Hojas de Sauco
Led by the words of an old man, we will witness the extraordinary event that changed the life of a village forgotten amid the fog.
This feature-length documentary chronicles the Sundance ceremony brought to Eastern Canada by William Nevin of the Elsipogtog First Nation of the Mi'kmaq. Nevin learned from Elder Keith Chiefmoon of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Alberta. Under the July sky, participants in the Sundance ceremony go four days without food or water. Then they will pierce the flesh of their chests in an offering to the Creator. This event marks a transmission of culture and a link to the warrior traditions of the past.
A poetic and metaphysical view on a daily life routine in a distant nursing home, on a top of the mountain in Uzice, Serbia – the closest place to heaven. This is the last station on earth for old people that called “clients”. While they’re waiting for the end of their lives, prisoned in a desolate nursing home and their old-dying body, they are fighting for the freedom of their soul, the only place they can feel young and alive. A fight between light and darkness, suffering and acceptance, life and death.
Feisty, fiercely independent and firmly rooted in place, 90 year-old Mabel Robinson broke barriers back in the 40s when she became the first woman in Hubbards, Nova Scotia, to launch her own business—a hairdressing salon where she still provides shampoo-n-sets over 70 years later. Weaving animation and archival imagery with intimate and laugh out loud moments in the salon, the film celebrates the power of friendship, doing what you love and staying active. With no desire to retire anytime soon, Mabel gives voice to a generation who are not front and center of cinema or the pop hairstyles of the day, and subtly shifts the lens on our perception of beauty and the elderly.
This short documentary is the portrait of an 88-year-old woman who lives alone in a log cabin without running water or electricity. Augusta is a non-status Shuswap Indian living in the Williams Lake area of British Columbia. She recalls past times, but lives very much in the present. Self-sufficient, dedicated to her people, she spreads warmth wherever she moves, with her songs and her harmonica.
In a seaside sanatorium, an old man sees his life turned upside by the arrival of a seagull that he gently tames. When the gull is injured, the old man takes care of it and for a moment finds his childhood soul.
A group of elders spends their weekdays in a retirement home in Sandim, on the north of Portugal, where they talk, do arts and crafts, practice yoga and pray. We follow them between October 2012 and March 2013, when an economic crisis overshadowed Portuguese society and unemployment rates reached record levels. Meanwhile, arrangements are made for the Carnival ball. Will they bring the first place home this time?
A documentary about faith through an essay on aging and the fear of death. A story about a group of elders in a ghost town and their lifetime struggle for the respect of their culture and their different ways of understanding faith, where the need of water is the main element that supports their demands and ancient culture is presented as an heritage for new generations to come, that if their home town survives after they are gone. A film that portrays youthfulness as hope, while the main characters reminds us all that nothing is more powerful than our own will and that there is no such thing as a lost cause.
An embittered old man is obsessed with conquering the Niagara River and Niagara Falls. He endangers his sons' lives by forcing them to challenge the falls by going over them in a barrel.
Theater director asks his actors for a research on human cruelty and misery in Brazil, while trying to raise funds for his next production, a play based on a story by Machado de Assis, "A Causa Secreta" (The Secret Cause). The troupe oblige and go around town witnessing long lines in National Health Services, inhuman conditions in public hospitals and poor people being constantly humiliated. They find people are becoming indifferent to human suffering.
A group of Brazilian girls go to India hoping to become Bollywood actresses.
Comedy about a Sunday League football team who win the Lottery.
A young sailor descends from a local train. He goes to a nearby forest, which is full of strange men in medical uniforms behaving in an absurd and eccentric manner. The sailor falls under their influence and masochistically gives himself up to them only to be disemboweled by the werewolf orderlies. The sailor’s last unconscious image is a “white ship sailing towards the horizon”—a Soviet symbol for happiness and joy.
About Sado-masochism, suicide and the irrational nature of the human spirit. The irrationality of the human psyche, sadomasochism and suicide are the leitmotifs of this film. The documentary footage of airplanes and pilots – symbols of courage and honour – become an unexpected counterpoint to the main structure of the film. The combination of documentary footage and poetic storytelling with the inclement northern setting reinforce the ascetic atmosphere of Suicide Monsters and give its self-destructive characters a heroic and noble appearance. —arsenals.lv
A military group of alpinists are selected to carry out a secret mission. The fate of humanity depends on their success. The rules of the mission require the death of each participant once his or her task is accomplished. After killing one of their colleagues and splitting into several groups, the alpinists continue their journey. But the human unconscious doesn’t follow military orders. Having once committed murder, the “knights” can’t control their desire to kill. They forgot their mission… and kill each other instead. —University of Pittsburgh
Ostensibly, a film about a child's pictorial alphabet stuck on the letter H.
Love From Ground Zero follows three strangers across the back roads of America with the ashes of a mutual friend. Using a series of old postcards as a map, the threesome drive from New York to Montana retracing their friend’s journey “out west” years before. As they try to make sense of the untimely death, they are forced to face the realities in their own lives that have brought them down this unpredictable road.
With her career stalling, her pending marriage still pending and her dreams on hold, Jazz is searching for a new direction in her life. At her sister’s insistence, and with the help of a handsome (and frustrating) young lawyer, she begins working for a local community center teaching adults how to read. Now, Jazz will discover that everything she thought she wanted out of life can change the second you fall in love.
In a temper, Meg, a cynical, overworked TV executive, rants about how the movies she produces lie, making you think dreams can come true, and tries to smash her favorite snow globe. Instead, it hits her on the head and knocks her out. When she comes to, she finds herself magically transported to a perfect snow-covered town like the one in her globe, married to a handsome woodworker and mother to two young children.