Eleven directors from 11 countries each contribute an 11-minute short reflecting on the events of 11 September 2001: A village teacher in Iran tries to explain to her young students what’s happened; city kids in Burkina Faso think they’ve spotted Osama bin Laden; a deaf Frenchwoman in Manhattan writes a Dear John letter to a man who left that morning for work at the World Trade Center; a Chilean remembers Allende; events recall other deaths; a mother endures more than her son’s death. The tones vary, as do the locales. Most stories are about others coming to terms with the events of the day, but at least one confronts the viewer with tragedy and death.
Category: Arthouse
Actually the comedy of unemployment, which is defined as possibly the worst, or maybe the best, thing that ever happened to this film’s group of protagonists: a middle-aged loan officer, his successful wife, a champion of professional joblessness (and mountain-climbing enthusiast), and the employment agency professional who falls passionately in love with him. This film’s honest work involves potatoes, ditch-diggers, a wheelbarrow, doomed love, jam in bed, and gunfire involving dueling employment agencies.
Iran Is My Land is about a young Iranian writer, Sohrab, who has written a hefty tome about classic poetry. To get the necessary licence to publish, he has to visit the Ministry for Islamic Art and Education in Teheran. Halfway there his car breaks down in the desert. Overcome by hunger, thirst and fatigue, all kinds of poets from former times appear to him. Each of them has different advice about how Sohrab should continue on his way.
Film based on W.F. Hermans’ novella Paranoia (1953), about a young man traumatised by war. Arnold Clever becomes convinced he is a wanted war criminal whose description is all over the newspapers. This delusion leads to his downfall.
A re-interpretation of the myth of Ulysses, the symbol of a man eternally torn between nostalgia for his past and a desire for discovery, between fear and enchantment, which, for Piavoli’s hero, is above all an enchantment with nature. The language of the film, invented using a mixture of Greek and ancient Mediterranean dialects, becomes a symbol of this ancestral wandering.
A mysterious agent arrives on planet Earth. According to his information, this area should have no trace of life, but to his astonishment he detects the presence of humans. He closely observes them from his hiding place, but after a while, the encounter is unavoidable. However, it suddenly hits him that they do not percieve each other the same way… Ildikó Enyedi’s film, with its peculiar atmosphere, was inspired by one of Adolfo Bioy Casares’ science fiction stories, and she used the exciting storyline to explore philosophical questions about moving images, appearances and reality.
Twenty-year-old Laszlo Sz., a driver’s mate, steals the money he was supposed to post and spends the day wandering around Budapest, visiting bars, restaurants, pinball parlors, and various other places in search of something different and meaningful.
In 1970s Yerevan, Armen, a compassionate archivist at the National Archives, spends his days helping ordinary citizens uncover forgotten truths about their past. Haunted by the human consequences of the records he handles, he becomes increasingly troubled by the way history can preserve injustice as easily as it preserves memory. As Armen struggles to reconcile his desire for truth with his concern for the people affected by it, his personal life and growing relationship with a young woman named Anahit intertwine with a profound meditation on memory, identity, and the weight of history.