These five award-winning coming of age short films offer a glimpse of how boys and young men tackle life's difficult desires: confronting one's demons, understanding sexual relationships, gaining the respect of one's father, or simply running away from it all. This is only the start of their complex formative years, where not every question has an answer, and not every answer makes sense. The short films are: Boys [Pojkarna] (2015); Ioana (2015); Kiem Holijanda (2017); Picnic [Piknik] (2015); Tomer & Elias [Tomer en Elias] (2016).
Tobbe (segment "Boys")
Sven (segment "Tomer and Elias")
Emir (segment "Picnic")
Two brothers, Lou and Miles, have one last chance to reconnect on the drive home after Miles has been released from a long-term psychiatric care facility.
A young man grapples with his unexpected inner turmoil after a strange woman he sees through a window bewitches him.
A boy frolicking about on the beach meets this girl who gives him his first kiss.
After the death of the paranoid emperor Tiberius, Caligula, his heir, seizes power and plunges the empire into a bloody spiral of madness and depravity.
At the age of 14 the world around you changes at a dizzying speed. But what if actually it's you that changing? What if these changes take you away from what up until now, has been your world? Ibrahim and Rafa are going to suffer these changes for themselves, experiencing first love in a way they never could have imagined. And having to keep it Hidden away.
A chance meeting at an auction brings together Sawsan, a working-class girl and Adel, heir to a vast fortune with several estates to his name. This leads to a whirlwind marriage. This development spells trouble for Adel's fair-weather bourgeois clique, who are used to manipulating him with their own financial interests at heart.
A teenager fails to find (and keep) jobs which makes his father doubt the reason might be the boy's lack of sexual experience. As all his efforts prove to be unsuccessful, the father gives up, but not the boy's aunt.
An ex-convict is tracked down by his estranged teenage son, and the pair try to build a relationship and life together in Seattle.
Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.
New York, 1929, a war rages between two rival gangsters, Fat Sam and Dandy Dan. Dan is in possession of a new and deadly weapon, the dreaded "splurge gun". As the custard pies fly, Bugsy Malone, an all-round nice guy, falls for Blousey Brown, a singer at Fat Sam's speakeasy. His designs on her are disrupted by the seductive songstress Tallulah who wants Bugsy for herself.
"Sleep Sweet, My Darling" shows a bittersweet coming of age of Tomica Skrinjar, starting at the tail end of World War II in 1945.
1984, Sandusky, Ohio. A naive 17-year-old navigates heartbreak and self-expression as he explores his sexuality.
At the age of 40, Leila has spent her entire life caring for her parents and four brothers. A family that is constantly arguing and under pressure from various debts in the face of sanctions against Iran. While her brothers are struggling to make ends meet, Leila makes a plan.
The interlocking stories of two Lakota boys growing up on Pine Ridge Reservation. At 23, Bill just wants to make something of himself. Meanwhile, 12-year-old Matho can’t wait to become a man. Bound by their shared search for belonging, each of the boys grapple with identity, family, and loss, as they navigate their unique paths to manhood.
A massive segment of the Sun has broken off and is heading for Earth, whose surface is slowly heating up to an unbearable level. A strange mood pervades a debilitated world: anything could happen, virtually anywhere, without warning. Even in a sleepy town, where an 18-year-old lad gets stranded on his way to the family cottage. The fact is that no-one knows at what temperature the human character starts to melt...
Reality and fantasy begin to blur when a teenager, alone in her attic bedroom, immerses herself in a role-playing horror game online.
An aging jockey is determined to win one last championship, but his dream is complicated when a young rookie shows up claiming to be his son.