Synopsis

A filmmaker immerses his daughter in the magic of cinema, where chaos meets fantasy. This creates a deep bond that will sustain them through good and bad.

Synopsis

Displaced Palestinian cousins Chatila and Reda are stuck in Athens. They live in a crowded group home with other migrants, and steal and save what they can to pay for fake passports that will take them to Germany. When Reda relapses into his addictions and spends all their savings, Chatila devises what seems like a foolproof smuggling operation to earn the money back fast. Then things go terribly awry, and the cousins must concoct an even more sinister scheme in order to save themselves and their families back home.

With an intimate and naturalistic lens on the cousins’ bond and shared dream of a better life, To a Land Unknown is a tightly drawn thriller that presents an audacious, moving testament to the dire circumstances faced by migrants in purgatory.

Synopsis

Winfried doesn’t see much of his working daughter Ines. The suddenly student-less music teacher decides to surprise her with a visit after the death of his old dog. It’s an awkward move, because serious career woman Ines is working on an important project as a corporate strategist in Bucharest. The geographical change doesn’t help the two to see more eye to eye. Practical joker Winfried loves to annoy his daughter with corny pranks. What’s worse are his little jabs at her routine lifestyle of long meetings, hotel bars and performance reports. Father and daughter reach an impasse, and Winfried agrees to return home to Germany. Enter flashy “Toni Erdmann” – Winfried’s smooth-talking alter ego. Disguised in a tacky suit, weird wig and even weirder fake teeth, Toni barges into Ines’ professional life, claiming to be her CEO’s life coach. As Toni, Winfried is bolder and doesn’t hold back, but Ines meets the challenge. The harder they push, the closer they become. In all the madness, Ines begins to understand that her eccentric father might deserve some place in her life after all.

Synopsis

Thirteen-year-old Marija has trouble fitting into the gray industrial town where she lives with her grandmother. She begins to form a tentative and volatile bond with rebellious peer Kristina, and the two enroll in a local modeling school that promises its pupils the chance of a glamorous life far away from their bleak and isolated existence. Both girls are told they show potential, but the financial and physical demands of the school encourage them to come up with increasingly extreme and dangerous ways to conform their young bodies to impossible standards of beauty.

Toxic is an aptly titled coming-of-age tale set amidst contaminated physical and social landscapes. At its center is two young women’s exploration of, in the words of director Saulė Bliuvaitė, “the body as a project, currency, an object of desire, the body as a source of pain and magic.”

Synopsis

Rebecca, the daughter of missionary Lawrence Byrne, was declared a “miracle” after she survived a plane crash deep in the Amazon forest as a child. Years later, Rebecca has become a healer, sustaining her family’s evangelical mission thanks to her growing fame. But when illegal loggers invade the land, Rebecca wrestles with her role in the community. As Lawrence maneuvers them into the epicenter of the escalating conflict, she begins to question her allegiance to her father, to their mission, and to her faith.

Director Pia Marais (The Unpolished, ChicagoIFF 2007) raises — and collides — religious, political, and environmental stakes to create a searing and timely eco-thriller. As the layers of the knotty plot unfold, exposing shifting alliances and increasingly blurry moral lines, Transamaonzia builds to a chilling, inexorable climax.