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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
The unbelievable true story of Chelly Wilson, who escaped the Holocaust and built a porn cinema empire in New York City in the 1970s. Chelly was a Greek-born, Christmas-celebrating, Jewish grandma, who married men but was openly gay. This documentary charts her unlikely rise to wealth as a shrewd businesswoman on “The Deuce,” aka New York’s infamous 42nd Street.
One ordinary citizen keeps his family out of poverty by cleaning up bloody crime scenes across Mexico City. This innovative feature, mixing documentary, surreal animations and a Mariachi chorus centres around Donovan Tavera and his struggle to continue his bloody work whilst keeping not only his wife and daughter together but also his mind. The film brings many of the haunting dead clients of Donovan back to cinematic life and thus denounces the terrible violence raging in Mexico. It thereby reveals the extraordinary balancing act between life and death needed to survive in modern Mexico.
The next great voyage of human exploration has already begun: the search for life on planets orbiting distant stars. With extraordinary CGI, the world's most inspiring scientists, via extreme environments on Earth and around the solar system, the film takes viewers aboard the next generation of space ships, across the cosmos and beneath the clouds of the exo-planets to discover The Living Universe.
Grieving the loss of his parents, a teenage humpback whale must embrace his destiny and discover his mystical song to save the oceans from a terrible monster.
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.
