Eighteen and Anxious

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).

Caleb, a South Florida teen, loves his camera, his weed and his grandmother. On the eve of his high school graduation, everything changes when he's exposed to HIV. While he waits three months for his results, Caleb finds love in the most unlikely of places.

France, 1963. Anne is a bright young student with a promising future ahead of her. But when she falls pregnant, she sees the opportunity to finish her studies and escape the constraints of her social background disappearing. With her final exams fast approaching and her belly growing, Anne resolves to act, even if she has to confront shame and pain, even if she must risk prison to do so.

An alienated and misanthropic teenager gains sudden and unwanted celebrity status after he's taken hostage by terrorists where his indifference to their threats to kill him makes news headlines.

A family is forced to live in silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound.

Set in puritanical Boston in the mid 1600s, the story of seamstress Hester Prynne, who is outcast after she becomes pregnant by a respected reverend. She refuses to divulge the name of the father, is "convicted" of adultery and forced to wear a scarlet "A" until an Indian attack unites the Puritans and leads to a reevaluation of their laws and morals.

Novalee Nation is a 17-year-old Tennessee transient who has to grow up in a hurry when she's left pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend on a roadside, and takes refuge in the friendly aisles of Wal-Mart. Eventually, some eccentric but kindly strangers 'adopt' Novalee and her infant daughter, helping them buck the odds and build a new life.

The unborn child of Mamlakat is telling her story. She is 17, beautiful and vivacious, and dreaming secretly of becoming an actress. She lives with her father and brother in a small village in Central Asia. One night she is seduced by an actor from a travelling troupe, who poses as a friend of Tom Cruise, and gets her pregnant. She tries to abort, but her father and brother become determined to find the seducer, setting in motion a cascade of comic adventures.

The film starts in the early evening of a normal day: Sophie, a 20 year old girl, is pregnant and wanders through the night to get sure about her future life. Does she want to be a mother or do an abortion? Does she love her friend or not? Who is the father of her unborn baby? Trying to figure out what to do Sophie encounters many people, and in the morning she has come to a decision. But this is not the movie's end...

Despondent over the closing of his karate school, Cobra Kai teacher John Kreese joins a ruthless businessman and martial artist to get revenge on Daniel and Mr. Miyagi.

Along with his new friends, a teenager who was arrested by the US Secret Service and banned from using a computer for writing a computer virus discovers a plot by a nefarious hacker, but they must use their computer skills to find the evidence while being pursued by the Secret Service and the evil computer genius behind the virus.

At the age of 14 the world around you changes at a dizzying speed. But what if actually it's you that changing? What if these changes take you away from what up until now, has been your world? Ibrahim and Rafa are going to suffer these changes for themselves, experiencing first love in a way they never could have imagined. And having to keep it Hidden away.

A satiric tragi-comedy about two women and their lover Robert who is an emigrant that keeps coming back. This film shows chaotic post-communist Europe after the fall of totalitarianism. Two opposite characters, women, meet during the Velvet Revolution in November 1989. Intellectual dissident Nona and a Communist secret police boss’ mistress Ester. They meet at an anti-regime demonstration and become friends. They don’t want anything to do with politics, both want to get married and have kids, but also get rich. Crazy plans and risky attempts to realize their shared dreams land them in many sticky situations in the post-revolution chaos. Too much money gets in the way of the power of friendship.

During a long, hot summer on the Thamesmead Estate in Southeast London, three teenagers edge towards adulthood.

A popular high school athlete and an academically gifted girl get roles in the school musical and develop a friendship that threatens East High's social order.

A 30-year-old slacker who lives with his mother finds his life turned upside down when his mother's flamenco-dancing friend moves in.

Set during a sultry summer in a French suburb, Marie is desperate to join the local pool's synchronized swimming team, but is her interest solely for the sake of sport or for a chance to get close to Floriane, the bad girl of the team? Sciamma, and the two leads, capture the uncertainty of teenage sexuality with a sympathetic eye in this delicate drama of the angst of coming-of-age.

This examination of a famous scandal from the 1970s explores the relationship between Barbara Baekeland and her only son, Antony. Barbara, a lonely social climber unhappily married to the wealthy but remote plastics heir Brooks Baekeland, dotes on Antony, who is homosexual. As Barbara tries to "cure" Antony of his sexuality -- sometimes by seducing him herself -- the groundwork is laid for a murderous tragedy.

Abortionist Vera Drake finds her beliefs and practices clash with the mores of 1950s Britain – a conflict that leads to tragedy for her family.

The film is a high-concept project with five stories exploring the themes of motherhood and pregnancy, directed by women filmmakers from five former Yugoslav republics. “Croatian Story” follows an anguished painter who must decide whether or not to keep one of her unborn twins, diagnosed with Down syndrome. “Serbian Story” finds an expectant mother in the same emergency room with a charming killer. “Bosnia-Herzegovina Story” centers on a financially strapped Sarajevo family whose son?s lover is pregnant. “Macedonian Story” unfolds in a clinic where a drug addict struggles to keep her baby, and “Slovenian Story” ends the omnibus on a humorous note with a nun who finds her own way to immaculate conception.