Heidi, is an eight-year-old Swiss orphan who is given by her aunt to her mountain-dwelling grandfather. She is then stolen back by her aunt from her grandfather to live in the wealthy Sesemann household in Frankfurt, Germany as a companion to Klara, a sheltered, disabled girl in a wheelchair. Heidi is unhappy but makes the best of the situation, always longing for her grandfather.
Maurice is a streetwise ginger cat who comes up with a money-making scam by befriending a group of self-taught talking rats. When Maurice and the rodents meet a bookworm called Malicia, their little con soon goes down the drain.
After fleeing civil war in Liberia, a formerly-privileged refugee is barely scraping by in her new life in Greece when she strikes up an unexpected friendship with a rootless tour guide.
A teenager who went missing and was presumed dead returns home after eight years to find a family deeply affected by his disappearance. Gradually, doubts arise about whether he really is the missing boy or an impostor.
Startups are using AI to create avatars that allow relatives to talk with their loved ones after they have died. An exploration of a profound human desire and the consequences of turning the dream of immortality into a product.
The film follows the journey of Kitty, the imaginary friend to whom Anne Frank dedicated her diary. A fiery teenager, Kitty wakes up in the near future in Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam and embarks on a journey to find Anne, who she believes is still alive, in today's Europe. While the young girl is shocked by the modern world, she also comes across Anne's legacy.
An ethnographic exploration of the work and daily life of non-player characters, the digital extras in video games. Their labor loops, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.
Amongst the mountains of Lesotho, an 80-year-old widow winds up her affairs and makes arrangements for her burial. But when her village is threatened with resettlement due to the construction of a reservoir, she finds a new will to live and ignites a spirit of resistance within her community.
Illuminating the challenges often unseen beyond the toys, trees and tinsel, people in a small Irish village reflect on their difficult relationships with Christmas. "So This Is Christmas" is a heartwarming and charming portrait from award-winning director Ken Wardrop, which perfectly exemplies his innate ability to tell the stories of ordinary people, depicting their thoughts, feelings and experiences in an empathetic way. Beautifully rendered in 35mm, the film is authentic and compassionate, and a valuable addition to the Irish documentary canon.
Cagliari in the 1940s is a big city for those who come from a small village. Annetta arrives in the days befpre Italy enters WWII and the Allies begin bombing the city. She's a 25-year old woman, always dressed in black, solitary and quiet, typical of the beauty of those from the most sparse areas of Sardegna.
In the past few days Rome has been the scene of a singular event: when it rains, the manholes exhale a dense steam whose origin and composition is unknown. No one can imagine that whoever breathes in the mysterious substance will have to deal with what he/she represses, their darkest instincts, their anger. Not even the Morel family.
17 years-old Giulio is sent by his mother to a boarding school for difficult offspring of rich families. The institution is sort of a “golden prison”, isolated in the Alps, to which inadequate parents delegate the task of educating the ruling class of the future. In this cold and ghastly place the boys are cut off from everything. Adhering to the strict rules of the boarding school is hard, but Giulio finds a good friend in Edoardo, who is maybe a little crazy, but who seems the smartest of all. They find out that security becomes more relaxed at night and they start running away to a nightclub in the middle of the woods. There they meet Elena, a young prostitute whose destiny will be unforgettably linked to theirs. The night is a space of freedom, of new and perturbing experiences for Giulio and Edoardo. But what they don’t know is that their transgressions are part of the educational program of the school.
In the heart of the Arctic, the Yamal peninsula is the world’s largest gas exploitation zone, a symbol of Russia’s energy hyperpower, which caused the appetite of oil corporations. But the Yamal peninsula is also the ancestral home of the Nenets, who have been pasturing here with their droves for over 200 generations. Every year the nomads undertake a journey of 1500 km. But for how much longer can they survive? Today in Yamal, pastures have given way to gas fields. Growing towns, a railway, an airport, the deep scars on the landscape caused by extraction of gas and oil, and the new nuclear-powered icebreakers, which will create busy shipping lanes in the Arctic, are all changing the local ecosystem. With the industry dramatically modifying the landscape, accelerating the effects of global warming, the Nenets way of life is under threat. The documentary gives a unique insight into a vanishing way of life, enhanced by stunning aerial footage, and rare access to an extraordinary people.
In rural Afghanistan, people are storytellers who make up and tell each other tales of mystery and imagination to explain the world in which they live. The shepherd children own the mountains and, although no adults are around, they know the rules; they know that boys and girls are not allowed to be together. The boys practice with their slings to fight wolves. The girls smoke secretly and play at getting married, dreaming of finding a husband soon. They gossip about Sediqa; she’s eleven years old and an outsider. The girls think she is cursed. Qodrat, also eleven years old, becomes the subject of gossip when his mother remarries an old man with two wives. Qodrat roams alone in the most isolated parts of the mountains, where he meets Sediqa and they become friends.
Nicaragua, today. Eleven-year-old María lives with her mother Lilibeth on the edge of an immense rubbish dump. Their future depends on selling a litter of purebred puppies to a local gang member. When the deal falls through, Lilibeth has to move to the outskirts of the city and leave María to work at a recycling factory. The days go by with no sign of her mother's return. María feels abandoned, confused and angry. One night she meets Tadeo, a kind and romantic boy determined to help her find her mother.
Teo’s dream of dancing with Mia in the school competition seems hopeless…until he meets Ro, a funny bird-like creature with wondrous abilities, lost in the city. Ro’s friendship will help the wayward boy find his feet, but it will take more than dancing for Teo and Mia to help Ro find his way home before a looming disaster.
The Amazon flows lazily through the goldmine-gashed landscape of northern Peru. Using real eyewitness accounts, directors Bénédicte Liénard and Mary Jiménez tell the story of a young woman who winds up in the clutches of forced prostitution when her initially hopeful attempt to escape the constrictions of her village goes wrong. Step by step, she is robbed of her moral and physical integrity. The film reconstitutes a space of dignity and returns voice and identity to a fate formally made nameless. With its powerful imagery, the girl’s traumatic odyssey embodies the destruction of life in a capitalist world in connection with horrific natural devastation.
Celebrity financier and jet-setter Markus Føns has been taken into custody. Following a brutal assault by a gang of bikers in connection with some of his more shady dealings, Markus opts for voluntary solitary confinement among the prison's weakest inmates; the rapists and the pedophiles. This ward has a prison choir, of which the inmate Niels is the unofficial and self-proclaimed leader. Markus decides to join the choir and before long has his sight set on reaching the top of its hierarchy. This battle is not fought with muscle, but with cunning, tyranny and canonical Danish songs!
