SKATEPARK (2024)

The Views From Sunset Hill

My debut short film - as I approached adulthood, I created this as a means of reflection towards adolescence and life. A poetic documentary about looking away from the past and being present in the beauty of life.

Israelism

When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the mistreatment of Palestinians, they battle the old guard to create a new movement opposing Israel’s occupation, and recentering Judaism itself.

L'Amour vache

Plot unavailable

Liam

Just after Isidore moves to France to study filmmaking, his best friend dies back in the US. Through documentary, performance, and animation, a ghostly portrait emerges, prompting Isidore to question his relationships with his parents and his boyfriend in Paris.

Flamboyants

The trajectory of flamboyant bodies that expose themselves in their social networks, whether artistic or not, and use these spaces freely.

Going Varsity in Mariachi

In the competitive world of high school mariachi, the musicians from the South Texas borderlands reign supreme. Under the guidance of coach Abel Acuña, the teenage captains of Edinburg North High School’s acclaimed team must turn a shoestring budget and diverse crew of inexperienced musicians into state champions.

The Eternal Night of Twelve Moons

On the Guajira peninsula in northern Columbia the old traditions of the indigenous Wayuu still hold sway. As soon as they begin menstruating, young women have to go and spend a year in a simple hut where only a few women are allowed to visit them. Contact with men is taboo. The grandmother is chiefly responsible for preparing the girl for her role as a woman during this period of seclusion. Pili is 12 years old when, for her grandmother's sake, she decides to follow this custom. But does she really know what she is taking on?

Jawline

Sixteen-year-old Austyn Tester, a rising star in the world of digital celebrities, builds his following on wide-eyed optimism and teen girl adoration as he tries to escape a dead-end life in rural Tennessee.

The Southern Wind

In Canada, the village of Val Gagné is facing a rural exodus. Life seems to be dissolving, the future is uncertain. But these Franco-Ontarian villagers are surprised by a wind of renewal. A wind that will give them hope.

Bedwetter

Men still have a privileged position. Yet the concept of a “crisis of masculinity” is increasingly permeating the media, with a loosening of roles and a growing uncertainty about what it means to be a man today. The director Jan Hušek also asks this question. He was still wetting himself by the age of thirteen, which earned him the unflattering nickname that is the film's title. In his open video diary, he captures the physical and spiritual transformation of his journey from boy to man. He returns to the woods and the roots of his childhood trauma. In doing so, he turns the camera on himself as well as on various teachers or his father. Perhaps the mark of adulthood, after all, is not overwrought masculinity, but the acceptance of his inner “pisspants”.

Jonas and the Backyard Circus

Jonas is 13 years old and his life's dream is to maintain the circus that he created in his backyard. While he faces this challenge, he will live the adventure of growing up.

Young Wrestlers

“Let’s see if you gained any weight. 26,3 kilogram. Ahmet, you need to eat more. Double meals.” Like other boys their age, Baran, Ahmet and their classmates wrestle with the desire for recognition, with homesickness and with their target weights. Most of all though, they wrestle with, and against, one another. They are comrades and competitors, united by one and the same dream: Olympic gold! In their wrestling academy in the Turkish province of Amasya, which is well known for this traditional form of combat sport, they undergo strength and endurance training, they learn lifts and throws, they urge each other on and they console one another. Always responding to the boys’ needs, the trainers give the boys tough love, sometimes fatherly, sometimes strict and disciplinary. The film’s intimate documental camera bears close witness to the fine line between friendship and competition, victory and the lesson of how to lose.

Oasis

As they enter their teenage years, twin brothers Raphaël and Rémi see their fraternal relationship crumble as one of them, suffering from an increasingly marked disability, remains a prisoner of childhood. But for one last summer, as they contemplate nature, time seems to stop momentarily.

Smelling the Dirt and the Coming Rain

An enigmatic coming-of-age story about two best friends who verge off on separate paths in their quest for self discovery, finding themselves involved with spirits, aliens, fortune telling, transcendental meditation, and religious deitism.

Therapy Dogs

A chronicle of the last year of high school as two friends set out to make the ultimate senior video.

DER KERN, DER DICH ZUSAMMENHÄLT

Plot unavailable

Like Water Through Stone

In the Espinhaço Mountains one winter, a group of small-town Brazilian girls are experiencing the end of their youth. Impossible romances leave marks on their bodies and the surrounding landscape. Each of the friends finds her own particular way to overcome the loneliness and to live within a tangle of uncertainty.

The In Between

Following the death of her brother, filmmaker Robie Flores returns to her hometown Eagle Pass on the Texas/Mexico border, wanting to turn back time. She collides with unruly experiences of adolescence – quinceañeras, Rio Grande river excursions, teen makeovers and beyond – that invite her to soak up the details of the home her brother adored and she ignored. What emerges is a playful dance between a personal and collective coming-of-age portrait of kids on the border and Robie herself as she rediscovers the possibilities of joy in the aftermath of grief.

North by Current

Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown following the death of his infant niece and the subsequent arrest of his brother-in-law as the culprit. Using the audio-visual approaches of essay film, first-person cinema vérité, staged actions, and decades of home movies, Madsen navigates a town steeped in opioid addiction, economic depression, and religious fervor, while using the act of filmmaking to rebuild familial bonds and reimagine justice. Posing empathy as a tool for creating a more just world, North By Current does not seek to investigate a crime, but creates a relentless portrait of an enduring pastoral family, poised to reframe and reimagine narratives about incarceration, addiction, trans embodiment, and ruralness.

Tierra de mujeres

The reality of four rural women in the Metropolitan District of Quito. Despite their pain and difficulties, they have managed to forge a life that in maturity unfolds all the beauty of wisdom.

Ballet Boys

Ballet Boys takes you through disappointments, victories, forging of friendship, first loves, doubt, faith, growing apart from each other, finding your own way and own ambitions, all mixed with the beautiful expression of ballet.

Soldier

A young man decides to join the army. He becomes the drummer in the military band, and his everyday life is now a combination of military training and music. What does the Argentine Army do these days, more than thirty years after the dictatorship? What does it mean to be a soldier in a country without wars?

vvvamor

A formally free poetic documentary filmed through a summer depression in northern Portugal.

Nous paysans

In barely a century, French peasants have seen their world profoundly turned upside down. While they once made up the vast majority of the country, today they are only a tiny minority and are faced with an immense challenge: to continue to feed France. From the figure of the simple tenant farmer described by Emile Guillaumin at the beginning of the 20th century to the heavy toll paid by peasants during the Great War, from the beginnings of mechanization in the inter-war period to the ambivalent figure of the peasant under the Occupation, From the unbridled race to industrialization in post-war France to the realization that it is now necessary to rethink the agricultural model and invent the agriculture of tomorrow, the film looks back at the long march of French peasants.

Brothers

A film about the close relationship between two brothers. Markus (10) and Lukas (7) live in an old, yellow townhouse in the middle of Oslo. The river runs close to their home. A paradise in the heart of a big city. Here the brothers grow up with their dreams and longings for the future.

Scheme Birds

As her adolescence gives way to the obligations of motherhood, troubled Gemma matures in Motherwell, her Scottish hometown, heavily dependent on the steel industry. Unfortunately for her, her hedonistic way of understanding the world does not fit in with the philosophy of the rest of the villagers, so trouble soon follows.

We Did It on a Song

This film tells the stormy tale of a group of friends from Boulogne-sur-Mer, a French town hit by the financial crisis. A year between dreams and disillusion, imagined by teenagers from a working or middle class background, with songs that regularly add poetry, laughter, and emotion to reality.

Living with Leopards

A film crew follows two leopard cubs as they make the fascinating journey from infancy into adulthood in this up-close-and-personal nature documentary.

L'Ánimal Plus Étrange Du Monde

Plot unavailable

No Plan B

A young lesbian filmmaker seeks to reclaim herself months after having her first sexual experience, which was with a man. This visual essay explores her relationship to her sexuality, girlhood, womanhood as well as her desires for something more.

My Bestest Friends

A group of final-year media students experience their last 238 days together, expressing how they feel before having to say goodbye.

Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey

Part documentary, part drama, this film presents the life and work of Jack Kerouac, an American writer with Québec roots who became one of the most important spokesmen for his generation. Intercut with archival footage, photographs and interviews, this film takes apart the heroic myth and even returns to the childhood of the author whose life and work contributed greatly to the cultural, sexual and social revolution of the 1960s.

Cowboys: A Documentary Portrait

Told in the cinematic tradition of classic westerns, “COWBOYS - A Documentary Portrait” is a feature-length film that gives viewers the opportunity to ride alongside modern working cowboys on some of America's largest and most remote cattle ranches. The movie documents the lives of the men and women working on these "big outfit" ranches - some of which are over one million acres - and still require full crews of horseback mounted workers to tend large herds of cattle. Narrated through first-hand accounts from the cowboys themselves, the story is steeped in authenticity and explores the rewards and hardships of a celebrated but misunderstood way of life, including the challenges that lie ahead for the cowboys critical to providing the world's supply of beef. “COWBOYS” was filmed on eight of the nation’s largest cattle ranches across ten states in the American West.

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.

Minding the Gap

Three young men bond together to escape volatile families in their Rust Belt hometown. As they face adult responsibilities, unexpected revelations threaten their decade-long friendship.

it feels so scary getting old

"Cause all the music you loved at sixteen, you'll grow out of. And all the times they will change, it'll all come around", Lorde humming in her song, Stoned at the Nail Salon (2021). It gets me, 15 years old Alma, into something that she fears the most. Getting old. With the fear that she can't be as joyful as her teenage years and living the life as she supposed to be. But in this love letter wrapped in video form, I just hope Alma and her little self know that her life is her own personal space, she can do anything, personalize everything, and get creative with all of her ideas. Your life supposed to be fun according to you, and your fears should be wrong because you have all of those control upon how she's going to live her life.