A middle-aged Bulgarian is watching the change of the guard in front of the Buckingham Palace. For no apparent reason, while looking, in his mind he gets back to his childhood in the little Bulgarian village he grew up in. Different rites, different traditions and still he finds something in common. He recalls the people he knew, he feared or admired. He ponders over that life of no brilliance, where people plough, harvest, marry and die, celebrate or grieve. Miracle are also worked, conceived in a unlimited child’s imagination. It is the child’s perception of the world that helps us to give a meaning to the major questions of human existence.
Year: 2021
Created from footage shot in Yuppie-era Boston and San Francisco, Living in the World showcases Joe Gibbons at his prime. The story is told through a series of “confessions” made by the narrator to his camera, as he decides to quit his position at a health-care company and continue his life outside the strictures of a 9-5 gig. “There’s something wrong with the world when you have to work and you don’t want to,” Joe declares. But then he finds that drifting jobless through the land of the employed creates its own peculiar anxieties.
A Swiss sailor jumps ship in Lisbon, tired of the noisy engine room, the ship. He rents a room and does little. He writes letters to his lover, describing the whiteness of the city, the solitude and the silence. He sends his love and emptiness; she replies with love and confusion.
Three Italians have to move from their current city to vote to local elections elsewhere. Pasquale is an Italian emigrant living in Munich (Germany). He has to vote in Matera, Basilicata (south of Italy). He is genuinely happy to come back to Italy, even if it’s just for a few days; but the country he is dreaming is different from the reality he meets. Furio moves from Torino to Roma with all his family. He is so niggler and annoying that Magda, his wife, is thinking to escape. Mimmo is a young good fellow, moving with his grandmother, from Verona to Roma. His trip is disturbed by worries about her health, while she is very calm.
Haji is severely traumatized by the war with Iraq. Back from the front, he’s unable to adapt to civilian life. Despite family opposition, his fiancée stands by him as together they challenge both the authority of family and state to lead their own lives.
Riko, a suicide-obsessed young woman, meets up with K, an angry young man whose dream is to blow out all of existence. Together, they join up with three other would-be terrorists on an errand to deliver a “cake” to an unspecified location somewhere in Tokyo.
Syria in 1977. Ossama Mohammed’s film explores how in an oppressive society individuals are subjected to various stages of submission until they are prepared to accept violence. Images of everyday life in rural areas where education is minimal provide a portrait of young villagers. Theirs is a choice between a life of toil working the land as their parents have done, or that of a migrant labourer in the city. Trapped between religious and political ideologies and completely fascinated by authority, many of these young peasants choose the army.