
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")
5.3In this freewheeling dark comedy, a haunted Marine spends one crazy day with his estranged son.
0.0"Quarantines" is a collective film made at the time of the first confinement of 2020. Ten international directors, ten perspectives that intersect in the same period, with their authentic and more atypical universes than each other. A work that unites in isolation and expresses the impalpable. This film is a challenge, a bet: that of creation which persists despite everything within the constraints of the health crisis.
0.0Damien grew up in Geneva, never knowing his father. At thirty-two, he suddenly learns that he is the direct heir of an Englishman living in Taiwan. Damien flies to Taipei where he meets his Taiwanese half-brother Steven. Their inheritance is suspended, on account of two other missing heirs. Damien and Steven set out to find them on the island.
0.0A father pays his son a visit after years of conflict and turns up in the middle of his house move. The son, Vincent, reacts violently to that intrusion. Emotionally weakened, the father involuntarily reveals the true reason of his visit, which revives the tension between them. Within a few minutes, the anger, the memories and the crossed looks move the two men deeply.
6.7A shy student suddenly becomes the center of attention when she wins a huge birthday party that she never asked for.
7.2An average family is thrust into the spotlight after the father commits a seemingly self-defense murder at his diner.
7.1For Jimmy Smith, Jr., life is a daily fight just to keep hope alive. Feeding his dreams in Detroit's vibrant music scene, Jimmy wages an extraordinary personal struggle to find his own voice - and earn a place in a world where rhymes rule, legends are born and every moment… is another chance.
7.6County Durham, England, 1984. The miners' strike has started and the police have started coming up from Bethnal Green, starting a class war with the lower classes suffering. Caught in the middle of the conflict is 11-year old Billy Elliot, who, after leaving his boxing club for the day, stumbles upon a ballet class and finds out that he's naturally talented. He practices with his teacher Mrs. Wilkinson for an upcoming audition in Newcastle-upon Tyne for the royal Ballet school in London.
7.3Expecting the usual tedium that accompanies a summer in the Catskills with her family, 17-year-old Frances 'Baby' Houseman is surprised to find herself stepping into the shoes of a professional hoofer—and unexpectedly falling in love.
7.8After narrowly escaping a bizarre accident, a troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes.
8.0For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.
7.5In 1973, 15-year-old William Miller's unabashed love of music and aspiration to become a rock journalist lands him an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine to interview and tour with the up-and-coming band, Stillwater.
7.2At a village railway station in occupied Czechoslovakia, a bumbling dispatcher’s apprentice longs to liberate himself from his virginity. Oblivious to the war and the resistance that surrounds him, this young man embarks on a journey of sexual awakening and self-discovery, encountering a universe of frustration, eroticism, and adventure within his sleepy backwater depot.
7.0A couple of high school graduates spend one final night cruising the strip with their buddies before they go off to college.
6.9A young South African boy from the Johannesburg ghetto named Tsotsi, meaning Gangster, leaves home as a child to get away from his helpless parents. Now a teenage thug, Tsotsi finds a baby in the back seat of a car he's just stolen. He decides that it is his responsibility to care for the infant and in the process learns that maybe the criminal life isn’t the best way.
6.8It is the 1980s. Jens and his brothers live in a single-family house in Risskov, a suburb of Aarhus, Denmark. Here, the family's patriarch psychologist and self-appointed God, Uffe, rules the roost in his dressing gown and underwear. Changes threaten the peace when Uffe decides to write his memoirs.
7.7A retired farmer and widower in his seventies named Alvin Straight learns one day that his distant brother Lyle has suffered a stroke and may not recover. Alvin is determined to make things right with Lyle while he still can, but his brother lives in Wisconsin, while Alvin is stuck in Iowa with no car and no driver's license. He then has the idea of making the trip on his old lawnmower, thus beginning a picturesque and at times deeply spiritual odyssey.
7.1Renowned oceanographer Steve Zissou has sworn vengeance upon the rare shark that devoured a member of his crew. In addition to his regular team, he is joined on his boat by Ned, a man who believes Zissou to be his father, and Jane, a journalist pregnant by a married man. They travel the sea, all too often running into pirates and, perhaps more traumatically, various figures from Zissou's past, including his estranged wife, Eleanor.
5.7A character study of a family on vacation. The emotional abyss and problems are behind the seemingly nice facade of an intact family as they experience guilt, love, and jealousy.
7.2A pregnant Colombian teenager becomes a drug mule to make some desperately needed money for her family.
