Stories on Human Rights

Several directors from countries of the region were invited to create stories taking place in and around the beautiful city of Istanbul, in the vein of “Paris, je t’aime” and “New York, I love you”. They come together to remind viewers that Istanbul’s history does not belong only to the people of Turkey.

From the perspective of two Palestinian men who are preparing to perform a suicide attack in Israel, this is the first film to deal with the subject of suicide bombers.

Mohammed Assaf, an aspiring musician living in Gaza, sets a seemingly impossible goal: to compete on the program "Arab Idol."

The movie follows Rajai, a Ford Transit driver which is the most popular transportation in the Palestinian occupied territories (occupied by Israel). While taking a ride with Rajai, we experience the frustrating situation the Palestinian need to deal with. On our trips from the roadblock in Ramallah to the roadblock in Jerusalem, we get to hear analysis of the situation by all kinds of random transporters, people from different religions, origins, and levels of class.

Returning to his native city just months before the new millennium, filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad captures the daily, idiosyncratic beats of Nazareth - a city both Christians and Muslims consider one of the most sacred in the world. Set against the background of the riots surrounding a square that both the municipality and the Muslim community lay claim to, Abu-Assad allows his story to unfold through the eyes of two cynical, funny and wise gas station attendants who have been working at the service station for decades. Their comments on the political and social conditions of their city paint both a tragic and subtle image of its inhabitants.

The drama, the story of three childhood friends and a young woman who are torn apart in their fight for freedom, is billed as the first fully-financed film to come out of the Palestinian cinema industry.

A Palestinian girl of 17 who wants to get married to the man of her own choosing. Rana wakes up one morning to an ultimatum delivered by her father: she must either choose a husband from a preselected list of men, or she must leave Palestine for Egypt with her father by 4:00 that afternoon.

Intent on making a film, a group of resourceful young boys don't let limited resources stand in their way.

Short film from the 'Love, Life & Everything in Between' Netflix collection.

Bilja was seriously wounded in the 1992 shelling of Sarajevo. A French photographer took pictures of her while she lay bleeding and desperately begging for help; pictures of Bilja's wounds made him famous. Zbanic searches for Bilja and reconstructs the moment when news became more important than her life.

Love Island tells the story of a pregnant French woman who lives in Sarajevo with her Bosnian husband and their daughter. They go for a vacation at a Croatian island, where things get complicated when they all become attracted to a beautiful woman.

Kym, an Australian tourist, decides to travel to Bosnia. Her guidebook leads her to Višegrad, a small town steeped in history, on the border of Bosnia and Serbia. After a night of insomnia in the 'romantic' Hotel Vilina Vlas, Kym discovers what happened there during the war. She can no longer be an ordinary tourist and her life will never be the same again.

The true story of a translator attempting to save the lives of her husband and sons during the Bosnian genocide.

Jasna searches for the remains of her two children who were killed and buried in the mass grave by Serbian Army. She gathers all available information and inspects mass grave sites hoping to find the red rubber boots her son wore the day he was abducted.

Loving young couple Luna and Amar try their best to overcome unexpected obstacles that threaten their relationship. After Amar's dramatic change in a fundamentalist community, Luna tears herself apart searching if love is truly enough to keep the couple together on the path to a lifetime of happiness...

A woman and her daughter struggle to make their way through the aftermath of the Balkan war.

Causes and consequences of the assassination that happened in Sarajevo a hundred years ago still continue to reverberate in Europe. On June 28, 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire Franz Ferdinand sparking World War I that marked the start of the 20th century. As Sarajevo commemorated the centennial of the assassination, different people had different interpretations of what happened in the city a century ago and different emotions about it. ONE DAY IN SARAJEVO tells about various perspectives of the anniversary in Sarajevo combining and contrasting footage filmed by citizens of Sarajevo (with small cameras and mobile phones) with scenes from feature films about the assassination by directors from Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the United Kingdom

Six young filmmakers from Central and East Europe developed shorts about the theme of "generation".

In the periphery of São Paulo, the pregnant single mother Cleuza works as maid in the apartment of a middle-class family. Each of her sons has a different unknown father: the oldest, Dênis, has a baby son that lives with his mother and he works as motorcycle courier.

When the inmate Maria do Socorro Nobre reads an article about the Polish artist Franz Krajcberg in Veja magazine, she decides to write a letter to him. Socorro was sentenced to more than twenty-one years in a prison for women in Salvador, Bahia, while Franz is a tormented artist that lost his family and lived his childhood in a ghetto in Poland but survived the Holocaust. Franz moved to Brazil and recovered life wish living close to nature and inspires Socorro to dream with life again.

American photojournalist Peter Mandrake becomes embroiled in Brazil's dangerous underworld of pimps, drug gangs and arms smugglers when he sets out to find the killer of a local call girl.

Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns to the shooting locations of his films, along with his actors, friends and close collaborators. Jia recalls the inspiration sources for his movies, such as Platform, Still Life and A Touch of Sin. The film is the memory of a filmmaker and of a country in convulsion, China, which reveals itself little by little.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

A documentary about the fathers of Bossa Nova: João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

A short film omnibus featuring the work of five directors representing five countries involved in the 2017 BRICS summit, an annual international relations conference held between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The collection—taking the concept of time as a unifying theme—depicts the economic, political, and social alienations and contradictions that create, compound, and structure issues as wide-ranging as poverty, class stratification, and homeless; familial distress; spousal abuse; and natural disaster.

A collective film of 33 shorts directed by different directors about their feeling about cinema.

Brazilian badlands, April 1910. Tonho is ordered by his father to avenge the death of his older brother. The young man knows that if he commits this crime, his life will be divided in two: the twenty years he has already lived and the few days he has left to live, before the other family avenges their son's death. He is torn between fulfilling his ancestral duty and rebelling against it, urged by his younger brother Pacu. That's when a tiny travelling circus passes through the vast badlands where Tonho's family lives.

Directed by Idrissa Ouedraogo.

A king’s son takes over when his father dies.

Poverty and misery are rife in Gourga, a village in the Sahel. The inhabitants must choose: stay and await international assistance or leave for more fertile regions in the country.

Short directed by Idrissa Ouedraogo.

Karim's father is missing and presumed dead, which is why his father's brother has taken over the house and is now his stepfather: this is the custom in Burkina Faso. This would be all right with Karim, except that his new stepfather is a harsh, unloving man, who would just as soon beat him as look at him, and he is the same way with the lad's mother. At the same time, Karim has made friends with Sala, a girl from a wealthy family, starting from when he gave her a baby goat-kid. Their friendship prospers enough so that, when Karim and his mother leave the abusive uncle carrying only what they are wearing on their backs, Sala is able to persuade her family to help them settle safely elsewhere. When Karim's father turns up at last, it is icing on the cake, for they are now able to send the obnoxious man who overshadowed their lives away in disgrace.

The beautiful Awa, from a poor background, decides to marry for money rather than love and ends up with the much older Karim. While married, she continues to love the much younger Bouba. On the happy occasion of Awa’s birthday, a macabre plan is to be set in motion.

40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules: (1) The film could be no longer than 52 seconds, (2) no synchronized sound was permitted, and (3) no more than three takes. The results run the gamut from Zhang Yimou's convention-thwarting joke to David Lynch's bizarre miniature epic.

11 directors show their view on the terrorist attacks on the world trade center in New York.

A small African village. The story focuses on Bila, a ten year old boy who befriends an old woman, Sana. Everybody calls her 'Witch' but Bila himself calls her 'Yaaba' (grandmother). When Bila's cousin Nopoko gets sick it is Sana's medicine that saves her.

In the periphery of São Paulo, the pregnant single mother Cleuza works as maid in the apartment of a middle-class family. Each of her sons has a different unknown father: the oldest, Dênis, has a baby son that lives with his mother and he works as motorcycle courier.

An elegant dinner, which takes place in real time, brings together a group of intellectuals in the early 90s in São Paulo, Brazil: the hosts are the editor of the country's top news magazine and her husband, the company's lawyer, and the occasion is the wedding anniversary of the magazine publisher and his wife, a famous theater actress. The publisher has written an open letter to the president of the country, with serious denunciations, which will run in the upcoming issue. He risks being arrested this very evening. As tensions increase with the imminence of prison, secrets come to light revealing the conflict between the ethics sought in public life and the ethics practiced in private life.

Brazil 1821. Upon his return to the imposing farmhouse, Antonio, a rich cattle herder, finds out that his wife dies in labor. Forced to live in the property with numerous African slaves, he marries his wife's niece. A restless soul, he returns to droving, leaving his young wife behind alone with the slaves.

In the Kalapalo cosmogony (an ethnic group that lives in the Xingú Indigenous Park), water is as old as humans and is the source of life. That is where all their sustenance comes from, their food, their drink, their joy. The idea of using water as a dumpster, of poisoning water is a dystopia. In this documentary Chief Faremá —from Caramujo village on the banks of the Kuluene River— tells us about the birth of water and warns us about the consequences of disrespecting it.

Composed by eleven short-movies. Started in 2018, the project explore in a sensible and creative way the position of humankind and nature. The key stories illustrated by the eleven internationally recognized filmmakers reflect the intertwined relations between human society and natural environment that are aggravated by climate change on multiple dimensions and scales, hinting at possible solutions.

On December 31st 1999, destiny brings a fugitive prisoner and a depressed middle class teacher together, as the new millennium approaches bringing hope to everyone.

Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to chose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.

In an empty city, scorched by the sun, the young and old confuse the fever of sunstroke with the delicate birth of passion. Like ghosts, they hover around buildings and endless flatlands in search of the ever elusive love. Inspired by 19th century Russian short stories, the plots weave and unravel together in the improbable city of Brasilia – a distorted mirror-image of the Soviet utopia – located in the heart of the Brazilian desert.

After the death of his mother, a young Brazilian decides to leave his country and travel to her native land. In a foreign land, he finds love and danger.

Shows a market where puppies are bought and sold. Several puppies are placed in a cloth bag, and they struggle to break free. One bites through the bag, pokes his head, and is observed in his triumph and then confusion.

An ancestral city; through its delicious botanical garden and its branched canals, we observe the clues and traces of its ancient culture. Two couples of men and women, former lovers, meet again one year later. The yesterday's breath of youth is still perceptible in their conversations. Is it still possible for us to love? Does youth really have an end? Like the networks linking the old city, what type of ecological existence does their culture require? Written by Venice Film Festival

Jia Zhangke brings to this edition of the Beautiful series The Hedonists, an engaging drama about several unemployed Shanxi coalminers looking for work.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.

In "Spaces #2", 7 internationally acclaimed directors shot, after commissioning by the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, a short film at home, making their own timely comment on the new reality that we live in. The project is inspired by the book "Species of Spaces" by the French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist, Georges Perec and the days of quarantine. The idea is to create a film at home, using the environment, the people or the animals in that space. The only outdoor areas that may be used are outdoor living spaces, such as the terrace, the garden, the balcony and the stairwell. "Visit" is Jia Zhangke's submission.

Xiao Shan, a temporary worker at the Hongyuan Restaurant, has just been fired by his boss Zhao Guoqing. Deciding to leave Beijing and returns to his home in Anyang, he goes to see a series of people from his hometown who have also been living in Beijing-construction workers, train ticket scalpers, university students, attendant, prostitutes-but no one wants to go back with him. Dispirited and confused, he searches out one after another of his old friends who are still in Beijing. Finally he leaves his wild long hair, the symbol of his life in the city, at a roadside barber stand as his offering to Beijing.

Set in China's underworld, this tale of love and betrayal follows a dancer who fired a gun to protect her mobster boyfriend during a fight. On release from prison 5 years later, she sets out to find him.

Chengdu nowadays. The state owned factory 420 shuts down to give way to a complex of luxury apartments called "24 CITY". Three generations, eight characters : old workers, factory executives and yuppies, their stories melt into the History of China.

China's greatest living filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Platform, The World) travels with acclaimed painter Liu Xiaodong from China to Thailand as they as they meet everyday workers in the throes of social turmoil. Liu Xiaodong is well-known for his monumental canvases, particularly those inspired by China's Three Gorges Dam project. In DONG, Jia Zhangke visits Liu on the banks of Fengjie, a city about to be swallowed up by the Yangtze River. The area is in the process of being "de-constructed" by armies of shirtless male workers who form the subject of Liu's paintings. Liu and Jia next travel to Bangkok, where Liu paints Thai sex workers languishing in brothels. The two sets of paintings are united in their subjects' shared sense of malaise in the face of the dehumanizing labor afforded them.

Meduzot (the Hebrew word for Jellyfish) tells the story of three very different Israeli women living in Tel Aviv whose intersecting stories weave an unlikely portrait of modern Israeli life. Batya, a catering waitress, takes in a young child apparently abandoned at a local beach. Batya is one of the servers at the wedding reception of Keren, a young bride who breaks her leg in trying to escape from a locked toilet stall, which ruins her chance at a romantic honeymoon in the Caribbean. One of the guests is Joy, a Philippine chore woman attending the event with her employer, and who doesn't speak any Hebrew (she communicates mainly in English), and who is guilt-ridden after having left her young son behind in the Philippines.

Self Made tells the story of two women - one Israeli, the other Palestinian- who are trapped within their respective worlds. After a mix-up at a checkpoint, they find themselves living the life of the other on the opposite side of the border.

A homeless real estate agent who gets legal consulting from his Goldfish discovers that he can travel in time.

Meduzot (the Hebrew word for Jellyfish) tells the story of three very different Israeli women living in Tel Aviv whose intersecting stories weave an unlikely portrait of modern Israeli life. Batya, a catering waitress, takes in a young child apparently abandoned at a local beach. Batya is one of the servers at the wedding reception of Keren, a young bride who breaks her leg in trying to escape from a locked toilet stall, which ruins her chance at a romantic honeymoon in the Caribbean. One of the guests is Joy, a Philippine chore woman attending the event with her employer, and who doesn't speak any Hebrew (she communicates mainly in English), and who is guilt-ridden after having left her young son behind in the Philippines.

A homeless real estate agent who gets legal consulting from his Goldfish discovers that he can travel in time.

Skin Deep is a tragic comedy of a destined loser who will do anything to prove that the destiny is wrong. A story of a hopeless romantic who wants to surprise his love one with a tattoo on his left arm carrying her name, and ends up by surprising her with another lover. Now he has tow options: abandon his belief in an eternal love or find another girl with the same name.

The story is about a couple who have gone so long together that they almost became one.

The "Villa Virgin", a shantytown in the slums of Buenos Aires. Julian and Nicolas, two priests and long-standing friends, work tirelessly to help the local people. Julian uses his political connections to oversee the construction of a hospital. Nicolas joins him following the failure of a project he was leading in the jungle, after paramilitary forces assassinated members of the community. Deeply troubled, he finds a little comfort in Luciana, a young, attractive, atheist social worker. As Nicolas' faith weakens, tension and violence between the slum drug dealing cartels grow. And when work on the hospital is halted by ministerial decree, the fuse is lit...

The portrait of a man and his attempts to make things up with life after losing his job.

Zapa is a locksmith in a quiet and little town lost somewhere in the province of Buenos Aires. The work is quite slow, and hours seem to pass slowly. Polaco, the owner of the shop, sends him on a job that consists of opening a safe at an office. The next day, Zapa is imprisoned for being responsible of robbing the place. Ismael, his uncle, a retired policeman, bails him out and sends him to Buenos Aires. Zapa becomes an aspiring officer in the Buenos Aires Police. He gets to his new home city, takes the instructional course, works at a precinct, has a love affair with a teacher and starts to see his life turn into a strange fiction.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

A wedding invite from an estranged sibiling inspires a grandmother to assemble her family and embark on a roadtrip in a broken down caravan.

A making-of recording of the shooting of Gatica, el Mono by Leonardo Favio.

In Argentina, between 1982 and 1985, the Puccios, a well-established family of San Isidro, an upper-class suburb of Buenos Aires, kidnap several people and hold them as hostages for a ransom.

In Patagonia, a successful interior designer's life falls apart after he suffers a horrific accident.

Julia, a 25 year-old university student, two weeks pregnant, with no criminal record, is sent to prison. Julia murdered the father of her child. This story addresses maternity, jail and Justice; confinement, guilt and solitude; but above all it deals with Julia and her son, Tomas, born inside an Argentinean prison.

A fluorescent tube illuminates an empty playground in the evening. Nearby a flash of light is projected on a makeshift screen. This outdoor movie is a portrait of a village repeatedly struck by lightning. As night falls, the silhouette figures of young men emerge, they are playing with a football raging with fire. They take turns kicking the ball which leaves illuminated trails in the grass. The lightning on the screen flickers amid the fire and the smoke rising from the ground. The game intensifies with each kick that sends the fireball soaring into the air. Finally the teens burn the screen and crowd around it to witness the blazing canvas, behind which is revealed the ghostly white beam of a projector. Phantoms of Nabua is part of the multi-platform Primitive project which focuses on a concept of remembrance and extinction and is set in the northeast of Thailand.

0116643225059 is an early experimental film by Weerasethakul made during his time at SAIC. The work is about a long-distance telephone conversation between the filmmaker and his beloved mother in Khon Kaen, Thailand. Weerasethakul superimposed a photograph of his mother in her youth alongside his own image and his apartment in Chicago. It renders a strong bond between the artist and his family.

Taking the recent tsunami in Asia as its starting point, the filmmakers have used the idea of a ghost seen wandering along the rocky coastline of a Thai island and, in a life-affirming gesture, they have invited some local children to direct the film for them, suggesting and filming the movements of the actor-ghost.

Created in celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this short essay centres on a monologue delivered by a reincarnation of the philosopher in twenty-first century Thailand.

The work is part of the Memoria Project, the first major series of work that is set outside of Weerasethakul’s home country. Given his affinity for the Amazon, of which Thai jungle tales were originally inspired, Weerasethakul has started to explore South America - and since 2017, has been developing a film based in Colombia. He is drawn to its topography, where active volcanoes and landslides ceaselessly transform natural landscapes. The Memoria Project presents both personal and collective memories, while retaining the artist’s fascination with illumination. A vital part of the video and photographic works is the presence of a lone protagonist on the beach. Weerasethakul worked with Canadian actor Connor Jessup who visited him during the filming of a documentary at Nuquí area in Chocó Department, western Colombia. Here, the actor is a spirit that contemplates the artist’s journey, his dream of both real and imaginary films.

Petch, one of the young men of Nabua, composes and plays this song about his village. One evening, he sang a song to Weerasethakul’s film crew regarding an August event when the former members of the Communist Party of Thailand gathered to commemorate the first shoot out in the field more than 45 years ago. Weerasethakul layers Petch’s song with an image of his friend, Kamgiang, whose grandfather was killed by the soldiers in the field not far from his home.

Invisibility displays Weerasethakul’s continued interest in the issue of perception and memory. The installation takes threads from his recent films, Cemetery of Splendor and Fever Room, both of which feature the same actors. Here, he takes them deeper into an imaginary world and ponders the future of shared consciousness. The videos depict a landscape where the protagonists are confined to a room, along with the viewers. With no way out, they infiltrate each other’s dreams. Invisibility mirrors the troubled state of Thailand’s politics. It proposes a decayed vision of the future where one needs to constantly evade reality. The viewing experience shifts between seeing and not seeing, fact and fiction, space and void.

For a Fiery Monkey Year.

In this video diary, Weerasethakul documents the set of Primitive Project in Nabua, Thailand, particularly the scene when teenagers are hypnotized and sleep inside a time machine.

Cactus River is a diary of the time Apichatpong Weerasethakul visited a newlywed couple near the Mekong River.

Shimkent hôtel tells the story of a young man who's experienced the failure of a business venture in the Afghan mountains, and who suffers from shock in Kazakhstan.

An empress commissions a painting of herself from a French outsider in hopes of stirring her husband's interest in this lavish period piece. The Lady in the Portrait is a period yarn evoking the unique rapport between a French missionary and the Manchurian Empress whose portrait he's ordered to paint.

“Le Pont du Trieur”, co-written by de Meaux and Philippe Parreno, with an original score by Dave Stewart, is set in Pamir, a region situated in the highest part of Tajikistan, at the border between Afghanistan and China. This is a strategic zone controlled by various armies in the midst of a region that awaits reconstruction. The film stems from the simple question of how to tell the story of a country of which the West is deprived of images. Both fiction and documentary, it is about reality and the means of telling it.

Christophe, a young horse racing jockey from Paris, is filled with hope and ambition. Yet after a race, he tests positive for illegal substances and is subsequently suspended from racing. He decides to move to Macau, in Asia. There his circumstances change very quickly: he wins one race after another, earning himself large amounts of money and success with women. But, his new life also brings him an ever-increasing sense of solitude. Macau has its own unspoken rules that Christophe thinks he can ignore. But events start to gain momentum as the net tightens around him. Motivated by love for an intriguing young Chinese woman, Christophe ends up gambling with his own destiny, but this time on the card tables.

Sissako visits a war-torn Angola after thirty years of war in search of a friend and thereby through interviews reflects on the lost utopias of a generation of Africans who experienced the liberation struggles. His camera is witness to the dislocation and despair of those he encounters living in Angola, however he also discovers the resilient spirit of Africa and optimism for its future in unexpected ways.

Ira wanders around the streets of Moscow. She's pregnant with the child of Adrissa, an african student.

Melé is a bar singer, her husband Chaka is out of work and the couple is on the verge of breaking up... In the courtyard of the house they share with other families, a trial court has been set up. African civil society spokesmen have taken proceedings against the World Bank and the IMF whom they blame for Africa's woes... Amidst the pleas and the testimonies, life goes on in the courtyard. Chaka does not seem to be concerned by this novel Africa's desire to fight for its rights.

The story of two people who cross paths in Nouhadhibou.

8 shorts centered around 8 themes directed by 8 famous film directors involved and sharing their opinion on progress, on the set-backs and the challenges our planet faces today.

A cattle herder and his family who reside in the dunes of Timbuktu find their quiet lives -- which are typically free of the Jihadists determined to control their faith -- abruptly disturbed. A look at the brief occupation of Timbuktu by militant Islamic rebels.

Ahmed’s father has only a day with his wife and son before he must return to war. With haunting, innocent cruelty, the children play games that mirror the adult world, leading them to discover the harshness of destiny

In Ethiopia, in a small country school, children have a lesson on the Millennium Development Goals. But one of the pupils, Tiya, is distracted, she doesn’t listen. She is staring at the window. Outside, some children are playing rugby... Abderrahmane Sissako's contribution to 8 (2008).

La Vie Sur Terre (Life on Earth) is a 1998 Malian comedy/drama film written and directed by, and starring Abderrahmane Sissako. It is set in the village of Sokolo and depicts rural life on the eve of the 21st century. Runtime is 61 minutes.The film earned Sissako awards at the Fribourg International Film Festival, the Ouagadougou Panafrican Film and Television Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Yuriko, a daughter of Yakudza boss is lost in Russia. Here she finds Alexey - a young man who is trying to help her.

Sergey Bodrov's film tells about the tour of the band "Tiger Lilies", which covers 5 countries, including Russia. We tried to show the band's impressions of our country, to tell about the musicians' love for visual effects, thanks to which cinematography and music come together. The film honestly and impartially tells about the band, about its work on stage and behind the stage, praises and recognizes the power of art.

We all live on the same planet, under one sun which nurtures and renews our unique and common hopes for the future. No matter how much we differ from each other in color, ethnicity and belief, we all share the same source of life, united in our destinies. An omnibus film on the topic of Turkish - Armenian relations.

The tale of the extraordinary life and times of Lucky, a horse that was born in captivity but achieves his dream of running free with the help of a stableboy.

White King, Red Queen is a Russian film. The composer Isaak Schwarz won a Nika Award from the Russian Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences for the film's music.

Young Sasha is brought into a state-run children's home because his mother died early and his father spends most of his life in prison. The conditions are like in a penal institution. Sasha tries several times to escape and to search for his father.

John Gregory, who is a seventh son of a seventh son and also the local spook, has protected the country from witches, boggarts, ghouls and all manner of things that go bump in the night. However John is not young anymore, and has been seeking an apprentice to carry on his trade. Most have failed to survive. The last hope is a young farmer's son named Thomas Ward. Will he survive the training to become the spook that so many others couldn't?

The Nomad is a historical epic set in 18th-century Kazakhstan. The film is a fictionalised account of the youth and coming-of-age of Ablai Khan, as he grows and fights to defend the fortress at Hazrat-e Turkestan from Dzungar invaders.

The story of the first love between two eight-graders.

Ulay and Abramović take turns hitting each other in the face, gradually increasing speed and intensity with each blow. This performance is best known for being the inspiration for New Order's "True Faith" music video.

Marina Abramovic's performance 'Relation in time', with her long time partner Ulay. "We are sitting back to back, tied together by our hair, without any movement for 16 hours. Then the audience came in. We continued sitting for one hour."

In a small house with oversized furniture, located in a rice field in Asia, some children wearing army clothes and weapons, start playing war, creating between each other two armies and using children's toys, laser weapons, machine guns and helicopters. Slowly, as the game progresses, they start imitating war scenes as seen on TV, such as negotiations and death scenes. At the end of the film, the children are coming out of the house and they deposit their weapons in front of it. The smallest child comes out in the end with a burning bramble stick in his hand and lights the pile of weapons. All the children leave while the pile is burning. In over twenty countries around the world, children are direct participants in war. Denied a childhood and often subjected to horrific violence, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 children are serving as soldiers for both rebel groups and government forces in current armed conflicts. Dangerous Games is a work of fiction.

7 Deaths of Maria Callas is a continuation of Marina Abramovic's lifelong meditation on the female body as a source of both power and pain. Here Abramovic turns her focus to renowned opera singer Maria Callas, whose stunning soprano voice captivated audiences around the world in the mid-20th century as her life was beset by struggle and scandal. Through a mix of narrative opera and film, Abramovic recreates seven iconic death scenes from the American-born Greek singer's most important roles - in La Traviata, Tosca, Otello, Madame Butterfly, Carmen, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Norma - followed by an interpretive recreation of Callas' own death performed onstage by Abramovic herself.

The video tape shows the half-length portraits of Abramović and her husband Ulay standing opposite each other, looking at each other and producing a long sound with open mouths.

"Naked we stand opposite each other in the museum entrance. The public entering the museum has to turn sideways to move through the limited space between us. Everyone wanting to get past has to choose which one of us to face" – Marina Abramovich

Combining video, performance art, documentary, and tableau vivant, this short piece set in what appears to be part of the Ayutthaya Ruins in Bangkok, Thailand, begins with a panoramic shot of various Thai folks dressed in traditional garb and sleeping in the grass as a woman narrates. The rest of the piece is broken into six unbroken shots of these individuals in still poses depicting both some aspect of Thai life as well as suggesting its disquieting alienation from modernity, as the same woman narrator now sings. The final shot is again of the ensemble sleeping, suggesting that the previous montage was, indeed, a collective dream.

Balkan Erotic Epic explores the sexual aspects of Serbian folklore. Ancient myths that have trickled into everyday household remedies or explanations are juxtaposed with the joys of the female and male sexual forms from which all human life originates. Functioning as both sexual liberation and reinvented modern myth, Balkan Erotic Epic is a display of the need for a cultural change in viewpoint around sex.

I brush my hair with a metal brush held in my right hand and simultaneously comb my hair with a metal comb held in my left hand. While so doing, I continuously repeat 'Art must be beautiful', 'Artist must be beautiful', until I have destroyed my hair and face.

A compilation of erotic films intended to illuminate the points where art meets sexuality.

Murali Nair directs this political satire about a man arrested for stealing who becomes charged with a number of murders he didn’t commit.

Through the eyes of a child named Unni, the film captures the reality of a village in Kerala, India in the 1970s. He belongs to the superior caste of Nairs. His friends Raju, Ramu and Gopi, who go to school with him, belong to the lowest caste of all. His friend Gopi in particular has already had a life full of hardship and tragedy.

A local ruler bows down to the pressure from democratic forces and is forced to hand over a part of his province to a democratically elected leader. He also presents his pet dog to a poor peasant and his wife. For the poor peasant and his wife, the dog is not a mere dog, but a symbol of the royalty which had always inspired in them feelings of respect, admiration and blind worship. They bathe the dog in a very ceremonious manner and take much care of it. They even desist from tying it up. But when the dog bites and kills a duck and then a boy, it leads to problems. The democratic leader orders the arrest of the dog, followed by the arrest of the poor peasant. Then follow protests, talks, negotiations leading to more interesting developments.

Krishnanunni is the descendant of a wealthy orthodox Nair family, whose fortune has now dwindled. But there is still enough to ensure a leisurely life. Everything is going fine until one morning, while shaving, his wife discovers a black mole under his lower lip…

In this unique tale, director Murali Nair portrays life in rural India with ribald wit and sharp social satire.

A young woman, Antonia, returns to her island of birth, Corsica, after one of her relatives has disappeared at sea. She is torn back and forth between her old love Ettore and the dumb Alexander. The quest for Antonia's place in the masculine environment of armed nationalism is an excuse for all kinds of peregrinations in the spectacular landscape of Cap Corse - a landscape that itself becomes a leading character.

As he is fleeing the Western world, a terrorist discovers Eastern civilization. His subjective journey is a means to create a fiction halfway between adventure and romance. The narrative is guided by sensation and gives birth to a series of visual and sound feelings bearing witness to the encounter between cultures. - MUBI

Short film about young people walking.

"La Déraison du Louvre," is a strange short movie in which a young woman tours the titular gallery late at night, and takes in a variety of their exhibits (including the Mona Lisa) and the paintings and statues do have an effect on the young woman...

Without words, we're left to consider whether love and attraction can break through the impasse of human intolerance.

Nina Satana, a fifteen-year-old gothic girl, falls in love with Momo, the new Moroccan boy in her class.

Marieke, a 27-year-old Dutch woman, works for an advertising agency in New York. She feels lonely in ‘the city that never sleeps’. Her boyfriend Dylan is the only one who can comfort her, although he only drops by occasionally. When she visits the verdant and quiet Long Island on an outing with colleagues, the introverted woman finally blooms. Especially when she is introduced to George. Right at that moment, Dylan asks Marieke to let him go. Subtle drama about loneliness, mourning and starting anew.

When Alexander suddenly leaves on a road trip to France, Lukas decides to join him as he’s been trailing his charismatic brother for his entire life. But during this journey he discovers that he finally has to go his own way, not knowing this decision would be so all-encompassing.

Three youngsters take a road trip to Seville that will change their lives forever.

Noreturn examines Gonzalez-Foerster's own 2008 Turbine Hall installation TH.2058, which imagined the gigantic space fifty years in the future as a dystopian nightmare of steel bunk beds under the watchful gaze of Louise Bourgeois' Spider, an H. R. Giger-like touch. In the video, she unleashes a group of schoolchildren on the installation and watch as they move from playfulness to a recognition of the installation's menace, finally huddling under a Henry Moore sculpture. - TIFF

Gloria consists of a 5-minute looped tracking shot in a park in the centre of Rio, in Brazil. This park is a copy of a French-style garden, but does not have perfectly straight contours. The tropical climate and the abundance of the vegetation constantly overruns all human efforts to make it a sophisticated park. A woman’s voiceover soliloquises the tropicalisation of this garden and the possibilities for fictions that she could create in this place. - New Media Encyclopedia

Atomic Park is a place in the White Sands desert (New Mexico), not far away from Trinity Site, where the first atom bomb exploded in 1945. This national park provides an ambivalent landscape, as well suited for a picnic as for ballistic tests. A white desert, like a natural exhibition hall every movement can provoke diverse interpretations. Like a faint echo we hear Marilyn Monroe's desperate monologue and accusation about man's violence from The Misfits (1961). - Torino Film Festival

In De Novo she turns the camera on herself, divulging the complicated thought processes behind the works she made for her five different invitations to present at the Venice Biennale. The video shows her unafraid to question the contexts of her own work in relationship to an ongoing inquiry into the nature of exhibition, exposition and narrative mythologies. - TIFF

Subjective observations of Corsica and Japan, accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack.

A collection of 11 short poetic psycho-geographic portraits of cities and spaces from artist Dominique Gonzelez-Foerster. Ranging from the revisiting of a scene of Ming-Liang Tsai's 'Vive l'Amour' through the eyes of its protagonist, to a ticker-tape parade in Buenos Aires, from a reflection on the filmic qualities of Brasilia,to an observation of the observers of the 1999 eclipse in Paris. All soundtracked by a sensitive balance of field-recordings and carefully chosen delicate music.

For her contribution to the 2006 São Paulo Biennial, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster used the work of Oscar Niemeyer as a starting point for an exploration of the relationship between the exhibition space and the urban context, through an intervention in which she reproduces and multiplies existing columns, reconfiguring the reading of the rhythm and proportions of modern architecture. The Marquise, in Sao Paulo’s Parque Ibirapuera, an enormous concrete canopy designed by Niemeyer in 1954, is therefore the subject and setting of this film, in which the artist reveals her interest in ‘tropical modernism’ and develops certain recurrent themes in her work, such as ideas of shelter, playground or potential space. - MNAC

This sensual, slow-motion video installation shows the artist, with her shocking-pink hair, lying naked on the rain-soaked earth.

This video art work features Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist lip-synching to Kevin Coyne's 1973 song 'Jacky and Edna', her image superimposed with fleeting images seen from the window of a moving train.

For her London exhibition, ‘Worry Will Vanish’, Rist has transformed the gallery into a fully immersive, sensory environment. Projected against two walls, ‘Worry Will Vanish Horizon’ (2014) is a journey inside the human body, based on a three-dimensional animation. Rist delights in patterns created by manipulating creases of skin, caressing, pushing and pulling to depict the varied textures of human flesh. These corporeal images periodically overlap with close-up fragments from nature as Rist blurs the boundaries between the self and organic structures. She explores the relationship between internal and external, how individuals are linked to the tissues and blood vessels of other organisms, and in so doing, she suggests relationships with the universe at large.

During the party offered for Halloween at the Nobel Laureate, Murray Gell-Mann in Santa Fe, Michele and Pipilotti enter a back room...

With I'm a Victim of this Song, Rist takes up the concept of the "cover" version, in which one performer does a version of another's song, and gives it her own twist. Starting with music from Chris Isaak's hit single Wicked Game, she adds her own sung and screamed versions of the lyrics, accompanied by effects-manipulated, diaristic video images. The result is an art-world "cover" of a popular artifact, with a woman's voice reinterpreting the male original, and a vivid illustration of the consumer's claim to own and interpret media images.

‘It’s springtime’, a little bird stealing the filaments of my window screen reminded me this morning. ‘The sun in shining, the sky is blue, the trees are blossoming pink flowers and there is a wide world to be explored…what are you doing indoors?’ This 2002 video by artist Pipilotti Rist seems to be proposing a similar criticism in her reframing of concepts of time, season and the human lifespan.

Pepperminta is an anarchist of the imagination. She lives in a futuristic rainbow villa and according to her own rules. Colors are the young woman's best friends and strawberries are her pets. She knows the most amazing remedies to free people of their fears. Pepperminta's wish is for everyone to see the world in her favorite colors. Werwen, a young plump and shy man yet whose sex appeal Pepperminta finds highly attractive, and the beautiful Edna, who talks to tulips, join her on her passionate mission. These three musketeers of a different kind set out to fight for a more humane world. Wherever the gang appears, everything is turned upside down and people's lives are transformed in the most miraculous and wondrous of ways.

This video work was made while Rist was still an art student at the School of Design in Basel, Switzerland. It was produced in an unlimited edition and is intended to be shown on a domestic-style monitor, although it may also be displayed as a projection with special permission from the artist. The video depicts the artist, an attractive young woman dancing manically around the room while repeatedly singing ‘I’m not the girl who misses much’. The phrase is an adaptation of the first line of the Beatles song ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun'. Referring to her childhood Rist has said, ‘In my village in Switzerland I had a small window on the art world through the mass media; through John Lennon/Yoko Ono I moved from pop music to contemporary art. In return, I will always be grateful to popular culture’ (quoted in ‘I rist, you rist, she rists, he rists, we rist, you rist, they rist, tourist: Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Pipilotti Rist’, Pipilotti Rist, p.16).

Each pixel is separated like an exploded screen, set in a chaotic way into the space. The video has a whole movement in the room, as one three dimensional image. The experience resembles the brain, working with electromagnetic waves and low voltage information

A documentary about controversial Iranian singer Mohsen Namjoo.

Directed by Saman Salur

The film tells the story of a woman who loves her husband very much, but after a while she learns of her husband's strange behavior, and so on.

Hamid and Homa are incapable of having a baby. Rezvan accepts to carry their child in her uterus through artificial impregnation until the child is born. When Homa dies and Hamid loses his memory in a car accident, things get complicated.

What if you lived by the sea, and one day you stopped hearing the sound of the waves? What would you do then? That's the question posed by Saman Salur in 'Thirteen 59', an introspective study of the psychological side of war. A chief commander in the Iranian army wakes up from a coma years after the war in which he fought has ended. Unable to define himself by the conflict anymore, he struggles to move on from what he has always known and find the peace within himself. Habit is the hardest addiction to kick.

The film is set around three protagonists. Two run a gas station on the outskirts of town, on a road that gets next to no traffic anymore, and so they get next to no customers. They live and work out of a decrepit van on site, its windows covered in plastic. Sadry is a former strongman, now blind in one eye. He is the boss of the station. Yadi is his eager to please assistant, who usually annoys more than pleases. Finally there is the postman, Abbas, who longs to trade in his break-less bicycle for a motorcycle, while he must care for his mentally ill brother.

In a harsh and mountainous landscape, at an abandoned station called Tang Haft, Hassan is responsible for transportation of people with a suspended cabin-like device called Gargar over a roaring and wide river. This is an opportunity for Hassan to know people and be witness to their life stories, loves, happy times and sad times. Unexpected events reveal new truths about his only friend, a young peddler known as Angelic Asghar.

In the mega-city São Paulo, with its eighteen million inhabitants, survival is a question of skilfully exploiting the rules - for all layers of the population. This committed documentary illustrates a lifestyle that seems far away and in the future but is an everyday reality.

When middle-aged suburban couple, Laura and Bruno are gifted a remote couples’ retreat for their anniversary, they decide to give their failing marriage one last shot before calling it quits. Arriving in an idyllic sanctuary nestled in the mountains, Laura and Bruno uncomfortably enter a world of laughter workshops, tantric dance, sexual liberation and emotional animals, helmed by the charismatic guru Bjorg Rassmussen. When new temptations start to take hold, the couple are pushed to the brink forcing them to look within to find what they really want. But will they bare all to get it?

When a mysterious stranger arrives in their isolated coastal town, 10-year-old twins, Kimi and Melody are forced apart. Kimi must find the strength to let go of what he loves the most.

A young woman surprises her brother and friends when she suddenly turns up in her small home town with a secret.