preoccupied with convincing her husband not to take a second wife to realize what's going on. And soon enough Wadjda's plans are thwarted when she is caught running various schemes at school. Just as she is losing hope of raising enough money, she hears of a cash prize for a Koran recitation competition at her school. She devotes herself...

Marcelle Hanselaar: Postcard from the Edge (2013)

Marcelle Hanselaar: Postcard from the Edge (2013)

Director: Thomas Völker
Country: UK
Runtime: 12 min 

"POSTCARD FROM THE EDGE" is a short but intimate portrait of the Dutch painter MARCELLE HANSELAAR directed by German filmmaker and artist Thomas Völker. The film was made on the occasion of Hanselaar's Solo Show "Walking The Line" which took place at Kings Place Gallery London between May and June 2013. From the exhibition catalogue: Marcelle Hanselaar's familiar theme, the conflicting awareness and subsequent struggle with the balance of how we see ourselves and how we appear to others, has now found a bigger arena. Her gripping paintings of a solitary figure, with or without props are still there but now, for the first time, she takes this theme into the public realm, something she has freely explored in her large etchings but never before in her paintings. The result is a Breughel-esque tableau vivant. Hanselaar says "I am fascinated by the phenomena of crowds, how the shift from private to collective behavior creates a shift of inner boundaries as well. Our familiar sense of inner... 

The Past (2013)

The Past (2013)

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Country:Iran
Runtime: 130 min



Coming back to accomplish the divorce procedure, Ahmad an Iranian man, arrives in Paris after four years to meet his ex-wife and her daughters from her previous marriage. He notices his ex is in a relationship with an Arab named Samir who also has a son and a wife in a coma. The relationship of the older daughter and her mother is in deterioration because the daughter thinks her mother is the cause of Samir's wife comatose state. The affairs get more complicated when the older daughter discloses something heinous she has done.

The Great Beauty (2013)

The Great Beauty (2013)

Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Country: Italy
Runtime: 135 min

This visually spectacular film, which carries echoes of the classic works of Federico Fellini, was enthusiastically received by festival audiences and critics upon its premiere. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called it 'an outlandishly entertaining hallucination,' and according to Variety's Jay Weissberg it's an 'astonishing cinematic feast.' Journalist Jep Gambardella (the dazzling Toni Servillo, Il Divo and Gomorrah) has been a permanent fixture in Rome's literary and social circles since the legendary success of his one and only novel. Armed with a roguish charm, he has seduced his way through the city's lavish night life for decades, but when his 65th birthday coincides with a shock from the past, Jep finds himself unexpectedly taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries, and looking past the extravagant nightclubs, parties, and cafés to find Rome in all its glory: a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.

La banda Picasso (2012)

La banda Picasso (2012)

Director: Fernando Colomo
Country: Spain
Runtime:100min








Take Picasso, Apollinaire, Manolo, Braque, Max Jacob and Gertrude Stein, and mix in the robbery of the 'Mona Lisa' from the Louvre. Together, the film presents a good-humoured view of the jealousies and intrigues between the characters.

Dripped (2011)

Dripped (2011)

Director: Léo Verrier
Country: France
Runtime: 9 min

Jack is a strange character. He steals paintings from museums to eat them. He feeds himself with the artistic process of the painter. But one day, the museums are closed and he will have to paint by himself to survive.