We're in Portugal but in France

NOSTALGIA

Stuck in a creative rut, filmmaker Gilda Pourjabar returns to Iran, her homeland, to talk with her brother Siamak, an illustrator based in Tehran. This encounter raises questions about their relationship to Western popular art, as they grew up in a culture that the current political regime describes as “westoxicated.” This documentary uses playful animations by Siamak, inspired by Franco-Belgian comics and rock concert posters, superimposed on archival footage of the most recent popular uprisings in Iran to become a logical collaboration for these artists who shared a record collection as children. Together, they examine how art slips through the cracks of repression to light the rebellious sparks in the hearts of young people.

Born in 1943 in Bessarabia region, Victor was forced to flee his homeland because of the war. After 77 years, his grandson, Dan, goes back there with his grandpa, Victor, who is recounting memories and seeking information about his birth and his lost relatives, in the country that is now the Republic of Moldova.

When a holiday wish wreaks havoc on a fractured family, they must work through their differences to defeat an army of magical Christmas ornaments.

The free, almost naive view from the perspective of a child puts the "68ers" in a new, illuminating light in the anniversary year 2008. The film is a provocative reckoning with the ideological upbringing that seemed so progressive and yet was suffocated by the children's desire to finally grow up. With an ironic eye and a feuilletonistic style, author Richard David Precht and Cologne documentary film director André Schäfer trace a childhood in the West German provinces - and place the major events of those years in completely different, smaller and very private contexts.

Fear and fascination arise in Muriel Grey when she remembers the figure of her father, who passed away when she was still very young. Thirty years after his death, Muriel will tell us the story of José Carlos Grey, a Black Holocaust survivor, freedom fighter in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance, and one of the only Black men known to have been imprisoned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Shifting Paths explores one family's resilience during the 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses in Frankfurt, Germany. This film traces the loss of a family-owned pharmaceutical company and how a once banned chamomile product, Kamillosan, has survived today with few knowing anything of its history.

A filmmaker confined to a psychiatric institution tries to find healing by bringing together all the members of his family for a collective experiment: using a construction game set, they must try to recreate as precisely as possible the happiness that once filled their family home, which disappeared 25 years ago. If even one family member managed to restore everything perfectly, the patient would be cured - that much is certain. But nothing was ever going to go as planned.

The Water Map is an essayistic journey through the ethnography and landscapes of the Region of Murcia. These places are in the process of disappearing due to the increasing and abundant agricultural exploitation. Water has marked the territory and the culture of the area, and with its disappearance, the memories of four characters fade away.

When Ines died, she left a very particular legacy, 10 books that read 'For my children'; it was the story of her life. Marked by a youth idyllic love, Ines was forced to marry a violent and womanizer man with whom she had 20 children. In the 50s, she managed to get divorce and 20 years after her death, Luisa, great-granddaughter of INES, reads, rescues and makes visible her history.

Disrupt, reject, destroy, avoid: At the interrupted rhythm of the broken photographs that a granddaughter has rescued from her grandfather’s hands, the last piece reconstructs the memory of an older man who has decided to leave behind his life impulses to surrender to sleep and calm. An essay on the act of joining our memories, the illusion of remembering and the freedom to forget.

Stone Street documents the life and experiences of a Trinidadian diaspora family and their enduring connection to the long standing family home in Port of Spain. Through the intersecting journeys of this extended and extensive family, the filmmaker explores themes of home, belonging and identity in a life defined by the fragmentary nature of a migratory Caribbean culture. This experimental documentary combines a lyrical first person voice with a family archive of home made audio visual artifacts, interviews and events. As the documentary explores the fragmentary nature of Caribbean identity, it simultaneously celebrates the fragments of domestic memorializing found in home movies, videos and photographs. Stone Street uses these various forms to evoke the experience of a complex and diverse Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora identity.

My mother has died. Her name was Maria. Her children, we, Raúl and Santiago, discover among the objects left by our mother hundreds of photographs from our maternal grandfather, from REGINA -our great-aunt-, from our mother, from our father... And through those photographs, and with the help from an old camera -my grandfather's inheritance-, I, -along several trips to the places where those photographs were taken-, seek to recover and not lose my memory... that of my family. In the end, we will have to think on our memory and on what we have preserved and lost.

When she realizes that her grandmother, the woman who raised her, is losing her sight, the director decides to explore the bond that unites them through the episodes of non-vision that these three generations share, the memories of the past, the misunderstandings and the new memories they seek to have in common.

Parole tremanti

As Molly prepares for her late brother's funeral, Sam helps her through her grief and guides her to the very end.

Focused on the experiences of Manuel "Manolo" Díaz Caballero, who was a local police officer in Malaga for more than 30 years, his memories of those years are the subject of this documentary.

A poetic exploration of the multi-generational affects of Canada's Indian Residential School system, based on the personal trials of Aboriginal playwright Yvette Nolan.

Home movie collection of the Bohulano Family of Stockton, CA. Footage dates between the 1950s-1970s.

Eliza Dushku takes on her homeland of Albania.