Monegros

After geopolitics forced him into exile, Alexey Molchanov spent 2023 on a journey to reclaim his athletic glory and honor his iconic mother’s towering legacy by attempting the most dominant season in the history of the deadly sport of freediving.

Three men enter the new wild west of baby making, online forums where sperm donors connect with hopeful parents, but find themselves exchanging more than just genetic material.

Viktors is an entrepreneur with a unique offer – he has built a bar, bakery, spa, hotel and an auto-shop in a former “sovkhoz” cafeteria in the village of Lone. Viktors understands life, and that his words carry weight – almost 500 village inhabitants are now employed. Lone is a lively place both day and night, full of youths and many other businesses. Viktors is very proud.

Featuring Paul Robeson, this is the first documentary film to take a serious look at social conditions and race relations in South Africa.

By telling the human stories behind the entire value chain that gives life to the Spanish wine with the greatest international projection, ‘Rioja, Land of the Thousand Wines’ portrays a currently blooming wine region underpinned by the talent and the work of the new generations of winemakers that operate side by side with the region’s historic wineries. The film puts the focus on the match between territory and product, wisdom and tradition, and lays a bridge between the origins and the future of Rioja. An immersion into a fascinating world that, through captivating cinematography and careful editing, attempts to find the keys to understanding what Rioja wine is and what makes it so special.

Varda focuses her eye on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. Her investigation leads from forgotten corners of the French countryside to off-hours at the green markets of Paris, following those who insist on finding a use for that which society has cast off, whether out of necessity or activism.

The follow-up film to “Barstow, California” takes us to the mountains of Miyama, a remote forest and tourist area north of Kyoto. Uwe Walter, a shakuhachi player from Germany, lives there with his wife Mitsuyo for 30 years. Together with the villagers he prepares the annual Gion Festival. On the eve of the festival, the village representatives tell him that his self-built studio is to be demolished. This brings back memories for him of earlier times and his first steps as a Nō actor. In the manner of a fresco, the film interweaves rural depictions of everyday life with the story of its German protagonist. In the village community with its togetherness of generations, Uwe shares life with his neighbours, with farmers, hunters, woodsmen, poultry farmers and anglers, tills his kitchen garden, and like other tradition-conscious villagers, he also grows his rice. The film shows them in a harsh mountain landscape between the rainy season and the first snow.

Migrant families experience violence, but they also keep beautiful memories when they arrive in new lands. Fantastic and intimate stories, recalled from childhood, travel across time and space, magically intermingling with the help of the four elements and breaking the boundaries of cinema.

A provocative and poetic exploration of how the British people have seen their own land through more than a century of cinema. A hallucinated journey of immense beauty and brutality. A kaleidoscopic essay on how magic and madness have linked human beings to nature since the beginning of time.

Cyrille, a young gay farmer from Auvergne, has only one friend, a homosexual like him. One day, he goes on vacation to a beach in Charente Maritime. He cannot swim and sees the sea for the first time. It was there that he met the director Rodolphe Marconi who decided to devote this sensitive and gentle portrait to him, plunging us into an agricultural world in crisis and into a life often lonely and made up of hard work rarely pays off.

Best friends Hazel Findlay and Maddy Cope journey to the rocky outer reaches of Mongolia, on a quixotic search for new trad routes.

A strange story from Somerset, England about a filmmaking farmer and the inspiring legacy of his long-lost home movies.

At L'Abri, a short-term "hospitality community" in the English countryside, five strangers spend a summer together exploring their big questions about faith, being human, and finding belonging back home.

When is the moment you think: I'm going to hoist my regional flag? Who are these flaghoisters? And what does it mean to identify with your region? These are questions that filmmaker Okki Poortvliet, theatermaker Hans van der Werf and designer Vera Vos asked. So, they went through the whole of Drenthe, a region in the North of The Netherlands where all three of them grew up, to collect as many stories as possible from hoisters of the flag of Drenthe. The Flaghoisters is a film about the confrontation between the countryside and, as people from Drenthe call it, “the city dwellers”. A story about a disappearing language, the safety of your village, greeting each other, being proud, and just acting "normal".

After a career filming across five continents, EMMY and BAFTA winning wildlife cameraman Stephen de Vere returns to the English countryside, to explore the hidden world beyond the garden gate. From playful fox cubs to the barn owl tending to her chicks, explore the extraordinary world waiting beyond the garden gate. The film is a personal view, giving an insight into what it’s like being a wildlife cameraman and reminding us that you don’t have to travel to all corners of the world to get close to nature.

Les Danses de Tami

Three girls on a tour of the English countryside meet up with two young women who introduce them to the joys of life in a nudist camp.

Documentary about Swedish emigration to Argentina via Brazil.

A Sherpa family breaks a taboo and climbs the most holy of mountains to earn money for their son’s education. They accompany a western expedition on East Wall of the Khumbakarna Mountain, a wall that has never been climbed before. ‘The Wall of Shadows’ tells the story of an encounter between a young Sherpa boy and an experienced western mountaineer at the foot of the sacred mountain. Will they face the wrath of mountain Gods?

In the absence of any physical connection, this short explores alternative forms of contact among neighbors by making use of an old 16mm camera, a zoom lens, and a few meters of expired film.