SYNOPSIS

Gina 

Gina is the story of Gina Markuš – a young Montenegrin woman who was imprisoned during the 1950's in Yugoslavia and sent to the Naked Island (Goli Otok) to serve her sentence. A few years before committing suicide, she put everything on paper...

The story follows Marina, Gina Markuš's niece, on her way to the Naked Island she is visiting for the second time – the first time as a baby seen in a photograph and now as a grown up woman. Marina and Gina are telling us the first female story of the Yugoslavian camps – a story about love that gave them the will to live; a story about trauma, pills and psychiatric hospitals, homicides and a suicide; and, ultimately, about hope.

STATEMENT OF INTENT

"It looked truly beautiful. Made out of white carved stone, every piece perfectly equal in size, red tile roof, everything surrounded by carved white marble. It shined in the sun as if the stars had fallen from the sky. If only blood and sweat could shine forever, it would be shining there even today." This is a quotation from Gina's memoirs, which are, first and foremost, a document of emotions – it is the evidence of human feelings and traumas, and it is also a document that holds many crucial historical facts. Based on historical records, 16,101 people were sent to political camps – many of them did not survive. Gina was one of 150 imprisoned Montenegrin women. Women that had survived camps did not speak about their past in public, neither they were asked to – female trauma has never been studied or talked about.

SYNOPSIS

The nights still smell of gunpowder 

Concerned with the fragmented memories of my childhood during the civil war in Mozambique, I return to my grandmother’s village to reveal the untold stories, which still haunt my generation.

This film will take place in the village where I grew up and where all my childhood memories were created. For me, the village was always a paradise. But what I didn’t realize was that I was living in the middle of a civil war. Today I am going back to confront that childhood memory with the reality and circumstances of the political situation that my country is facing. 

STATEMENT OF INTENT

The constant question of my cinema is collective memory.

I live in a country where a collective genocide is being constantly perpetrated on our own history, our own memory.

This project is about memory and its fragmented nature and the need to document it when there is the danger of losing it. It is a personal film that is juxtaposed with the dark period of the civil war, the moral damages and traumas that lasted 16 years, and the open wounds that remain. The violence is felt in the voices of raped women and child soldiers who continue to scream silently. As my generation is facing new tensions, the ghosts of war are tirelessly waiting in the shadows. The rifles may be no more, but the nights still smell of gunpowder.

SYNOPSIS

Without a name

Marcela is schizophrenic. She meets Joaquín, who has just emigrated from Venezuela where he left his son. They fall in love, and Marcela tries to overcome her condition to recover her son and have a family.

Marcela is schizophrenic. She keeps her condition under control by drawing everything that happens around her. When she falls in love with Joaquín, an immigrant who wants to bring his son to the Dominican Republic, she locks herself into her own bubble. She is terrified because she also has a son, who was taken from her because of her condition. But Joaquín doesn’t abandon her; he enters into her world and with his help, she learns to overcome her fears, so she can recover her son and have a family with Joaquin.

STATEMENT OF INTENT

I confess to having a passion for the human mind and its enigmas; and I’m fascinated by humanity’s need to brand as strange anyone who doesn’t correspond to the conventions of appropriate behavior. In Without a Name, I highlight issues I am interested in deepening as a woman, Latin American and filmmaker. I give a voice to Marcela, a woman whose schizophrenic condition makes her believe that she cannot be a good mother. Through the character of Joaquín, I focus on a topic that affects me personally: migration. Their dreamlike world merges with the real world, as it does in life itself. I depict how these characters, two "weirdos," can be together and fall in love. Love will impel them to achieve the impossible.

SYNOPSIS

Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo 

A man can remain astray for a long time. But once he finds his destiny, he may have to pay for it with his life.

Hassan and his dog Rambo find themselves in a complicated situation. Rambo becomes hunted overnight by Hassan's neighbour Karem. This pushes Hassan to improvise to find a way out of the country and to save Rambo from an unknown fate.

STATEMENT OF INTENT

In February 2015, a video circulated on social media of a dog tied to a lamppost in a neighbourhood. Around the dog stood seven men holding knives and cutting the dog, which howled with rage and pain, trying to leap at them. Although the dog was tied up, the men seemed afraid of it. Then one man steps in and hits the dog hard on the head, killing it on the spot. I feel that we and stray animals have become so alike. We have no price; we are being killed, chased, imprisoned and tortured, which is why we are always looking over our shoulders, not knowing from where the danger will arrive. My film is based on the story of this video. The dog, Rambo, faces the same crises as a crowd of vagabonds insist on murdering it in front of everybody. The only difference between the two tales is Hassan, the protagonist, fights to save the dog until he succeeds in finding a safer sanctuary. 

SYNOPSIS

Do you know anything about Omid ? 

This film is about the dark years of Iran in the 1980s, just after the revolution when many political prisoners were put in prison under sentence...

A couple in their forties live in an urban no-man’s-land in the suburbs of Teheran. Reza works as a handyman. Maryam is a childminder. They grieve for their deceased son, Omid, by pouring their love into the cat he adopted. One day, the cat disappears. They go on the hunt for it with increasing desperation.

STATEMENT OF INTENT

My second film is about the dark years of Iran in the 1980s, just after the revolution when many political prisoners were put in prison under sentence. This period has even been repressed in the collective memory of the Iranian people, the level of oppression was so extreme. I decided to make a film about this period because all struggles are only possible through the collective memory of past and present struggles.
 

At the end of the eighties, and the end of the Iran-Iraq war, many of this prisoners died and were killed. Their bodies were transported to various places in whole of Iran. One of these places is in the south of Tehran. The executions and burial processes were secret. People disappeared secretly in the night and then transported and dumped in unmarked graves. During the trials, the prisoners were asked one question: " Are you ready to repent?" If the victim was a sinner then he deserved it, and if he was not guilty, then he was allowed to go Paradise. Some of them survived and went back to live in Tehran or other cities...