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GOODBYE, HOW ARE YOU?Boris Mitic.Serbia/60´/2009/

A satirical documentary fairy tale about a hero of our time who would die for what he believes in, but doesn’t believe in anything anymore... A new documentary style featuring a "satirical-vérité" narration and over 400 unique "satirical documentary shots" filmed on a three-year, 50.000 km trip along Balkan side roads.

SEVERING THE SOUL Bárbara Klutinis  18’ / USA / 2008
She could do complicated math problems effortlessly at the age of nine. And yet Rosemary, the oldest daughter of the highly gifted Kennedy family, was considered mildly mentally retarded. When she started having tantrums in puberty, her father, Joseph Kennedy, demanded a lobotomy. He wanted to save the family's reputation by taming his maladjusted daughter. Only when she became incoherent, did the surgery stop. Found footage interweaves an account of Rosemary Kennedy’s lobotomy procedure in 1941 with an overview of the psychosurgery movement of the 1930’s-1960’s in the U.S.

REMITENTE: UNA CARTA VISUAL (Postage: a visual letter)Tiziana Panizza20’/ Chile / 2008 / Super 8mm

When I was little and had to ask for a wish, I always asked for the same thing: To meet the other half of my family that lived in Italy. Imitating my Italian Nonna, I wrote dozens of letters to those people that I didn’t know. I would tell my cousins about my day-to-day life in the city where I was born in South America. This documentary is a letter sent from Chile to Italy; one last attempt to recover an old family custom. 

THE SOLITARY LIFE OF CRANES Eva Weber     27’ / UK / 2008

Part city symphony part visual poem, ‘The Solitary Life of Cranes’ explores the invisible life of a city, its patterns and hidden secrets, seen through the eyes of crane drivers working high above its streets. Within the loose structure of a day, starting with the drivers climbing up at dawn and ending with them coming down after a nightshift, the film observes the city as it awakens with a bustle of activity, through the lull of midday and the manic rush in the evening, until it calms down again deep into the night. Throughout the film, the drivers share their thoughts and reflections on London and life in general.What emerges is a lyrical mediation about how our existence is shaped through the environment we inhabit, both for the drivers high up in the sky and the people on the ground they are watching.

CIEN METROS MÁS ALLÁ (One hundred meters away)Juan Luis de No66’ / Spain / 2008 / HD     

The price to live on the other side. The surroundings of Melilla, a little part of Europe within the African continent which forms the terrestrial border between Europa and Africa. There thousands of people survive through smuggling and hoping for an opportunity to improve their existence. In the meantime the globalization proceeds inexorably without taking into account the personal lives. Melilla is the border between Europe and Africa, but this consideration goes beyond the geographical level and is also reflected in the lives of some people who try to survive smuggling. Inhabitants as Mustafa, who just got married for convenience, Hassan, a veteran of the business that has seen many changes; Said, a young man who is dedicated to passing packages through the border, or Fatima, a divorced woman who works at the frontier. Everyone knows that the global economy does not affect their everyday.

EN ENERO, QUIZÁS (In January, perhaps)Diogo Costa Amarante50’ / Portugal / 2009 / DVcam    

After Romania joined the European Union in 2007, the Spanish government established a moratorium as a measure to curb the immigration of the Romanian people. Thousands of Romanians that came to Spain to find a job, got a foreign identification number card saying: “Not allowed to work as employees till January 2009”. “In January, perhaps” depicts the daily routine of Dan, a homeless Romanian man that struggles to survive in the streets of Barcelona and believes in the January 2009, the moment that the two years transitional period finishes, he will be able to find a job and rearrange his life.

DER PFAD DES KRIEGERS (The Way of a Warrior) Andreas Pichler53’ / Germany / 2008               
                   
Michael N. is a wild child. On his sledge he races down the snowy slopes of the forest, almost unable to brake. He leaves his home in South Tyrol in the early 80s, determined to become a Catholic priest. Eventually he turns his back on Europe and, as a novice, joins the Jesuits in South America, where the Catholic priests have sided with the powerless and the humiliated. Eight years later, as the head of a Bolivian guerilla troop, he commits terrorist attacks and kidnaps Bolivia's Coca-Cola boss. Several days later he dies in a hail of police bullets, taking with him the kidnappee and almost every commando member. This is a documentary about the mortality of ideologies and the immortality of the dead. A film about Michael N. and those who mourn him.

ASÄMARA    Jon Garaño y Raúl López9’ / Spain / 2008      

Asämara: “sent to work”, “sent to earn a living”. This is the reality millions of children must face in Africa nowadays, in spite of their extreme youth. Either in the city or in rural areas, their fight is the same: surviving.

PACHAMAMA Eryk Rocha105’ / Brazil / 2008 / HDCam
        
Pachamama – word that means “mother-Earth”, to Native Americans, and refers to the bucolic goddess of the rural workers – tells the story of a filmmaker’s journey – its director himself – through the Brazilian rain forest on his way to Peru and Bolivia, where he meets the reality of people historically cut-off from the political process of their own country and that, for the first time, try to have a say in the outcome of their own fate.

MEDITATION ON CARNAVAL (Meditation on Carnaval)Ana Costa Ribeiro15’ / Brazil / 2008
        
A meditation on street Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro as seen by a woman who is coming back to Brazil.

A LA SIERRA DE ARMENIA (To Armenia´s mountains) Juan Rodrigáñez12’ / Spain / 2008
        
Josif Jurg lives in the quarter of Tetuán in the city of Madrid. Josif likes to go down on the street to sing. One morning while josif is singing, a hen escapes from a nearby farm.

A FILM FROM MY PARISH-6 FARMS Tony Donoghue 7' 10" / Ireland / 2008
        
The six farmers in this film are the filmmaker´s neighbours in County Tipperary, Ireland. Through all the years of plenty they stuck to more traditional ways of living and of farming.They repaired and repainted old furniture, recycled kitchen utensils and old sacks and used natural farm resources wisely and carefully. In many ways their hand made brightly painted furniture and their moody free range animals represent the difference between a more traditional type of farming and a new industrialised version. Luckily traditional farmers like this are still to be found all over the world to teach us again how to live in a sustainable way.

CRUDE Joe Berlinger104’ / USA / 2009

Three years in the making, this cinéma-vérité feature from filmmaker Joe Berlinger is the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial environmental lawsuits on the planet. The inside story of the infamous “Amazon Chernobyl” case, Crude is a real-life high stakes legal drama, set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking, exploring a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.

NOTES ON THE OTHERSergio Oksman13’ / Spain / 2009
        
Each summer, a crowd of Ernest Hemingway doubles meet in Florida to choose the authentic Hemingway after Hemingway´s death. However, one day back in 1924, the real Ernest Hemingway also wanted to be someone else. This film is the story of this hypothesis.

MA’RIBRainer Komers30’ / Germany / 2008
        
Ma'rib is a poetic documentary starring archaeologists, camel breeders, craftsmen, farmers, quarrymen, shepherds, students, teachers, tribesmen, waiters and a thousands of years old Yemeni oasis at the edge of the Rhub al-Khali desert.











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