A film in two parts: a first act filmed as an observational documentary in the world’s largest flower market, followed by a fictional second act about a man, afflicted by a terminal illness, encountering a stranger in a train station bar. A radical reflection about time running out and what remains to be done, adapted from a play by Pirandello.
In the 50s and 60s, deep in the American countryside at the foot of the Catskills, a small wooden house with a barn behind it was home to the first clandestine network of cross-dressers. Diane and Kate are now 80 years old. At the time, they were men and part of this secret organization. Today, they relate this forgotten but essential chapter of the early days of trans-identity.
Tooba Gondal is one of the most infamous British jihadists. When she was only 20 years old she left London to join the Islamic State and gained popularity worldwide as “the ISIS matchmaker” after she recruited a dozen of Western women to marry ISIS fighters. Between 2014 and 2017 she actively engaged in propaganda on social networks. After disappearing for two years, Tooba was filmed in 2019 by director and freelance reporter Benedetta Argentieri, in Raqqa, Syria. Is she really the nice, intelligent and submissive girl we see on camera? Or is she a violent extremist? An interesting reflection on the Islamic holy war seen from the point of view of the women who are part of the caliphate, fighters and executioners themselves.
Whaling has been around for centuries. It seems the fruit of man’s violence, destroying himself by destroying nature. Accompanying the rise of capitalism, the practice survives today, reflecting humans’ eternal destructiveness of nature and the creatures unable to resist them.
Football stadiums have long been the designated places for the escalation of conflicts and every incident during a football match makes for a fire-starting headline material. Meanwhile, the armies of six former Yugoslav republics have been getting together every year for over a decade, for a futsal tournament in the name of peace, in almost complete media silence.
