SYNOPSIS

In the heat of the escalating anti-colonialism war in Vietnam, a 14-year-old boy has to help sustain his family’s travelling circus by performing a life threatening act of knife throwing with his two siblings.

The film centers on a family run travelling circus: Ba, a 14-year-old boy holds a wooden board for his older brother, Hai, to throw knives at, while their little sister, Tu, stands in front of the cutting board as the target girl. His brother's talent and his little sister's fearless attitude draws the blueprint for a tragedy waiting to happen. The movie unveils the world inside Ba’s head, as he attempts to help his sister from the fate that he has foreseen in his dreams, under the financial pressure of their family and the political pressure of the country entering war.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

Framed in the body of water of the Mekong Delta, “If wood could cry, it would cry blood” sums up the life of these children like fishes out of water, constantly holding on to their last breath. The film tries to translate the existential metaphor of one’s purpose and identity, exploring social structure through a family drama. Our protagonist, lonely even though he is always surrounded, struggles to find his place as the untalented child of a family praising art in a world controlled by money. The film questions our place as individuals within our own family, our society but also as humans within the world.  All I desire is for the film to bring out emotions from the audience, arouse in them pity and fear, and then purge them from those emotions.

SYNOPSIS

How deep can you go down to remember who you are?

Marina lives in Paris and writes about the Soviet monotowns - the industrial settlements built for the needs of one giant factory. To finish her research she goes back to her native Ukrainian monotown which still remembers the suicide of her father-miner 18 years ago. Her unexpected discoveries about her own roots will put in danger the identity of the whole town and become a threat for the memory of her father’s life and death. Marina faces a difficult personal choice: to restore collective memory as a scientist or to honour private memories as a daughter.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

I’m interested in a topic of postcolonial traumas of Ukraine and the ways they can be faced and healed. In particular I explore the nature of memory and the influence of the Soviet past which still poisons the minds. People of the industrial monotowns - the main location of my story - came from different corners of the Soviet Union to build their new world on a “no-man's land” as they thought. They felt no past behind them, no roots, no historical continuity. And their grand-children inherited it. I want to show how just one fake picture can substitute the collective memory of the whole town. I put this philosophical concept in an investigative story. But the thing my heroine is looking for is actually her identity, erased by propaganda.

SYNOPSIS

BENIMANA is a story of the friction between collective and individual existence. Veneranda, a survivor of the Tutsi genocide who is working for reconciliation, thinks her past is behind her when her old demons resurface as she learns of her daughter’s pregnancy, under the silent eye of the grandmother, who feels the family balance wavering.

Rwanda, 2012. The country is emerging from an era of silence after the 1994 Tutsi genocide, and people's courts are being set up with the aim of bringing justice and reconciliation. Veneranda, a survivor, is convinced of the need for these trials. Despite pressures, she organises discussion sessions between victims and the families of the executioners. Therapy for some, an act of betrayal for others, these testimonial sessions revive and reveal the traumas that each of them try to overcome, in their own way. The wounds of Veneranda's past are exposed again when she learns of her daughter's unexpected pregnancy and the identity of the father. Veneranda has to face her own contradictions and the dark parts of her past.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

BENIMANA is about intergenerational trauma and the need to deconstruct prejudices and resentments. The film’s characters, who are mainly women, go through successive moments of happiness, chaos and darkness in which love and hate, resentment and reconciliation are intertwined.They thus portray my country, Rwanda, in its effort to rebuild itself after the Tutsi genocide of 1994.

SYNOPSIS

When a young trans woman from rural Nepal disappears while patrolling wild elephants, the blame falls on the leader of her trans community, who must find her before their imminent yearly ritual.

PIRATI is the matriarch to a group of five trans women that lives in a small village terrorized by wild elephants. They make their ends meet by performing at other people’s celebration for alms. One night, the youngest member of the group, APSARA, goes missing while patrolling the wild elephants. The blame comes to PIRATI, whose negligence could have triggered her disappearance. So, to find APSARA, PIRATI now must deal with the villagers who don’t care about them; police, with better things to do than finding a trans-woman; APSARA’s family, for whom she’s been dead since she came out; and the deep, dark forest, which holds more threat than just the wild elephants.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

In our society, where conservative ideologies can sometimes take over humanity and empathy, people who desire what our society forbids them to desire are often marginalised. They fail in society's eyes, and are cast aside.
Being about a similarly outcast group of five trans-women who fail to meet the standard of masculinity set up by our patriarchal society, this film deals not only with their disappearance, but also questions our society’s responsibility in their vanishing. How long were they actually ‘missing’, before they finally disappeared? Along with that, I also intend to analyse why and how a marginalised person, after fighting with the whole world to finally live their truth, would spend their entire life trying to fit in and be accepted by the same society that rejected them.

SYNOPSIS

Acapulco Magic is about the hardships of growing up for a Mexican teenager, someone trapped in a place that seems magical, but it is also a story about the beauty of friendship, love and sacrifice.

Ángel is a teenager who works as a prostitute on the tourist beaches of Acapulco. After meeting a military boy named Carlos, he will discover emotions and feelings that he had never experienced. This will motivate him to run away from those who led him into that kind of life, including his own mother. But the people around will prevent him from escaping, plunging him deeply into a dark net of child prostitution.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

This is a fiction film drama that is created from diverse anecdotes of people living this harsh reality. It talks about something that few dare to expose on any media but that is well known as one of the most serious problems in my country. Child prostitution. Which is latent and uncomfortable. A complicated taboo subject in our society. That is why I want to take the viewer to an Acapulco that many do not dare to see, highlighting the loss of innocence in a crude way.
I can relate to this, because I grew up in the slums of Mexico City and the hardships I overcame, were in some parts similar to the ones of my characters. I am passionate to tell this story now because of what sexual abuse represents to me and to my mother; and a small part of acting against it, it’s through my art.

SYNOPSIS

A bourgeois kid discovers that his father has another family. He tracks a rebellious boy who turns out to be his brother. They plan to escape together but their respective environments have already written their paths. 

A bourgeois teen discovers that his father keeps a lover on the outskirts of town. His investigation leads him to contact a rebellious factory boy who turns out to be his brother. His raging obsession with him will transform into a friendship, as they develop a strange symbiosis. They plan to escape together but their neighborhoods have already written their paths.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

Godspeed Satan is a brotherly love story, a thriller filled with intense moments of intimacy, guided by the ambiguous and profound inner search of the main character. Without knowing, he’s looking for a deeper truth, a meaning that his current life doesn’t seem to have. The film presents a duality and speaks about the encounter with one self through others.  Little by little I realized that the main topic on it is the toxic masculinity, its echoes and the consequences of capitalist heteropatriarchy. The resolution of the story deals with the topic of forced disappearances, one that I find extremely important in Mexico. It’s a coming of age that portraits and is directed to centennial teenagers, the ones still looking for their ideals and preferences.

SYNOPSIS

Aisha, a Somali carer for elderly patients lives in an Egyptian neighborhood witnessing the underworld of African society where there is tension between the groups. Stuck in a loveless relationship, routine and pressure of dreary work lead her into an impasse.

Aisha, a Somali young woman of 26-years-old who works as a health carer for elderly patients, lives in Ain-Shams a neighborhood in the heart of Cairo where she witnesses the underworld of growing African migrants’ society and the tension between the different groups. Routine, pressure of dreary work and being stuck in a loveless relationship with an Egyptian cook; while being involved with an Egyptian gang that controls her neighborhood and blackmails her to steal apartments' keys from the old patients, makes her dreams and violent nightmares cross to her reality and leads her into an impasse

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

The story I’m telling takes place where I spent my childhood and early teenage years. When I returned after years, an African community had emerged within the heart of Cairo. They came from different countries looking for work, peace or asylum away from war and starvation. They formed their own world with their own terms and rules. Some worked hard in under-paid jobs for a living but others rebelled against their inevitable fate of acquiescence and became outlaws, but for both sides and their families just surviving the day is considered heroic.

While riding a microbus there, an African girl with a tired face sat beside me and slept; she woke up frightened and went into hysterical crying. I wondered a lot about that girl’s background. Then my character, Aisha, started to answer my questions; a lonely girl trapped between the two survival mechanisms of her society facing the same social pressure from a bigger universe which is the Egyptian society, and despite living among people who resembles her in color. This is not enough to make her feel belonging but it is enough to make her feel alienated; like the ostrich, a bird that can’t live with them and can’t fly one meter above the earth's surface

This is what I want to show in this film by following Aisha's life and capturing the slow effervescence under the surface of her calmness till the point of despair then explosion.