When I Saw You (2012)

When I Saw You (2012)
Director: Annemarie Jacir

Country: Palestine
Runtime:98 min


 The follow up to Annemarie Jacir's award-winning feature debut Salt of the Sea, When I Saw You tells the tale of a young Palestinian boy and his mother as they struggle to maintain their dignity after being displaced from their West Bank by the Israeli army in 1967. Defeated by the Israelis for the second time in their quest to liberate Palestine, numerous Palestinians and their families join refugees from the 1948 conflict in refugee camps located in nearby Arab countries. 11-year-old Tarek (Mahmoud Asfa) and his mother Ghaydaa (Ruba Blal) are just two of the thousands who were displaced when the Israeli army seized control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Desperate, they seek shelter at the Harir Camp in Jordan while anxiously awaiting the return of Tarik's father, Ghassan. Later, when Ghassan fails to appear, Tarik grows emboldened by his encounter with a band of heavily-armed Palestinian freedom fighters, and decides to join their ranks.

Ana Arabia (2013)

 Ana Arabia (2013)

 Director: Amos Gitai
Country: France | Israel
Runtime:85 min

Filmed in one sequence-shot of 1:25, Ana Arabia is a moment in the life of a small community of outcasts, Jews and Arabs, who live together in a forgotten enclave at the “border” between Jaffa and Bat Yam, in Israel. One day, Yael, a young journalist, visits them. In these dilapidated shacks, in the orchard filled with lemon trees and surrounded by mass public houses, she discovers a range of characters far removed from the usual clichés offered by the region. Yael has the feeling of having discovered a human goldmine. She no longer thinks of her job. Faces and words of Youssef and Miriam, Sarah and Walid, of their neighbors, their friends tell her about life, its dreams and its hopes, its love affairs, desires and disillusions. Their relation to time is different than that of the city around them. In this tinkered and fragile place, there is a possibility of coexistence. A universal metaphor.

Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012)

Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012)

Director: Lav Diaz
Country: Philippines
Runtime:360 min

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive degenerative disease found in individuals who have been subjected to multiple concussions and other forms of head injury. A variant of the condition, dementia pugilistica (DP), is primarily associated with boxing. CTE has been most commonly found in professional athletes participating in American football, ice hockey, professional wrestling and other contact sports, who have experienced head trauma, resulting in characteristic degeneration of brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein. Individuals with CTE may show symptoms of dementia such as memory loss, aggression, confusion and depression which may appear within months of the trauma or many decades later. (Wikipedia)

Florentina Hubaldo keeps repeating her story, orally, akin to a mantra, a meditation and a prayer; her way of remembering; her means of maintaining hope for survival and redemption; fighting with what’s left of her memory. She lives and exist in a place and a condition where history, her story, is being systematically being obliterated.

Two gold hunters endlessly dig the ground with their shovels and hoes for the proverbial treasure that will emancipate them.

A father sadly waits for the death of her fragile daughter.

Prisms of Perception(2012)

Prisms of Perception(2012)

Director: Gigi Scaria
Country: India
Runtime:3 min
Video Art

Gigi Scaria did his BFA in painting at the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, and his MFA at the Jamia Millia University. His work focuses on issues of change, unsettlement, immigration, exodus and non-belonging. Scaria attempts to draw the viewer’s attention towards the painful truths of displacement.

Polluting Paradise(2012)

Polluting Paradise(2012)
Director: Fatih Akin
Country: Germany
Runtime:85 min

Ten years ago, the government of Turkey decided to dump waste in the hills above the Black Sea village of Çamburnu. The villagers' struggle against the Turkish state's decision has lasted as long – the mayor and the whole village against Ministers of State, judges and financial interests. How can they possibly succeed against these powerful institutions? Director Fatih Akin takes a devastating look at the small village whose health and security are threatened by the introduction of the garbage dump. Situated in a defunct copper mine, the refuse heap pollutes groundwater and streams and fills the air with terrible odors. Akin keeps his cameras rolling over the course of five years as community members, including elderly residents and schoolchildren, fight the smug bureaucrats who signed off on the dump, while they attempt to maintain their daily existence as farmers, fishermen and students. Akin does what all good activist filmmakers do best: expose the stark divide between everyday citizens and the people who supposedly represent them, urging viewers not to let a similar fate befall their hometowns.

Boy Eating the Bird's Food (2012)

Boy Eating the Bird's Food (2012)

Director:Ektoras Lygizos
Country: Greece
Runtime:80 min

Boy Eating the Bird’s Food, inspired by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel, Hunger, tells the story of Yorgos (Yiannis Papadopoulos) a twenty-two year old living an isolated life in modern day Athens and on the brink of poverty and starvation. He is estranged from his family and only really has one true friend – his beloved pet canary. Quite like a bird himself, Yorgos has a beautiful singing voice and occasionally shares his canary’s birdseed.

The whole film is an unashamed metaphor for the mood of the people of modern day Greece. A sense of frustration reverberates throughout the film stemming from the fact that Yorgos’ passion and talents are being stifled due to a lack of financial independence. This escalates into the protagonist resorting to more and more desperate measures to keep himself alive and to retain some level of sanity and self-worth.

Employing the use of shaky cam and extreme close up shots, the film is uncomfortably intimate, obsessive and even intrusive into Yorgos’ everyday life. Thus we can’t help but sympathise with this character, having seen him at his most private and vulnerable. Lygizos describes using a small camera from early on in the rehearsal process so that Papadopoulos could become “used to me being his ‘co-player’ – not a co-star, not another actor, but instead his subtle shadow.”

Yorgos’ is deliberately denied a social context or background history in order to convey the message that his story is indeed a ubiquitous one in Greece and the emphasis remains on the obvious metaphor. Greece’s abandonment by Germany is symbolically present within the classical German language piece Yorgos chooses to sing for an audition early in the film. It is no mere coincidence that Yorgos doesn’t understand the lyrics and furthermore, that he fails the audition.

Boy Eating the Bird’s Food is a powerful, uncomfortably honest and truly devastating portrayal of a young man struggling not only to feed and house himself, but also clutching onto a fading sense of identity, masculinity and self-worth. A brave performance from Papadopoulos in Lygizos’ accomplished debut feature film; well deserving of all the critical acclaim it will undoubtedly receive on the festival circuit and beyond.

Khan Khanne (2014)

Khan Khanne (2014)

Director:Jean-Luc Godard
Runtime:     8mn 46s




Jean-Luc Godard did not attend the world premiere of his new film, ADIEU AU LANGAGE (GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE), at Cannes. But instead, he sent a letter in motion to Gilles Jacob and Thierry Fremaux, the directors of the Festival.
Made public the 21/05/2014.

Ida (2013)

Ida (2013)

Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
Country:Poland
Runtime: 80 min


Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski (My Summer of Love), this story of faith and despair is gracefully told, its simple, uncluttered spaces and luminous black-and-white photography harking back to Robert Bresson. Innocent young Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), raised in a Polish convent and preparing to take her vows, is persuaded by the Mother Superior to make contact with her only known relative, an aunt (Agata Kulesza) who reveals to the young novitiate that her father was Jewish and her parents both died in the Nazi occupation. Hoping to uncover the details, the two women set off for the family's hometown, where the romantic attentions of a handsome young sax player in the hotel bar prove almost as troubling to Ida as her parents' demise.

In Hiding (2013)

In Hiding (2013)

Director: Jan Kidawa-Blonski
Country: Poland
Runtime: 103 minute


Radom under Nazi occupation at the end of World War II. After the tragic death of her mother a young girl, Janina, lives alone with her father a photographer. He decides to give shelter to a young Jewish girl, Esther, the daughter of his friend who has been hiding in a small room under the floor. Initially Janina rebels against this situation, but soon begins to take an interest in the involuntary tenant. Gradually, curiosity turns into fascination. One day Janina’s father is arrested in street roundup and now Janina has to look after Esther alone. The young women start to live in almost complete isolation from the outside world: loneliness and fear bring them closer and closer. Mutual dramatic experiences make their relationship more intimate. When the war ends Janina hides the news from Ester and continues to keep her in hiding as her erotic fascination with Esther turns into an obsession.

The Notebook (2013)

The Notebook (2013)

Director: János Szász
Country: Hungary
Runtime: 109 min

Towards the end of World War II, people in big cities are at the mercy of air raids and death by starvation. A desperate young mother leaves her 13-year-old twin sons at their grandmother's house in the country, despite the fact that this grandmother is a cruel and bestial alcoholic. The villagers call her “the Witch” because she is rumoured to have poisoned her husband long ago.

Previously pampered, the twins must learn how to survive alone in their new, rural surroundings. They realise that the only way to cope with the absurd and inhumane world of adults and war is to become completely unfeeling and merciless. By learning to free themselves from hunger, pain and emotion, they will be able to endure future hardships. So they begin their own series of studies: they fortify their spirits by reading the Bible and learning foreign languages. They practice every day to harden their bodies and minds. They hold their hands over flames, cut their legs, arms and chests with a knife and pour alcohol right on their wounds. They desensitize themselves to insults and learn to ignore the more insidious appeals of sentiment and love.

The twins keep a written record of all they have witnessed during the war, the Notebook. When they write, they follow their own strict code: The prose must be free from emotion, the notes precise and objective.

Based on Agota Kristof's famous novel.