1950s. Alice leaves Switzerland, the country where she was born, to move to Lebanon with Joseph, an astrophysicist with whom she is in love. Twenty years later, the life of the young couple is challenged by the outburst of the civil war. The “pathways taking to the sky” are blocked from one moment to the other, but the gripping question remains open: staying or leaving?

‘Skies of Lebanon’ takes inspiration from the true stories that the Lebanese grandmother used to tell the director. It deals with a dramatic page of the country’s history, but it does so by describing a ‘wonderland’, an imaginary and at times fabled world destined to surrender in the face of the war horrors and hence to become more realistic. The use of stop motion and live action alternatively makes the film a coloured and dramatic poem at the same time.

The vicissitudes of the very young Regina are told set against the background of the Calabria region presented from an unusual viewpoint. After having prematurely lost her mother, she grows up with her father Luigi with whom she shares a passion for music.
The mutual support and care and the indissoluble bond between the two are put to the test by a traumatic event, which will end up turning upside down and changing their lives.
It is a dramatic interplay between faults, responsibilities, and acquisition of awareness, and also a clash, comparison, and an encounter between generations.

Helena is a German actress and a victim of the new hostile policies of post-Brexit Great Britain.
Here, as a consequence of those policies, a new social group has formed, called ‘those who stay’, because they have attained a British passport.

And the director of the film is part of this group. It is only sixty-seven (intense) minutes for a first, striking, zero budget film.

Jérémie, played by Maury himself, is an inexperienced actor. Work, love, and family adversities follow and torment him also in Paris, where he has moved for work, and push him to go back home. Here he has to grapple with his father’s recent suicide and the demanding presence of his mother Bernadette (Nathalie Baye) while he is preparing for an important audition. The queer theme and the conflictual mother-son relationship remind of the last films by Xavier Dolan, including the daring and strongly expressive use of photography rich in pastel colours.

Luxor is the city where Hana, a British aid worker, returns looking for rest and tranquillity. Here she meets again Sultan, her ex-boyfriend. Is she really looking for him? What is she actually looking for?

The ancient Egyptian town becomes a catalyst
for and container of old and new
memories. The film is a sort of travel journal intertwining past and present, which leads the protagonist to ask herself questions about future. Durra definitely prefers powerful and suggestive images to dialogue.

Maryam is a 20-year-old Iranian girl who is forced to lie about her relationship not to have to deal with the rigid rules of her family of origin. She has to pay a high price for her freedom, the price of lies and obstacles, which make her path dangerous.

Ebrahimi’s story tells of the difficult generational gap between parents and children and, in particular, of the problematic life of women in a country such as Iran…and not only there.

Times (modern ones) are tough for fishermen in Cornwall since many were forced to sell their boats to rich capitalists. Fisherman Martin does not have a boat anymore, while his brother Steven has transformed his into a cruise boat, which is a source of tension between the two.

What is striking about the film, even before learning about the plot and story, is how it is shot: it is entirely in black and white, filmed with a hand- cranked 16-mm Bolex camera from the Seventies, perfectly in line with Eisenstein’s style.

The theme of the water and the acting pushed to the extreme of comedy hint at the L’Atalante by Vigo with Michel Simon playing the character of the grumpy fisherman.

Elli is an android built by a man, whom she identifies as her father, by reproducing the features of his daughter who had died some time earlier. He shares his memories with her and each day is identical to the other, when one night, Elli starts walking in the woods to chase a distant echo. In her second film as screenwriter and director, Sandra Wollner tells the story of a machine and the ghosts each of us carries inside.

Jin, an illegal immigrant in Paris,
makes his living by driving a night taxi without legal permit. He is a passionate DJ of electronic music and during one of his shifts he meets Naomi, a stripper. While planning together their escape, they start an affair with some danger.
In his debut film, Ferrucci uses a dark approach to present a face of the French capital different from the one shown in postcards by transporting the viewers to a dilapidated environment illuminated by neon lights.
Non-professional actors move in the circles of the local mafia, which has started a modern slavery based on the exploitation of illegal immigrants.

Shadi lives in the same village
village where she lost
both her parents. They were accused of having killed Hasti, their daughter’s play-mate, so they were killed to revenge her death. The little Shadi was then adopted by her uncle but she had to face the marginalization the inhabitants of the village forced her to experience starting from school. Metamorphosis in Slaughterhouse describes the
cruelty of taking justice into one’s own hands and the social and psychological consequences it has on the individual. He does that through the clear, green eyes of someone, though innocent, who pays the highest price.