Apocalypsever - Franco Maresco

What's it like starting a family when you're both transgender? This intimate film follows Hannah and Jake Graf on a journey through prejudice and surrogacy to birth during lockdown.

The film is separated into four chapters, each tracking a different group of protagonists who all have one thing in common – they were born deaf. Little Sandra likes to play football and admires Ronaldinho. Marián worships trains and wants to be an engine driver. Teenagers Alena and René are expecting a baby and long for it to be born healthy. The trio of Roman, Kristián and Karmen help their parents by collecting junk to be sold and dream of one day having a house with a flush toilet.

Twelve Mexicans, scattered across different cities worldwide, capture their personal experiences during the early days of the 2020 pandemic lockdown. With only the resources at hand, they document their daily lives, reflecting the uncertainty, confusion, and anxiety that marked this unprecedented moment in history. From the relative comfort of isolation at home to the vulnerability of those at risk of losing their jobs or fighting the virus on the front lines.

Two instants separated by 99 days conflict with each other.

The pandemic has many faces. It has affected everyone across the world, but each of us in a different way. A collection of individual fates observed in fine detail. And a filmic world tour that looks down on places of residence from above and yet gets very close to the people.

Filmed and edited entirely in isolation, Living in Fear is an educational and inspiring documentary directed by myself, Stephanie Castelete-Tyrrell, a disabled filmmaker as I capture the fears and struggles disabled people faced before the government implemented the lockdown on the 23rd March 2020. Thousands of people with disabilities were left in the dark and had to make the call weeks before to lockdown as it was inevitable that we would die if we caught the virus. Food was impossible to access because we couldn't go out or get delivery slots, and even if we did panic buyers made it impossible to get the items we desperately needed. We were truly isolated, unable to have family and friends visit. Having carers coming in and out of the house was risky and many disabled people felt that having basic care was putting their lives at risk.

A short documentary about a homeless couple who face the ban on being on the street during 2020 quarantine. Just through their eyes, the two protagonists show us a different Milan, silent and suspended.

Bulletproof explores the complexities of violence in schools by looking at the strategies employed to prevent it. The film observes the longstanding rituals that take place in and around American schools: homecoming parades, basketball practice, morning announcements, and math class. Unfolding alongside these scenes are a collection of newer traditions: lockdown drills, teacher firearms training, metal detector screenings, and school safety trade shows. Bulletproof asks what these rituals reflect back at us, looking beyond immediate causes and responses to mass shootings in a cinematic meditation on the array of forces that shape the culture of violence in the United States.

What happens when a world that relies on traffic and the logistics that allow it comes to a standstill? What happens when sickness and even death are taken from us?

What did it mean to live in a perpetual siege, coupled with total communication blockade on top of a triple lockdown for the women of Kashmir. This hybrid documentary will try to delve into these questions exploring how the idea of life/living, time and space completely transformed for Kashmir post Article 370 abrogation.

Ever since the first Roma people arrived in Sweden five hundred years ago, they have been discriminated against and persecuted. The lack of knowledge, invisibility and denial of the historical abuses that Roma have been exposed to is one of the many contributing causes of continued marginalization and vulnerability of Roma today. Here, the Roma tell of the abuses and persecutions they experienced during the 20th century. How it felt like as a child being constantly expelled from the camp, not infrequently in the middle of the night, with violence and under gunfire. Soraya Post from the traveling group tells how her mother, as a pregnant 23-year-old, was forced to abort her child in the seventh month. The reason: She was a "gypsy".

A young student heads back to his village during the COVID-19 lockdown to collect ethnographic material for his thesis, but as quarantine stretches on, the rituals and everyday scenes he records start bringing back childhood memories-leading him to piece the footage together into something more personal.

A musical, and also a reflection on watching, on trying to escape an anthropocentric gaze and also on watching itself in cinema. Featuring mares and horses: Triana, Víctor K, Bambi Sailor, San Special Solano, Buck Red Skin, Onkaia, Cool Boy, the donkey Agostino, the mule Guapa. And also Alfredo Lagos, Raül Refree, María Marín, Pepe Habichuela, Virgina García del Pino, María García Ruiz, Pilar Monsell, María Pérez Sanz.

13 years ago, director Bob Entrop made the film A piece of blue in the sky, the first film in the Netherlands that depicted the murder of almost 1 million Sinti and Roma during the Second World War. There is a taboo on what happened during the war, you don't talk about it with anyone and certainly not in front of a camera. Requiem for Auschwitz is a sequel, with the most valuable moments from the first film, supplemented with the grandchildren and the creation and performance of the 'Requiem for Auschwitz' by Sinti composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb by the Sinti and Roma Philharmonic from Frankfurt and a Jewish choir in the Berliner Dom in Berlin, during Holocaust Memorial Day. During his visit to Auschwitz in 2020 with four musicians from the Dutch Accompaniment Orchestra, Roger shows them the places that inspired him.

In the suburbs of Montpellier, France, in the spring of 2024, a Roma wedding celebration is about to begin. In the bedroom of a small apartment, Luisa and her cousins meet up to talk about their dreams, their traditions, and their desire for emancipation. The ritual of flamenco dancing became for Luisa a space of freedom.

A look at what happened after Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was filmed in the Romanian village of Glod. It follows the life of one girl who longs to escape the poverty as foreign lawyers arrive with the promise of suing 20th Century Fox for millions of dollars.

Martin Scorsese’s Quarantine Short Film was created during the COVID-19 lockdown as part of the BBC series Lockdown Culture with Mary Beard. In the short piece, Scorsese reflects on life in isolation and the experience of time during the pandemic.

A groundbreaking film that chronicles how a cabal of mega-corporations worked through the United Nations to hijack our world, all while being aided by the mainstream media and Big Tech.

In 2020, the USA experienced a multiple catastrophe: No other country in the world was hit so badly by the coronavirus pandemic, the economic slump was dramatic, and so was the rise in unemployment. A rift ran through society. In the streets there were protests of both camps with violent riots, authoritarian traits were evident in the actions of the leader of the nation. And all of this in the middle of the election year, when the self-centered president fought vehemently for his re-election. From the start of his presidency, Donald Trump had divided American society, incited individual sections of the population against one another, fueled racism, hatred, xenophobia and prejudice, insulted competitors and denigrated critical journalists as enemies of the people. The documentary shows how this could happen and what role the targeted disinformation of certain sections of the population through manipulative media played.

Watch the inspiring story of Paul Roma, a former WWF wrestler turned teacher, as he shares not only wrestling techniques but also valuable life lessons with his students…