Of Love and Shadows

Mildred and Doris are two middle-aged white women, from very different backgrounds, who become lovers and set up house together. Film explores the pleasures and uncertainties of later-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity in a culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance.

A group of children, fleeing the war, is taken to Luanda accompanied by a nun. When they reach the aeroplane, 12-year-old N'Dala decides to leave the group and to reconnoitre the city. The nun then starts her unceasing quest for the missing boy. N'Dala, only carrying a textile bag and a doll made of wire, walks through the busy streets filled with people and traffic. Later he finds the tranquility of the island off the coast, where he meets the old fisherman Antonio, with whom he becomes friends. Not much later, he meets the lively, whimsical Zé, who is a little older than he is. N'Dala starts to experience the city and its inhabitants as increasingly forbidding and he would most like to return to the countryside from whence he came. Then he meets Joka, a fringe figure who persuades him to help with a robbery in exchange for money. With this film, Maria Joao Ganga wanted to provide a realistic sketch of the bitter political situation in Angola. One of her most important motivations ...

Marking a stylistically and philosophically turn away from the earlier features, The Sand Rose is Reis and Cordeiro’s most abstract, conceptual and literary work. The film’s collage structure gathers texts from multiple sources – including Kafka and Montaigne – and crafts a world of theatrical artifice far from the documentary inspired naturalism of Ana and Trás-os-Montes. Reis and Cordeiro’s least known film has lingered in obscurity and never recovered from the unfairly negative reviews that resulted in its severely limited release. Reis died less than two years later, just as he and Cordeiro were about to begin an ambitious adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo. - Harvard Film Archive

While observing others, Paula is also, herself, observed. ' Know the difference between an old maid and a spinster? The old maid does not have a choice. '

The inspiring life story of the late photojournalist, artist and activist Dan Eldon, who abandoned a comfortable life in London to document the struggle, heartbreak and hope of a war-torn and famine-ridden region of Africa.

In the turbulent aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, young Samia flees her homeland. She braves hostile seas in the crossing to France, but once there she finds that her struggles have only just begun. With no friends, no family, and — most crucially — no immigration papers, Samia has to figure out how to make a life and a living in a foreign land. She meets a young man, Imed, and soon finds work in the employ of the elegant Leila. But her presence in Leila's middle-class household triggers a shift in its dynamics, and soon Samia is enmeshed in a web of sexual tension.

A film director and her muse who was a student activist in the 1970s, a waitress who keeps changing jobs, an actor and an actress, all live loosely connected to each other by almost invisible threads. The narrative sheds its skin several times to reveal layer upon layer of the complexities that make up the characters' lives.

A nurse traffics the ID cards of demented patients on the black market of identity theft. Driven by easy cash, and an addiction to morphine, she struggles to keep tabs on her emotional void, and a growing fear of punishment.

Tairo, a young lion-tamer, is unhappy. Losing his lucky charm gives him a reason to set off for a journey across Italy in search of Arthur Robin, a former Mister Universe, who gave him the charm a long time ago.

When Tsanko Petrov, a railroad worker, finds millions of lev on the train tracks, he decides to turn the entire amount over to the police. Grateful, the state rewards him with a new wristwatch… which soon stops working. Meanwhile, Julia Staikova, the head of PR for the Ministry of Transport, loses his old watch. Here starts Petrov’s desperate struggle to get back not only his old watch, but his dignity.

Mélanie, 16 years old, lives with her mother. She likes going to school, her friends, playing the cello, and she wants to change the world. But when she meets a boy on the Internet and falls in love with him, her world changes as she is gradually recruited by Daesh. Sonia is 17 years old, and she almost did something irrevocable to “guarantee” her family a place in paradise. These teenage girls might be called Anaïs, Manon or Leila, and one day they all might go some way down the recruitment process. But can they ever come back from it?

A young woman marries a wealthy man she isn't in love with, but finds romance instead with the couples' painter friend.

Joy can't let go of her ex, but doesn't seem to be able to fall for the new guy. In the meantime she keeps having casual sex with strangers.

A teen raised in the Netherlands by her single mother travels to their native Bosnia to visit the father who left them, as he’s been admitted to a rural hospital. Joined by her cousin and his best friend, they hit the road.

Invitation

A young man visits his parents in Norway with his pregnant Spanish wife. Expectations run high, but in the short ride from the airport, it becomes clear that this won't be the harmonious family occasion everyone hopes for.

An ad agency copywriter, ordered to push a new brand of beer to black ghetto kids, resigns from her job and goes searching for her racial identity.

In the town of Utskor in the region of Bø, northern Norway, we find memories of a political past intertwining with domestic, familial moments during the midnight sun.

The sudden death of her mother brings Myung-eun back home to Jeju island. There she meets her estranged sister Myung-ju and Myung-ju's daughter Seung-ah, still living at their old home, and Hyun-ah who has lived with them for over 20 years like a relative. A career woman whose hard exterior masks her illegitimacy and abandonment issues, Myung-eun tells Hyun-ah she wants to start looking for her father after the funeral. Single-minded in her desire to dig up memories of her father and discover why he left, Myung-eun resents that Myung-ju, who like their mother is a carefree fish trader and an unmarried mother of a young daughter, seemingly doesn't care. At first Myung-ju is reluctant to accompany Myung-eun, but after Hyun-ah persuades her, guilt and her sense of duty as an older sibling prevails. And so the two sisters who are dissimilar in character...

Belgrade, 2022: A photojournalist is threatened by right-wing extremist groups in her Serbian home and flees to Germany with her daughter. But then she also experiences increasing strong threats and attacks in her new home.