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.
A woman was almost called Avioneta [small airplane] at birth. Another had a library in the back seat of her car. Yet another fractures her finger with the rebel shelves of her bookshop. Lectors read to cigar makers while they work. Women remember poems while they iron. And to them all I sing. Standing against fire, water, moths, dust, ignorance and fanaticism, an anonymous female army looks after books. An intimate resistance, lacking epic events, revolution or weapons.
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.
Immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, guided by naturalist and environmentalist Zoe Lucas who has lived over 40 years on this remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. Shot on 16 mm and created using a scope of innovative eco-friendly filmmaking techniques, this essay is a playful and reverent collaboration with the natural world. Zoe leads us among wild horses, seals and bugs, through peaks, valleys, roots, sands, weathers, seasons and stars.
How does it feel to play? What does it mean to listen? As some of this existential questions are asked to musicians, long pauses occur. Because is it even possible to put the emotions of music into words? The documentary is a cinematic improvisation piece. It’s about being present in the now, about playing and improvising, about carrying on the legacy of generations of jazz pioneers and creating something, unlike anything you’ve ever heard before.
With an ad in a newspaper, Ruth Beckermann announces a casting call for a film based on a well-known pornographic text. A hundred men confront with excerpts from the novel, “ Josefine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself ”, in an age when sex is more ubiquitous than ever, and yet at same time is met with a highly charged moral environment.
Hayat, an expert sailor in the Arctic, navigates far from humans and her family’s past in France. But when her little sister Leila gives birth to a baby girl Inaya, their worlds are turned upside down; we witness their journey, guided by the polar star, to overcome the family’s fate.
“We should start with a correspondence, maybe we will not correspond to one another. Ebrahim can send me a letter this Friday, and I’ll answer him next Friday. So, see you Friday, Robinson! " And so, Jean-Luc Godard stages himself in his daily thought, wisely desperate, and sends images and words from Switzerland to the other side of the Channel. In his mansion in Sussex, Ebrahim Golestan tries to decode these UFO-messages and skilfully seeks to bring them back to the appearance of reason. And so on, until the day a veil falls over the two Gods on the run. Does the existence of poets still have any meaning in these times of distress?
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.
