Thirteen year-old Marta has recently moved back to her native region of Italy with her mother and older sister and struggles to find her place on her own, restlessly testing the boundaries of the unfamiliar city. Marta’s only source of socialization is the local church, where she attends a series of catechism classes in preparation for her upcoming confirmation. A gritty exploration of a realistic coming-of-age tale that tackles questions of faith in impoverished southern Italy.
Cast: Yile Vianello, Salvatore Cantalupo, Pasqualina Scuncia, Anita Caprioli, Renato Carpentieri
Directed by: Alice Rohrwacher
On a water-skiing outing, a girl drives a speedboat and pulls a young man, when a crash occurs. After waking up from a coma, the man embarks on a mysterious travel – an odyssey where intuition and telepathy accelerates the journey in time. Dharma Guns revisits the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice fighting with the tyranny of Time-God. At a time when the industrial death of cinema seems to have been rationally, technically and economically organized, a cinema of poetry and fantastical adventure – intentionally created in a B-movie style – is possible.
Cast: Guy McKnight, Elvire, Lionel Tua, Diogo Doria
Directed by: F.J. Ossang
Habemus Papam is a traditional announcement in Latin, meaning “We Have a Pope!” The conclave of cardinals has spent several days in isolation, considering the candidates. The crowd of people in the St. Peter’s Square has also been waiting patiently. Everyone’s attention is suspended in tension until the moment the new pope appears on the balcony and greets all the believers. However, an unexpected problem occurs as the new pope has a panic attack. A famous psychoanalyst, an atheist, is called to help.
Cast: Michel Piccoli, Nanni Moretti, Jerzy Stuhr, Renato Scarpa
Directed by: Nanni Moretti
“Dance, dance... otherwise we are lost” are the words of Pina Bausch (1940 – 2009), a legendary German avant-garde dancer and choreographer. Her unique creations transformed the language of dance and offered a visual experience like no other. This revolutionary 3D film by Wim Wenders captures the aesthetics of Pina Bausch’s greatest works in a thrilling way. Partly musical, partly documentary, the film is a magical ode to the love of movement.
Cast: Pina Bausch, Dominique Mercy, Regina Advento, Malou Airaudo
Directed by Wim Wenders
Scriptwriter: Wim Wenders
Every night a girl, a boy, and an elderly technician meet at a dilapidated cinema. But the appearance of the ramshackle picture palace is deceptive – seemingly old and humble, every night it is a place where magic wonders come true. The three friends have come to enjoy staging colourful dressing-up fantasies, and these make-believe stories are becoming more and more real – the old cinema is taken over by beautiful princesses, elves, and howling werewolves. It is a kingdom of golden cities and deep, dark forests from which no one has found his way home.
Cast: Julien Beramis, Marine Griset, Michel Elias
Directed by Michel Ocelot
Scriptwriter: Michel Ocelot
No matter if you’re a punk, a pensioner, a family man, a nudist, or an umbrella salesman! No matter how you get there – a thumb ride, rev up your convertible so that the breeze riffles your hair, or slam your foot on the gas in a bubble car – it’s time to head for the Atlantic Ocean! A colourful and delightfully humouresque film, a sort of homage to Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday and also inspired by Blake Edwards, Aki Kaurismäki, and Jacques Demy, Holidays by the Sea aims for an almost dialogue-less burlesque comedy.
Cast: Jacques Gamblin, Maria de Medeiros, François Damiens, François Morel, Dominique Pinon
Directed by: Pascal Rabate
Perhaps the most inspiring movement of stylistic and ideological invention ever encountered in the history of the world cinema, the French New Wave crashed onto international shores when François Truffaut’s debut feature, The 400 Blows, premiered at Cannes in 1959, followed quickly by Jean-Luc Godard’s equally thrilling Breathless, based on a Truffaut story. Two in the Wave is a story of a friendship, an alliance of two of the foremost New Wave figures. As critics, they wrote for the the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma, and through the 1960s loyally supported each other in their filmmaking. The documentary poignantly melds revealing period footage of both men with scenes from some of their greatest films. History and politics separated them in 1968, but their friendship and their break-up embody the story of French cinema.
Cast: Etienne de Grammont, Nick de Pencier
Directed by: Emmanuel Laurent
Every morning, François, a bailiff, bids goodbye to his wife and begins the unpleasant task of evictions. However this morning, September 11th, the usual course of events is upset when, having arrived at one of the apartments, he coincidentally falls hostage to its tenants. In a wink of an eye the neighbourhood is surrounded by the usual crowd – François wife, a committed negotiator, police, snipers, and reporters. Little by little the local residents become annoyed by the irritating presence of the mob, and the captors realize there is a rather strange but possibly one chance to escape.
Cast: Hippolyte Girardot, Mohamed Fellag, Aymen Saïdi, Michel Vuillermoz
Directed by: Angelo Cianci
Werner Herzog’s 3D masterpiece, exclusively shot inside the Chauvet caves of Southern France, vividly captures the oldest known pictorial creations of humankind in their astonishing natural setting. Always keen to explore the everlasting struggle between the forces of nature and humankind, Herzog’s appetite for controversy and pushing the boundaries here is as large as ever.
Cast: Werner Herzog, Dominique Baffier, Jean Clottes
Directed by: Werner Herzog
Don Alfonso, a victim of an extortion scheme, fearfully flees his home, accompanied only by his marimba. When he loses his job as a musician due to a dwindling interest in marimba music, he decides to take drastic measures and begins to fuse traditional marimba music with heavy metal. Together with his godson Chiquilin, a street-wise kid hooked on sniffing glue, and Blacko, a medical doctor and ex-Satan-worshiper turned fundamentalist-Orthodox-Jew-born-again Christian, the trio comes together as Marimbas del Infierno, playing a new style of music never imagined nor heard before.
Lomās: Alfonso Tunche, Roberto González Arévalo, Víctor Hugo Monterroso
Režisors: Julio Hernández Cordón
Scenārists: Julio Hernández Cordón
Legend has it that director Raoul Ruiz once asked Marcello Mastroianni, which role he would like to play, and the actor responded – a professor, a tramp and a servant. But the film "Three Lives and Only One Death" is not that simple as the initial impression of three separate stories disappears when the previous story characters randomly start to appear in the next story. Raoul Ruiz with distinguishing ease merges the stories and Marcello Mastroianni in his penultimate role performs magnificently.
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anna Galiena, Marisa Paredes
Directed by: Raoul Ruiz
Based on one of the most talked about books in years and a #1 New York Times best-selling phenomenon, THE HELP stars Emma Stone as Skeeter, Viola Davis as Aibileen and Octavia Spencer as Minny—three very different, extraordinary women in Mississippi during the 1960s, who build an unlikely friendship around a secret writing project that breaks societal rules and puts them all at risk. From their improbable alliance a remarkable sisterhood emerges, instilling all of them with the courage to transcend the lines that define them, and the realization that sometimes those lines are made to be crossed—even if it means bringing everyone in town face-to-face with the changing times.
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Viola Davis, Bryce Howard, Allison Janney, Chris Lowell, Sissy Spacek, Octavia Spencer, Emma Stone, Cicely Tyson, Mike Vogel
Directed by: Tate Taylor