Olga is a complex young woman desperate to break free from her unfeeling family and social conventions. With her Louise Brooks-like tomboyish looks she drags herself, chain-smoking, from one job to another until she appears to find her niche as a truck driver. Although she has female lovers she does not form a bond with any of them; instead she clashes, time and again, venting herself in wordless emotional outbursts and other behavioural extremes.
Eka and Natia leave their childhood behind and ignore societal customs to escape from their turbulent family lives.
In a vast desert area somewhere at the border between Mongolia and China, Hungai lives together with his wife and child. Dutifully, Hungai plants little trees in the desert. After his wife embarks on a long trip to a hospital in the capital Ulaanbaatar to have their sick son examined, Hungai starts to drink out of loneliness. One day, a North Korean fugitive and her son ask for shelter in his home.
During a medical examination, 13-year-old Aslan is humiliated in front of a load of his fellow pupils. The incident unleashes his latent personality disorder. Plagued by self-doubt, he strives for cleanliness and perfection and is obsessed with trying to control everything around him. His compulsion draws Aslan, who lives with his grandmother in a village in Kazakhstan, into increasingly difficult situations. He abhors the way most of his fellow pupils are held in the sway of a criminal scheme, in which Bolat, one of Aslan’s tormentors, is also involved. Bolat blackmails the younger children into paying him protection money; he has nothing but contempt for ostracised Aslan.
The life of a young man struggling between the moral dilemmas, society where he lives, personal problems and the love of his life.
A young man trying to solve the puzzle of his father's last moments rattles the life of a quiet town and unburies unwanted truths. His compulsive quest becomes a downward spiral of love, lust and lies.
Natasha is a lonely, middle-aged admin employee at the zoo who still lives at home with her mother. One day her life is turned upside down when she discovers she has grown a tail…
Jorge is a peaceful hard-working man who seeks a simple, quiet life for himself and his family. One day, he is mugged and humiliated by a gang of thugs led by Kalule, a delinquent from his neighborhood. This event infuriates his son as much for Jorge’s meek acceptance as for the act itself. The son, looking for retribution, ends up getting himself shot. Kalule is sent to jail and when he gets out 18 months later, begins a campaign of terror against Jorge and his family. The authorities do nothing, so Jorge decides to take matters into his own hands.
Sumru, a young ethnomusicologist in search of her lost lover, leaves Istanbul for a three-month research project in Diyarbakır. While crossing paths with locals and tracing the pains of others through a music project based on Anatolian mournings, she comes to confront the remnants of her own agony.
Haunted by his dark past, a man takes a job as a fire warden in a remote tower in the wilderness, and is inexorably drawn towards a young woman with a terrible secret of her own.
Nihat, an introverted employee in a hospital cafeteria, is confused by Ayşe, a mysterious woman who just started working there as a dishwasher. Her obvious seductive approaches embarrass Nihat and make him nervous at the same time. Despite the rumors about her husband having been sentenced to many years in jail, Nihat reluctantly accepts Ayşe’s invitation to dinner at her house. This is the beginning of a strange and dangerous liaison. When Nihat discovers a picture of the woman’s husband and realizes that he looks astoundingly like him, the relation becomes even more toxic.
Chang-ho, 12, becomes friends with a North-Korean immigrant about the same age who just crossed the Dooman river, border between North-Korea and China. His mute sister and his wise grandfather accompany him through a series of misfortunes.
After a night of partying, Vicente is involved in a hit-and-run that kills a man. Vicente claims his innocence, but he was drunk and high. A tangled web of lies buries the truth, making a social scandal disappear — exonerating the real culprit, the son of a powerful politician.
In a yurt on the snow-covered fields of the North, Nanook and Sedna live following the traditions of their ancestors. Alone in the wilderness, they look like the last people on Earth. Nanook and Sedna's traditional way of life starts changing - slowly, but inevitably. Hunting becomes more and more difficult, the animals around them die from inexplicable deaths and the ice has been melting earlier every year. Chena, who visits them regularly, is their only connection to the outside world - and to their daughter Ága, who has left the icy tundra a long time ago due to family feud. When Sedna's health deteriorates, Nanook decides to fulfill her wish. He embarks on a long journey in order to find Ága.
A young Kurdish man is torn between his mother's nostalgic search of a song in her dreams and an uncertain future with his pregnant girlfriend.
Two Albanian brothers migrate to Greece and try, each in his own way, to integrate into their host country by following two different lifestyles.
Seymour Tahirbekov is an international chess grandmaster from Azerbaijan. Having won the Candidates Tournament, Seymour earns the right to challenge the defending world champion Skroten Gudmonson in the World Chess Championship match. With a few weeks left before the championship match, Seymour’s psychological and emotional state deteriorates under escalating abuse and pressure to succeed by any means.
A haunting sociopolitical drama blending fiction and documentary to elucidate the turbulent history of a Kurdish family. Mehmet (co-director Zeynel Dogan) lives with his pregnant wife in Diyarbakir, eastern Turkey. His father was fatally injured while working in Saudi Arabia and all he has left is an audio tape letter. Now he is to become a father himself, he visits his mother to ask about more of these cassettes but she’s evasive, reluctant to upset Mehmet’s view of his father with the whole dark story.
Two people meet up in jail when they come for monthly visits of their spouses. They fall in love after becoming witnesses to a wedding in jail but their relationship has to end because both their spouses get amnesty from the government.
When his mother disappears one autumn, a thirteen-year-old boy leaves his younger sister with their grandfather and goes on a journey in search of her.
