Coming Closer

Two monks on a mission choose very different paths

The short film (conveyed in a parable-like story structure) follows a man devoted to himself and the blessings of his attributed god. He struggles to survive a primitive life and is forced to take action to ensure his own prosperity.

Directed by Zaza Khalvashi.

The war is over. Once a young sculptor, and now a soldier, he returned home. Married, there were children. In search of work, he was hired to make grave monuments. Time passed... At one time, visiting a cemetery with friends, he saw with different eyes all his work done over the years...

Failing in his desperate efforts to find his beloved owner, an abandoned dog eventually joins a canine revolt leading a revolution against their human abusers.

In this dreamlike film, a nameless father and his son, Aleksei, live together in an apartment in St. Petersburg. Aleksei's mother has died and consequently the two have a very close relationship. When Aleksei acquires a girlfriend, she refuses to take a back seat to his bond with his dad, and breaks up with him. Aleksei is also experiencing nightmares, dreading separation from his father to be a part of the military as his father was.

The way home for Aleksandr Rekhviashvili is not charted in the conventional sense. It takes the viewer along some peculiar roads and across a unique landscape: Georgian history and legend, politics and social stratification, religion and ethics. Allusive, stylized and allegorical from beginning to end, his long-banned The Way Home is in part a tribute to Rekhviashvili’s favorite director, Pasolini, especially to The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966). Together with the short film Nutsa (1971) and the widely acclaimed Georgian Chronicle of the 19th Century (1979; SFIFF 1983), The Way Home closes a triptych of films that represent Rekhviashvili’s poetic contemplation of Georgia’s past. It makes extensive use of poems by Bella Akhmadulina (the major female poet of the cultural ‘thaw’ of the ’50s and ’60s and a Georgian by descent), and of sets by Amir Kakabadze. Like other films in the trilogy, The Way Home is stunningly photographed in black-and-white.--Oxymoron

Directed by Zulfikar Musakov.

This film ballad is dedicated to those who never returned home from WW2. A group of retreating Soviet soldiers, crossing a lunar terrain in a desperate attempt to escape death, is attacked by a German fighter plane that appears like a bolt from the blue. One by one they are killed. Then suddenly, in an unlikely denouement bordering on the mystical, the attacker is shot down with a simple rifle. For ideological reasons that defy understanding this film, one of Viktor Hres’ earliest works, was shelved in 1967 by Soviet censors. In 2010, it was restored by the Debut Studio of the Oleksander Dovzhenko Film Studio with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ukraine.

Banned in the Soviet Union for its "negative" content and never released, Kalatozov was forced to retreat from filmmaking for seven years because of this film. The film sets out to illustrate the old adage, "For want of a nail, the battle was lost," showing how the inferior quality of something so trivial as a nail in a soldier's boot leads inexorably to the capture of an armored train. Kalatozov had intended to demonstrate the crucial and universal importance of efficiency in Soviet industry, but the government decided that his fable gave a negative impression of the Red Army's capabilities.

A poetized chronicle of the events taking place in one of the Georgian villages in the late 19th century, when, to save a forest, the innumerous intelligentsia could rally the people and oppose the industrialists…

Garib in the Land of Jinn

Lithuania, 1977. Memories of childhood, adolescence, and first love in a small provincial town, shown through complexity of human relations at this periodical film.

In a world where there is hardly any life left, Marta must protect her son Samuel from the dangerous world that surrounds them. Everything changes when a curious survivor arrives at her precious home.

During one night in the coldest city on the planet, a man is forced to cross the boundaries of the imaginable in order to save his wife, kidnapped by a mysterious stranger. When a stranger kidnaps a wife, her husband has no choice but to comply with the demands of the kidnapper. The price for the life of a spouse is six people killed before dawn. But who are these six? Do they deserve a harsh sentence? And what boundaries of his conscience is a man willing to cross for the love of his life? In the coldest city in the world, the nights seem endless in winter and you can't wait for the sunrise.

Stella Anyways

In a post-pandemic world, a grieving young widow struggling with her own self-destruction, fights to save people as part of a crisis response team. Embedded with the fire department, she is battling the men who don't want her there, the clients who fight her tooth and nail, and her own wounded psyche. She wants to save the world, if the job doesn't kill her first

Weston Eastward, owner of a small delivery service, hires Garrett Britches to deliver packages to unusual clients, whom lead Garret to a dark secret.

A group of friends decide to spend the night in a field where a supernatural being resides, who asks for offerings in exchange for help.

The relationship between Marianne and her son, Dustin, has eroded over the years. Their small, fractured family unit is slowly rebuilt once Dustin receives some upsetting news and befriends an old street artist.