-
A SECOND BIRTHDAY
Italy 2016 30'
2016 Thursday, December 1st, La Compagnia, 7:00 pm
Directed by: Georg Manuel Zeller
Misha suffers from cystic fibrosis, an incurable disease. At nine years of age, he needs a liver transplant. During his long hospitalizations across Europe, Misha has been sustained by a deep awareness of himself and of the great issues of life as well as by a candid outlook on the world. Misha’s father, the film director of this intimate, moving work, films the time and space of a mesmerizing testimony during the months preceding and following the transplant.
Watch the Trailer
-
ABIGAIL
Brazil 2016 17'
2016 Monday, November 28th, La Compagnia, 6:45 pm
Directed by: Valentina Homem, Isabel Penoni
1940 through 1950 Abigail Lopes took part in the expeditions of Francisco Meireles, known in Brazil for trying to establish peaceful relationships with the native populations living in isolated areas. Abigail came in contact with the Xavantes in the Serra do Roncador, state of Mato Grosso, and spent there eight years of her life. The film portrays the encounter between the two young filmmakers and the aged researcher in her house full of memories and mementos from a past marked by a wealth of encounters and contaminations.
Watch the Trailer -
AMA – SAN
Portugal, Japan, Switzerland 2016 112'
2016 Monday, November 28th, La Compagnia, 3:00 pm
Directed by: Cláudia Varejão
When cherry-trees bloom in the small town of Wagu, the Ama-San, i.e. the women of the sea, go to the seaside and turn into actual marine beings. They plunge into the secrets of the ocean waters searching for algae, crustaceans, and mussels. Like creatures of the abyss, the deft gestures of these women from different generations preserve the ritual of ancient fishing, based at once on strength and gentleness.
Watch the Trailer -
CORPS
CorpseBelgium 2016 16'
2016 Thursday, December 1st, La Compagnia, 7:00 pm
Directed by: Benjamin d’Aoust
From his balcony, Benjamin d’Aoust views two aisles of the Saint-Gilles prison in Brussels, but – most importantly – hears the cries of those who live in the jail and the orders of those who rule it. In the film, the red-brick jail, typical 19th-century industrial architecture, becomes a place of the soul; the detainees’ voices become one – the prison’s. Saint-Gilles is the short film’s main character. It becomes a body and therefore a monster. D’Aoust creates a conflict between Inside and Outside, triggering a reflection on the role of prison in contemporary societies. -
DUBINA DVA
Depth TwoSerbia, France 2016 80'
2016 Tuesday, November 29th, La Compagnia, 3:00 pm
Directed by: Ognjen Glavonić
Like in a thriller movie, Depth Two opens on a truck found in the Danube at the Serb-Romanian border: inside there were 55 corpses of Albanian civils, the hidden proof of a war crime. While NATO bombs fell on Belgrade, in Suva Reka, in a Kosovo asking for independence, the Serb police locked the village inhabitants in a pizza restaurant and slaughtered them brutally. Ognjen Glavonić leads us into a not too distant past, where the depositions of victims and oppressors do not spare us the pain and surreal atrocity of a story “deliberately buried in silence.”
Watch the Trailer -
DUM SPIRO SPERO
Croatia 2016 52'
2016 Wednesday, November 30th, La Compagnia, 4:00 pm
Directed by: Pero Kvesić
“Dum spiro spero” is a Latin phrase meaning “While I breathe, I hope.” The motto is still used by those who want to live till the last breath. Interweaving daily life, books, and death, the film director reflects on his gradual loss of strength and on the strength you need to let life go. Pero Kvesić, an acclaimed Croat writer, debuts in film: the result ranks as high as his literature. In his diary, images and words circulate freely, interweaving ironic and lapidary authorial flashes sanctioning individual freedom, in life as in death.
Watch the Trailer -
FOTOGRAMA
The FrameBrazil 2016 9'
2016 Tuesday, november 29th, La Compagnia, 4:30 pm
Directed by: Luís Henrique Leal, Caio Zatti
The film-maker places his camera in front of the protective wall of a Brazilian city, and something unexpected slips into the frame – a detail that becomes key, inevitable. That film frame allows realizing a sophisticate travel-essay about the story and intricate web of social relationships that all images evoke.
Watch the Trailer -
HINTER DEM SCHNEESTURM
Beyond the SnowstormGermany 2016 92'
2016 Wednesday, November 30th, La Compagnia, 5:15 pm
Directed by: Levin Peter
The film director’s old grandfather has buried his memories of himself as a Nazi soldier in 1943, during the German invasion of Ukraine. He doesn’t remember, or doesn’t want to, the places, people, thoughts, and actions of that long journey into the darkness of history. Levin Peter finds a photo album that evokes the past of the young Nazi. He begins to chase him for answers, trying to break the communication barrier. At last, he travels to Ukraine on the tracks of that dramatic episode of a past life with the goal of preserving its memory.
Watch the Trailer -
HUAN YING
WelcomeChina, Switzerland 2016 60'
2016 Tuesday, november 29th, La Compagnia, 4:30 pm
Directed by: Zhu Rikun
Like in a dark nightmare. During a survey in the Sichuan region (South-west China), Zhu Rikun is stopped by police and subjected to a long, exhausting questioning on the reasons why he was in that area. Like serpent’s coils slowly wrapping its prey, the words of the officers weave a web of questions, pressures, insinuations stifling the film-maker. He resists demurely but adamantly. -
IZA LICA ZRCALA
A Two Way MirrorCroatia 2016 42'
2016 Wednesday, November 30th, La Compagnia, 3:00 pm
Directed by: Katarina Zrinka Matijević
Lika is a field covered with grass; it’s a beehive full of honey; it is mountain, lake, air, wind, tree, flower. In winter, it is a field covered with snow. An intense poetic exploration to outline a suggestive ‘inner landscape,’ the film-maker’s, who leads us into Lika, the land that once belonged to ancestors and will belong to posterity. A magic, special landscape because it does not lie in the Realm of the Real but in that of the soul, uncontaminated, incorruptible. A film that cures the wounds of the soul, because it was made by someone whose soul was wounded.
Watch the Trailer -
LA VIE À VENIR
Life to ComeBelgium 2016 52'
2016 Thursday, December 1st, La Compagnia, 4:00 pm
Directed by: Claudio Capanna
The twins Eden and Léandro were born severely premature. Once out of the belly of their mother, Laurence, they are thrown into the hostile and worrying world of the hospital, full of the sounds of machines and of doctors in white coats. As the weeks go by in the neonatal department, mother and children fight fiercely for their lives. We, the observers, dwell with them in this sort of limbo, a space-time lymphatic cortex that monitors, nourishes, and cures.
Watch the Trailer -
LES CORPS INTERDITS
Banned BodiesFrance 2016 12'
2016 Sunday, November 27th, La Compagnia, 6:30 pm
Directed by: Jérémie Reichenbach
In the form of a poem, of visual song, the voices of some migrants describe their experience in Calais, being confined in the largest camp of Europe, called “jungle” because there the individuals, stripped of all human dignity, live in a state of utter degradation, their banned bodies. In the freeze-frame of the suspended time of Calais, the migrant body vanishes. Only their voice, flesh that sings, tells the pain unceasingly.
Watch the Trailer -
MADAME SAÏDI
Mrs SaidiFrance 2016 60'
2016 Sunday, November 27th, La Compagnia, 6:30 pm
Directed by: Paul Costes, Bijan Anquetil
“You know, I am a comedian. If you have a role, don’t hesitate to call me. I live just around the corner. I am Mrs. Saïdi.” In 2007, a woman from Tehran aged over 70, comedian and mother of a ‘martyr,’ appeared in front of two French film-makers who accepted her invitation. Seven years later, they went to Iran to make a film about her. To everyone’s surprise, Mrs. Saïdi has become a well-known comic actress…
Watch the Trailer -
NAWET NIE WIESZ, JAK BARDZO CIĘ KOCHAM
You Have No Idea How Much I Love YouPoland 2016 75'
2016 Sunday, November 27th, La Compagnia, 3:00 pm
Directed by: Paweł Łoziński
What does the word “love” really mean? During our lives, we often create bonds and ties with our close ones, which with time seem to us impossible to untangle. The film tells the story of the tragedy of two women, mother and daughter, bound together by a difficult, complicate feelings. For the protagonists, the crucial event is a meeting with a third person, a stranger who becomes a close one, an experienced therapist. His basic tools are words and empathy.
Watch the Trailer -
REMAINS FROM THE DESERT
Germany 2016 21'
2016 Thursday, December 1st, La Compagnia, 8:45 pm
Directed by: Sebastian Mez
What remains of Osman after 7 months spent in a Sinai-based ‘torture camp’, in the middle of his journey full of hope from Eritrea to Israel, is an unutterable memory and a body marked by violence. The entirety of Osman’s body is tainted by a soul-drying story, a soul now as arid as the land where he fell prisoner. Sebastian Mez decided to retrace this journey on his own, travelling across landscapes of ferocious beauty and planets that we can’t even begin to imagine. Equally unimaginable is the experience of Osman, an alien astronaut who tries to land on a new world.
Watch the Trailer -
ŠALTOS AUSYS
Dead EarsLithuania 2016 42'
2016 Thursday, December 1st, La Compagnia, 3:00 pm
Directed by: Linas Mikuta
Two men, an aged farmer and his deaf-mute son, live in a remote area, isolated from civilization. Though sharing the same roof, problems, and sorrows they remain very distant from one another. Their attempts at conversation turn to misunderstanding if not conflict. Father thinks his son is abnormal and childish. Son sees his father as insensitive and crude. Can the two men find their way into understanding one another?
Watch the Trailer -
SAMIR DANS LA POUSSIÈRE
Samir in the DustFrance, Algeria, Qatar 2016 60'
2016 Monday, November 28th, La Compagnia, 6:45 pm
Directed by: Mohamed Ouzine
Samir is an Algerian smuggler who transports oil at the border with Morocco. Like every man, he has aspirations, dreams, anxieties. The dark of the night and the flicker of a cigarette, reward of a long day of work, are the ideal companion to representing deeper feelings and scrutinizing thoughts that resist the light of day. Almost symmetrically, Samir’s anxieties and desires are mirrored in the state of mind of the one behind the camera.
Watch the Trailer -
SÎPO PHANTASMA
Ghost ShipSpain 2016 67'
2016 Tuesday, November 29th, La Compagnia, 10:30 pm
Directed by: Koldo Almandoz
A journey across ghost ships, legends, stories of men and travels, cinema, ghosts, and vampires. Oscar Wilde, Murnau’s Nosferatu, Bram Stoker become the characters of a visionary and poetic film-essay made of fragments of pictures, letters, visions of ships and travels, famous characters and thousands of stories, both fantastic and real.
Watch the Trailer -
SWAGGER
France 2016 84'
2016 Sunday, November 27th, La Compagnia, 8:30 pm
Directed by: Olivier Babinet
In-between documentary and fiction, Swagger lets us into the surprising minds of eleven adolescents of various origins who live in one of the most disadvantaged Parisian banlieues, where ‘the French’ never set foot. A series of portraits that spotlight their hopes, fears, and daily life. In spite of their difficulties, these kids nourish dreams and ambitions that cannot be stifled. Olivier Babinet managed to bring these out and stage them in the form of a musical, constructing a film that defies all stereotypes about the European suburbs currently at the centre of the darkest news and giving us hope for the younger generations.
Watch the Trailer -
UN ALTRO ME
ANOTHER MEItaly 2016 82'
2016 Friday, November 25th, La Compagnia, 9:00 pm
Directed by: Claudio Casazza
In collaboration with Gucci for International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
The house of detention in Bollate, Milan, boasts the first Italian experiment in “ramped-up treatment” for sex offenders. Claudio Casazza placed his camera with prudence inside the centre, opening a window on a disturbing universe, where the gaze lingers uncomfortably. Day by day, the internees’ accounts, remarks, and opinions are woven with the prompts and questions posed by the psychologists. The latter, who connect with elusive personalities that take refuge in alibis and attempts to exemption from responsibility, outline a tentative cure.
Watch the Trailer -
WIĘZI
Close TiesPoland 2016 18'
2016 Saturday, November 26th, La Compagnia, 6:30 pm
Directed by: Zofia Kowalewska
After an 8-year separation, during which the man has lived with another woman, Zofia’s grandparents go back to living together. On top of this, preparations for the celebration of their wedding anniversary are under way. Their granddaughter, the film director, films them in their small apartment, a (single) space that becomes like a big mirror of their relationship thanks to the camerawork. The film casts a sweet, sympathetic gaze onto the couple’s daily life, in which old resentment and the awareness of not being able to live one without the other blend seamlessly in a loving embrace that resists time and the turbulences of life.
Watch the Trailer