Les escaliers sont en papier

A Place of Our Own

A young girl living in the French countryside suffers constant indignities at the hand of alcoholism and her fellow man.

These five award-winning coming of age short films offer a glimpse of how boys and young men tackle life's difficult desires: confronting one's demons, understanding sexual relationships, gaining the respect of one's father, or simply running away from it all. This is only the start of their complex formative years, where not every question has an answer, and not every answer makes sense. The short films are: Boys [Pojkarna] (2015); Ioana (2015); Kiem Holijanda (2017); Picnic [Piknik] (2015); Tomer & Elias [Tomer en Elias] (2016).

Hayat, a soccer fanatic from Hamburg, has breast cancer. After the operation, the 20-year-old feels disfigured and is no longer allowed to play football because of her medication. But a life without soccer? Unimaginable! For Hayat, the motto now is: after the game is before the game. The motley group of girls from FC Schanze, who neither have a jersey nor can dribble, take Hayat in. Her lousy coach Toni, who sees his main task as certifying that his girls are free of talent, also takes a liking to her. The way the roughneck courts her, first out of vanity and then out of genuine affection, and discovers his sensitivity in the process, is one of the film's great moments.

15-year-old Jesse is the only one who witnessed the stabbing of his friend Jonas. Now he has to face his family and friends from the BMX riders crew and explain the unexplainable - how he feels about it.

Set in the frozen steppes of Mongolia, a young nomad is confronted with his destiny after animals fall victim to a plague which threatens to eradicate nomadism.

An eleven-year-old Turkish boy, two young men from a small town, and a cuckolded policeman from the sticks all find their way to Berlin on May Day, where, in the district of Kreuzberg, emotions come to the boil every year.

In Mexico, two teenage boys and an attractive older woman embark on a road trip and learn a thing or two about life, friendship, sex, and each other.

Georgia Nicolson is fourteen, lives with nosey parents who don't understand her, an annoying three year old sister and has to wear a beret to school. She would, however, rather be blonde, have a smaller nose and a boyfriend. Revolving around her hilarious journal entries, prepare to be engulfed in the world of the soaring joys and bottomless angst of being a teenager.

A brief extract of four kids' lives somewhere in France. Quentin, who won a writers contest and now pays more attention to his career as an author than to his friends, beautiful Julie, his girl-friend, much more mature than she looks, falling in love with Quentin's very best friend Jimmy, who is kind of stuck in his unability of self-expression and grown up under bad social circumstances. And there is the shy boy Samir, exiled from Algeria, who lost his "brother" and only friend some time ago. Samir heavily falls in love with Quentin, but he can't handle it...

An adolescent girl, living with her mother and her grandmother, will have her first sexual experiences in a heavy and excessive way.

A blind child singer, thrown onto the streets of Bangkok, must sing to free himself from the gang that controls him.

One day. One night. A group of teenagers struggles to find their way in a world that offers them few choices.

Two teenage girls in small-town Sweden. Elin is beautiful, popular, and bored with life. Agnes is friendless, sad, and secretly in love with Elin.

When Victor attempts to seduce Elena, all he gets for his trouble is a one-way, six-year ticket to prison, where he concentrates on strengthening his mind, his body... and his desire for vengeance on the man who put him there. After his release and still madly in love with her, Victor will stop at nothing to win her over even if means revenge, for Elena has married David, the cop who sent him to prison!

A pregnant Colombian teenager becomes a drug mule to make some desperately needed money for her family.

Two trouble-causing brothers, who in the second generation after World War II Germany live, are in the center of this German made for TV movie. The movie makes a subject out of their everyday lives and the helpless attempt for them to build a normal life.

It is summertime in a blue-collar, marginal district of a city in the South of Spain. Tano, a teenager currently serving a sentence in a juvenile reform center, is given a 48-hour leave to attend his brother’s wedding.

In early 1990s Spain, eleven-year-old Celia lives with her mother and studies at a convent school in Zaragoza. When Brisa, a confident new classmate from Barcelona, arrives, Celia is drawn into a world that challenges the strict religious teachings and sheltered life she has known. Their friendship pushes her to confront hidden truths at home and the uncertainties of adolescence, leading her to explore questions of identity, independence, and belonging.

As a group of Danish children pass into adolescence, gradually the most popular girl becomes an outcast, for trivial reasons that she never understands.