Smile, Baby

When a woman shelters a group of girls from suffering female genital mutilation, she starts a conflict that tears her village apart.

Connie Doyle is eighteen, pregnant and alone. She accidentally ends up on a train where she meets Hugh Winterbourne and his wife pregnant Patricia. The train wrecks and she wakes up in the hospital to find out that it's been assumed that she's Patricia. Hugh's mother takes her in and she falls in love with Hugh's brother Bill. Just when she thinks everything is going her way, her ex-boyfriend shows up.

2021, Afghanistan right before the Taliban’s return. Naru, the only camerawoman at Kabul’s main TV station, struggles to keep custody of her three-year-old son after leaving her serial cheater husband. Convinced no good men exist in her country, Naru is caught off guard when Qodrat, Kabul TV’s most important journalist, gives her a career opportunity. As the two crisscross the city reporting on its last days of freedom, sparks fly and Naru starts to doubt herself: could there actually be a good man out there?

Lindani, a neurotic young trans man, struggles to tell his partner Tam he loves them after a random encounter with a stranger shakes his self-confidence. But as he finds himself pushed and pulled in all directions by the perceptions of others, can Lindani reconnect with himself enough to figure out how he really feels?

An indolent aristocrat gets more than he bargained for when he hires a competent but silently devious manservant.

Aimless young Alexandre juggles his relationships with his girlfriend, Marie, and a casual lover named Veronika. Marie becomes increasingly jealous of Alexandre's fling with Veronika and as the trio continues their unsustainable affair, the emotional stakes get higher, leading to conflict and unhappiness.

Bishnu returns to her Himalayan village after quitting her job, only to face mounting family pressures and societal expectations. As tensions rise with her pregnant sister's arrival and a budding relationship with a "suitable" boy from her community, Bishnu must choose between conforming to tradition or claiming her independence.

Zoya Diwan and her 8 year old son are stuck in an abusive marriage with her activist husband, when she is sought out for help by a victim of Triple Talaq

After the death of her abusive father, lonely librarian Martha finds herself caught up in a strange, sadomasochistic relationship with a monstrous husband whom she begins to suspect may be trying to murder her.

Co-directed by Blackwood and Julien, the first full-length feature film by Sankofa Film and Video offers a radical and necessary interrogation into what constitutes 'post-colonial' identity at a time of political and social restlessness in Britain. Set within an isolated desert landscape contrasted with recognizable scenes of the intensity of family life, this vanguard work demonstrates the richness and variety of the black experience; it is a poetic and hard-hitting commentary on the complexities of race, gender and sexuality.

Two actresses take us through a series of 'raps' and sketches about what it means to be beautiful and black.

Charlie is Not a Boy is the tale of a hushed soul, bound to a crumbling household in an allegorical America. With a perverted butcher for a father and a mother frozen in a quiet, catatonic spell, Charlie seeks solace in the whimsical world of his eccentric grandmother. As his safe haven unravels, Charlie navigates the hostile worlds of home and the military, caught between his authentic self and the masks he must wear.

A depressed wife and mother whose reality is starting to fracture into fantasy, drives her children to the beach. On the return journey she stops at a service station to fill up with petrol. Four mechanics eye her off and, as one of them walks towards her car, a full-blown erotic fantasy develops.

Lucio is a family man who secretly experiences a crisis with himself related to his sexuality. Living years of agony, he decides to assume his true sexual condition for his family and friends.

Ludovic is waiting for a miracle. With six-year-old certainty, she believes she was meant to be a little girl -- and that the mistake will soon be corrected. But where she expects the miraculous, Ludo finds only rejection, isolation, and guilt -- as the intense reactions of family, friends, and neighbors strip away every innocent lace and bauble.

The brain of a male engineer is transplanted into a female’s body. He soon finds it very frustrating to cope with the daily sexist discrimination most women deal with. For example, he is surprised when no one will hire a female engineer. When he is faced with dealing with female sexuality, he quickly begins exhibiting lesbian tendencies.

A man's life seems to be falling apart. He's bored with his job, gets passed over for a promotion and, when the pressures get to be too much, he tries to commit suicide, but he even fails at that and manages only to cripple himself instead of killing himself. Forced to stay at home, he finds the role of "househusband" enjoyable--until his wife takes a low-paying job with his old company, and rapidly rises up the corporate ladder.

Drawn by a strange ringing, a weary writer slips out of her life to follow it through the city, encountering strangers whose fleeting, intimate moments stir something lost in her. Phantasma reflects on the cards we’re given and what we choose to do with them.

Using a faceless doll criminal reenacts a brutal crime. But surprisingly he is not the one being judged. There seems to be an odd one out in the investigative group. The film premiered in the Berlinale Short competition programme.

Veronica, the new girl in town, is lured into the woods by a group of senior boys looking to make her a victim. But the boys don't know that Veronica's been trained to handle herself in surprisingly lethal ways.