Jean’s solitary existence strangling women along the path of the Tour de France is upended when the troubled Claire finds herself hopelessly drawn to him. Grandrieux operates the camera himself shooting in low-light environments, offering an alien vision of the French countryside stuck in a state of perpetual dusk. SOMBRE announced Grandrieux as a singular voice in the New French Extremity movement, with its fearless gaze into the intersection of desire and death.
Year: 2026
Darvish Khan, a deaf-mute shepherd living in the desert, has a mystical vision in a dream in which he encounters a saint. When he awakens, he finds himself clutching a large stone. Grateful for the vision, he aims to pay homage and begins to construct an unusual monument in its honor. After his wife tells a neighbor that it is miraculous place, news of his ‘garden of stones’ spreads and people from neighboring villages come to see it. The result wreaks havoc upon Darvish Khan’s life.
The story of a 15 year’s old Moroccan who is the only heavy metal fan in his town Essaouira. He spends his weekends playing traditional ballads in a wedding band with his two cousins but dreams of playing thrash metal and headlining Monsters of Rock.
An allegorical short film about the price of freedom. A vast, leafy tree stands in the centre of the field. One ambitious apple on a branch does everything to ripen as soon as possible and break away from the branch that ‘holds it back’, while these restless efforts are viewed with profound contempt by the withered apples around it. The young fruit’s efforts are finally rewarded and while the brief moment of freefall induces euphoria, it ends up crushed by the laws of physics.
KASTÉLYOK LAKÓI shows the clash between old structures and Hungary’s socialist present. “In 1966, I made the documentary KASTÉLYOK LAKÓI about five castles in Gödöllő that used to be the Habsburgs’ royal residence. When I filmed there, parts of the building had been repurposed, converted into an old people’s home and a Russian barrack. Everything was in a very run-down state. Dilapidated palaces in which old, confused people lived who still had their own opinions about the world and fateful stories to tell. And behind them, one can still see the baroque facades and snow-white fireplaces in the film.” – Judit Elek.
An intellectual is exiled to a small, isolated mountain village in southeastern Turkey to work as a schoolteacher. The inhabitants have to fight a perpetual battle against hostile nature, and the teacher tries to combat the inhuman reality of this place where misery, indifference and the impossibility of communication reign. In this village, tragedy is trivialized by repetition and habit. But the children who remain have a marvelous will to survive…
Betrayal is set in Bergen in the year 1948. The film’s protagonist is the seven-year-old Kamilla, who grows up in a society under reconstruction, and in a family in disintegration. Her parents are mostly concerned about money and about themselves, but in her friend Svein Kamilla finds the love and solidarity that she is missing.
The film follows Herdis, an eight-year-old girl, during a rainy day in Bergen. Set against the backdrop of social hardship and class divisions in the early 20th century, the story portrays Herdis’s fragile inner world as she navigates her family’s disintegration and her loneliness and hope for connection. Her parents quarrel, prompting her to wander out into the rain, searching for playmates, but she instead encounters humiliation from older children and remains socially isolated. Based on the short story collection Trylleglasset by Torborg Nedreaas.