L'Étincelle

A Ravaging Wind Gripped by the blind faith of her father, Reverend Pearson, Leni accompanies him on his evangelical mission. A banal accident forces them to stop at El Gringo's garage. When the Reverend becomes obssessed with saving the soul of Chango, the mechanic's son, Leni realises the time has come to take her fate into her own hands.

El Porvenir de la Mirada

Where the River Begins Yajaira, a young but strong Embera woman, lives with her daughter Maria in a violent Bogotá neighborhood. Haunted by dreams of the jungle, she longs to return to the village she once called home. After a tragedy strikes, they have no choice but to leave. Jhon, a charismatic young gang member, joins them on their dangerous journey to the Andágueda River, driven by motives he keeps hidden. Donde Comienza el Río is a poignant, poetic film where a perilous escape becomes a journey of healing. As the jungle reemerges through memory and dream, masks fall and reality is touched by the magic of Yajaira’s inner world.

Thorns and Silk

Cuerpo Celeste Celeste is a carefree 15-year-old coming of age after the fall of Pinochet when her life changes drastically and unexpectedly. Now, the desert and oceanside she once embraced feels alien. In an uncertain nation going through a transition of its own, Celeste is thrust into an adult world where she must grow up faster than she could have ever imagined.

Chin-Gone

This Palestinian Life In THIS PALESTINIAN LIFE, director Philip Rizk uses an oral history approach to highlight the stories and perspectives of Palestinian villagers and Bedouin. This method avoids using "experts" to interpret the broader Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Rather, the film's anthropological and ethnographic method portrays the daily life of Palestinian communities, in order to explore in greater depth how Palestinian life is being undermined by the pressure of Israeli occupation. Especially in Gaza, this style reveals the profound fragmentation of community life. The following stories are threaded together and interlaced to reveal the similarity of Israeli measures of occupation throughout Gaza and the West Bank, and the similarity of Palestinian reactions through sumoud – perseverance – to remain on the land.

Bad Blood The film follows the story of Hadzi Trifun, a prominent Serbian merchant, who tries to keep the peace with the Turkish authorities, but also maintains his reputation and influence in Vranje, an important Turkish town near the border with liberated Serbia. While Trifun is preparing his two sons to succeed him as the leaders of the Serbian people, he is suffering not only from powerful Turkish beys, but also from his family. Trifun makes difficult decisions that will later affect his descendants, the heroes of the novel Impure Blood by Serbian writer Bora Stankovic.

Now / Maintenant In Ghassan Salhab’s recent short filmic poems and political documentaries, he deliberately uses minimal images to make eloquent expressions of the desire for a new reality. As Salhab puts it: “The uprising in Lebanon was seriously starting to run out of steam; the first lockdown abruptly interrupted it, temporarily, we think. Now, as Bernard Noël Wrote, we must raise our fists and fight the memory.”

Your Christmas or Mine? Students Hayley and James are young and in love. After saying goodbye for Christmas at a London train station, they both make the same mad split-second decision to swap trains and surprise each other. Passing each other in the station, they are completely unaware that they have just swapped Christmases.