Twice Upon a Time

A Japanese man and a gay bar-owner in Hong Kong drink beer as they talk about their childhood and experiences.

A crazy referendum throws Switzerland into a state of emergency. By the acceptance of the initiative “No Bilangue” there should be from now on only one national language: French. Many German-speaking Swiss are therefore having a crisis.

Steven, a pupil in a special-needs class, learns that his school has won a trip to Alcabideche, Portugal. He is overjoyed to get the chance to finally see his homeland. Once there, he decides to conduct his own holidays...

It Ain't Necessarily So captures a budding Japanese jazz singer and her biracial vocal instructor who struggle to agree on the proper way to sing Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy.” Humor is no stranger to jazz singers Eiko Katayama and Kazue Hiraoka who star alongside Masa Fox, their English teacher. "Master at capturing hyper-awkward moments... brilliantly explore how representations of culture and identity ain’t necessarily how they appear." --Wilda Wong, San Diego Asian Film Festival

A teacher attempts to teach his students to properly enunciate the letter 'R'.

Osman can understand his mother tongue, Kurdish, but cannot speak it, and he speaks Turkish, which happens to be his second language, but cannot understand it. As a result of this condition of his, Osman starts to fail at handling two concurrent tasks. Just like he cannot respond to his patrons while he is working, he cannot engage in a conversation with his friends whilst they are having coffee together. Even though he wants to get married, he fails at sustaining a long-term relationship with women whom he meets. Osman’s life starts to change after a customer tells him that she could help him with his obsession.

Gunars Taurins has become a dad-sitter in Latvia. He wants to return to France as soon as possible once he has found a caregiver for his father. But it's not that easy and Gunars has to stay in Riga whether he likes it or not.

A surreal trip into the world of an extremely long german word.

Despite an unrivaled talent for communicating, Jake has trouble talking to women. When an impossible situation presents itself, Jake ignores the signs and goes on a wild goose-chase to pursue his quest for love. When his plan is foiled, a new best friend helps him finally express himself successfully to a woman – without uttering a single word.

How do German couples communicate in private? What are they arguing about? Is the way to a man’s heart really through his stomach? This docu-fictional hybrid production discusses such questions with the help of authentic interview snippets that were edited under the staged plot. We get an insight into the life of an animal couple, who experience typical everyday situations on behalf of us humans. At first, our fox is emotionally contained, while the penguin lady may get wild as hell. With a wink, the filmmakers hold up a mirror to the audience in the cinema.

With the 70s behind him, San Diego's top rated newsman, Ron Burgundy, returns to take New York's first 24-hour news channel by storm.

Borrowing from an anthropological study initiated through the University of California in 1969, The Taste of The Name is a fantasia on universality. As a parallel to the elusive “umami” and its gradual scientific acceptance as a primary taste, we consider what is perceivable, knowable, and namable. Through the blue spectrum of various hermetic artifices, we are fed fables of Jules Verne's Nautilus and resurface in a virtual tanning bed, turning over in a slippery navigation of language.

They just arrived in France. They are Irish, Serbs, Brazilians Tunisians, Chinese and Senegalese ... For a year, Julie Bertuccelli filmed talks, conflicts and joys of this group of students aged 11 to 15 years, together in the same class to learn French.

Le grand roman de l'homme

The filmmaker traces the loss of her ancestral language over three generations of her family, and her own desire to recover it.

There are over 6,000 languages in the world. We lose one every two weeks. Hundreds will be lost within the next generation. By the end of this century, half of the world's languages will have vanished. Language Matters with Bob Holman is a two hour documentary that asks: What do we lose when a language dies? What does it take to save a language?

Secessionnist movements in Canada outside Quebec.

“Let’s think of nature as a big room. Nature is a room you know you’ll have to leave some day, most likely not by choice”. Heather Phillipson’s hallucinatory video put the goat in the goat boat explores endless declinations of nature—natural, naturing, finding a better nature, the nature construction, nature on loan, nature’s lack of nudity...—while revealing humanity’s ambiguous relationship to it.

A man planning to commit suicide hires a taxi driver to take him to his jumping-off point.

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