Daniele, a young man, lives in Sant’Erasmo, one of the islands of the Venice lagoon. He lives by his wits and is maginalised also by his peers, who share an intensely entertaining life centred on the ‘barchino’’s religion, a worship practice aimed at transforming the traditional, small motor boats used in the lagoon into dangerous, missile-like, competition boats by engineering increasingly powerful engines. Daniele also dreams of having a record-hitting ‘barchino’. The degradation spoiling the relationships, environment, and the life of a drifting generation is analysed through the eyes of Venice’s timeless landscape. The point of no return is reached with a foolish, parallel story of a violent male initiation that is bound to fail, but explodes and pulls the ghost city into a psychedelic ruin.

Solvej is a bad-tempered, sixty-one-year-old woman who makes her living by illegally selling her medical prescriptions and driving around on her e-motorbike to deliver them. Kate is a young woman who after having discovered Solvej’s business tries to sneak into her apartment and look for the money that she has made pushing drugs. Precisely after this failed theft, the two women will meet and start a weird friendship.

Japan 1944. The twenty-two-year-old Hiroo Onoda is an intelligence officer and is sent to Lubang, a small island in the Philippines, where Americans are about to land. His mission is to organise and guide the local guerrilla until the Japanese troops are back. However, while the Empire surrenders a little while after, Onoda, hidden in the jungle, will accomplish his mission whatever it takes.

It is a drama full of suspense centred on the life of Irina, a Ukrainian single mother, who lives with her son Igor in a Czeck town, which lays bare central European society. One night Igor is attacked and the whole town shows solidarity and takes the side of Irina and the boy by condemning the Roma neighbours, who are suspected of having committed the crime. However, another truth will soon begin to emerge. The film has been presented at the Horizon section of the Venice Film festival in 2022.

Salvo is a fisherman and lives a solitary life overwhelmed by his nostalgia for the past that he seems to be clinging on. This bubble of melancholy he lives in bursts when a macabre discovery is made: the corpse of a drowned immigrant. His desire to bring the dead body back to his wife, who is unaware of the tragic event, will push Salvo to set off for a long, uncertain journey. Very soon he will meet Lea on his way, his former partner, who will join him in this road-trip. The two ex-lovers will then have to face the ghosts of their tragic past once and for all.

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.