Emilienne and the Passage of Time (2023)

Bauxita

Brazil is one of the most dangerous countries for environmentalists. The rural community of Belisário holds the country's second largest bauxite reserve, right below one of the most bio-diverse areas in the world: the Atlantic Forest. The small community was shaken when the beloved Gilberto, a Franciscan Friar, received a death threat followed by the lines: "you've been talking against mining way too much". PT: O Brasil é um dos países mais perigosos do mundo para defensores do meio ambiente. Em Minas Gerais, a comunidade rural de Belisário abriga a segunda maior reserva de bauxita do país, em uma das áreas de maior biodiversidade do mundo: a Mata Atlântica. A tranquilidade do pequeno vilarejo foi abalada quando Frei Gilberto, um franciscano que dedica sua vida à preservação da natureza, recebeu uma ameaça de morte com o seguinte aviso: "você tem falado demais contra a mineração".

The Balloonist

Meet Brian Boland—the beloved, eccentric hot air balloonist and artist from the rural Upper Valley of Vermont.

Solid Ground

The unique journey of three reserved and endearing teens as they test their limits, discover the meaning of strong connections and live and learn in synch with the natural rhythms of the land and its animals.

Montañas en Armonía

Plot unavailable

Pick up the Wind

A short film following Anthony, a young child from the small, rural town of San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba. We see him in different moments of his daily life as he interacts with different forms of environmental, familial, and social influences. While Anthony displays contradictory traits of creativity, destruction, rigidity, and tenderness as he interacts with his external and internal worlds, we see a story built from the the multidimensionality of Anthony's layered personality as a young man.

The Haida in Canada

Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the west coast of Canada, is home to Skil Jaadee and her family. They live in harmony with nature and have made it their mission to save their language and preserve their history.

Farrebique, or the Four Seasons

Farrebique, the first feature-length effort of French documentary filmmaker Georges Rouqier, is widely regarded as his finest film. Rouqier concentrates on a single French farm family, following them through the four seasons. As in the works of Robert Flaherty, the human characters and the land surrounding them are "one", and Rouqier never misses an opportunity to parallel their lives with the eons-old phases of nature. The final symbolic images of Spring, achieved through time-lapse photography, are almost unbearably beautiful. The winner of several festival awards, Farrebique nonetheless did not immediately result in an outpouring of financing for Rouqier's follow-up films (this was a common problem in the financially strapped French film industry of the 1940s). Perhaps as a result, Rouqier did not make his sequel, Biquefarre (filmed in the same region, with some of the same "actors"), until 1983.

Les doléances

Plot unavailable

Women 50 Minutes

A representation of queer and feminist imagery that was mainly shot in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, remote and developing areas in southwest China, and metropolitan cities like Beijing from 2000 to 2004 to document the social changes in contemporary China. The director sympathetically and erotically represents a variety of women, including women as laborers, women as prayers, women in the ground, women in marriage, and women who lie on the funeral pyre with their dead husbands. Her camera juxtaposes the mountains and rivers in old times, the commercialized handicrafts as exposition, the capital exploitation of the elders’ living space, and the erotic freedom of the young people in a changing city.

INTERVENTIONS AND INTERFERENCES

Through a collage of spaces and times, the interventions and interferences of nature and human beings in the south of Brazil reveals themselves... or try to hide.

Bad Axe

A real-time portrait of 2020 unfolds as an Asian-American family in Trump’s rural America fights to keep their restaurant and American dream alive in the face of a pandemic, Neo-Nazis, and generational scars from the Cambodian Killing Fields.

El puente

The efforts of a community to build a bridge which would allow their children to go school during the rainy season.

4 mois sur ma biosphère

After traveling the globe to highlight low-tech, Corentin de Chatelperron has set himself a new challenge: to live independently, alone for four months, on a bamboo raft floating in Phang Nga Bay, Thailand. On his 70 square meter platform, the engineer, passionate about ecology and system D, puts into practice what he has learned in order to feed himself and produce his own energy.

Werner We Love You

When Werner Herzog was still a child, his father was beaten to death before his eyes. His mother was overwhelmed with his upbringing and thereupon shipped him off to one of the toughest youth welfare institutions in Freistatt. This was followed by a career as a bouncer in the city's most notorious music club and an attempt to start a family. Today, the 77-year-old from Bielefeld lives with his dog Lucky in a lonely house in the country. Despite adverse living conditions, he has survived in his own unique and inimitable way.

A ház

Plot unavailable

La détresse au bout du rang

Plot unavailable

A la porra

Plot unavailable

India - Hardwar

Amateur shots of pilgrims and temples at Haridwar, followed by rural scenes and the Gorrie family at home.

Ceifeira

Plot unavailable

Appearances

An atmospheric and dreamy picture poem from Argentina's vast La Pampa region, where ancient stories of spirits are evoked in dark and evocative images between reality and the beyond.

Baix la garrofera

Plot unavailable

Christmas in Connecticut

While recovering in a hospital, war hero Jefferson Jones grows familiar with the "Diary of a Housewife" column written by Elizabeth Lane. Jeff's nurse arranges with Elizabeth's publisher, Alexander Yardley, for Jeff to spend the holiday at Elizabeth's bucolic Connecticut farm with her husband and child. But the column is a sham, so Elizabeth and her editor, Dudley Beecham, in fear of losing their jobs, hasten to set up the single, childless and entirely nondomestic Elizabeth on a country farm.

Ashes

Christian, a young man from the city, travels to a town in Zaragoza, Spain of his recently-deceased father to throw his ashes and give a final farewell. He arrives to find the town abandoned years ago by everyone, leaving their houses to slowly crumble into memory, in search of better opportunities. Yet, one resident remains. An eccentric and wild man who has chosen to live alone in nature, to protect the remains of the village from the pillagers that often drive by in search of valuable artefacts. Their encounter will force Christian to confront his father's identity and perhaps finally understand why his father was the way he was.

Her Blue Sky

High school student Aoi Aioi lives with her elder sister, Akane, after a tragic accident took their parents away 13 years ago. Because Akane has since been taking care of her single-handedly, Aoi wants to move to Tokyo after her graduation to relieve her sister's burden and pursue a musical career, inspired by Akane's ex-boyfriend Shinnosuke "Shinno" Kanamuro. Shinno was part of a band until he left for Tokyo to become a professional guitarist after the sisters' parents passed away, and he was never to be seen again.

Jeepers Creepers

On a desolate country highway, two homeward-bound teens are nearly run off the road by a maniac in a beat-up truck, and later spot him shoving what appears to be a body down a sewer pipe.

David Harum

Rogers plays a small town banker in the 1890s whose chief rival is the deacon (Middleton) with whom he has traded horse flesh. Taylor is a bank teller who places a winning $4,500 bet on a 10-1 harness racing horse, making him Rogers' bank partner.

Hector and the Search for Happiness

Hector is a quirky psychiatrist who has become increasingly tired of his humdrum life. As he tells his girlfriend, Clara, he feels like a fraud: he hasn’t really tasted life, and yet he’s offering advice to patients who are just not getting any happier. So Hector decides to break out of his deluded and routine driven life. Armed with buckets of courage and child-like curiosity, he embarks on a global quest in hopes of uncovering the elusive secret formula for true happiness. And so begins a larger than life adventure with riotously funny results.

Stealing Beauty

Lucy Harmon, an American teenager is arriving in the lush Tuscan countryside to be sculpted by a family friend who lives in a beautiful villa. Lucy visited there four years earlier and exchanged a kiss with an Italian boy with whom she hopes to become reacquainted.

Patagonia

After spending his entire life in a small town with his elderly aunt, 20-year-old Yuri escapes with Agostino, a children's entertainer who lives on the road in a motor home. Yuri is caught in a whirlpool of love and dependence with Agostino.

Hobal

The Saudi family is following strict instructions from their grandfather to remain confined in the desert during the early 1990s. A series of events shakes the family's foundation and they find them in a struggle between life and death.

La Rasante

After the death of his mother, Raúl is forced to look for his father to solve a legal problem with a property, he finds him in a distant town married to a young woman and after 20 years without seeing him they begin a conflictive and longing relationship.

Sinister 2

A young mother and her twin sons move into a rural house that's marked for death.

TRNOVO

Plot unavailable

Little Tornadoes

A poignant drama set in 1970s Australia about a newly-single father’s efforts to weather the turbulence of change – in his life and in the world around him – while a new immigrant endeavours to find her place in a foreign land.

El Espanto

A rural family consisting of Ñancul, a teenager, his mother, and his father are being visited by a priest who wants them to join the congregation. Ñancul’s mother, influenced by her son's odd behavior and the priest’s words, comes to believe that her son is possessed by demons.

Beatus Ille

Plot unavailable

Séraphin: Heart of Stone

The story takes place during the colonization of the Laurentian region in Quebec towards the end of the 19th century (approx. 1885-90), near Sainte-Adèle. An unscrupulous man, Séraphin Poudrier, dominates the small community using his wealth. Mayor of the village, he will marry Donalda Laloge, after her father, unable to repay his debt, gives her to him in marriage. Donalda, a gentle and submissive woman who was promised to the handsome Alexis Labranche, rather, he will live his life according to the wishes of this petty and contemptuous miser, but will never let his situation get him down.

I Want to Live on Mars

Two unlikely friends embark on a journey to escape life in a ghost town devastated by disaster.

The Hole in the Ground

Trying to escape her broken past, Sarah O’Neill is building a new life on the fringes of a backwood rural town with her young son Chris. A terrifying encounter with a mysterious neighbour shatters her fragile security, throwing Sarah into a spiralling nightmare of paranoia and mistrust, as she tries to uncover if the disturbing changes in her little boy are connected to an ominous sinkhole buried deep in the forest that borders their home.

Beaten to Death

A desperate choice leads Jack down a path that leaves him beaten and bruised as he struggles against man, nature and his own insanity. Stranded in the middle of nowhere after barely surviving a horrific assault, Jack encounters one local after another and quickly learns that a sick game of cat and mouse is about to begin. Battling the deranged country psychos and the harsh landscape, Jack must go to extreme lengths to survive.

Broken Hill

A sheep-rancher's son aspires to win a music conservatory scholarship, but to apply he needs musicians who can play his music. Circumstances lead him to form a band out of prison inmates.

SHORTCUT

A field laborer fights to survive in a hostile environment. The appearance of a strange presence and a revolver will change his destiny.

Holler

In a forgotten pocket of Southern Ohio where American manufacturing and opportunity are drying up, a determined young woman finds a ticket out when she is accepted to college. Alongside her older brother, Ruth Avery joins a dangerous scrap metal crew in order to pay her way. Together, they spend one brutal winter working the scrap yards during the day and stealing valuable metal from the once thriving factories by night. With her goal in sight, Ruth finds that the ultimate cost of an education for a girl like her may be more than she bargained for, and she soon finds herself torn between a promising future and the family she would leave behind.

The River Woman

Sofia grew up taking refuge in the river of the village where her grandmother, Salomé, lives. The lightness of summers spent swimming comes to an abrupt end with Salomé's death. Sofia returns to an empty home that is nothing more than a reminder of old routines and mismatched ways of showing love. But, led by the memory of a moment of courage long gone, she is confronted with a final encounter in the night.

Hunting Party

In a dystopian future, a group of murderers facing the death penalty participate in a game show where they must survive being hunted down by famed TV personality and sport hunter Tad Nightingale, in order to gain freedom from the system.