Defenseless(2024)

The Singer and the Dancer(en)

An older woman relives the bitter memories of her past, through her friendship with a younger girl who is experiencing a very insecure relationship with her boyfriend.

The Eyes of the Scissors(es)

Close-up to the man who censored films during the military dictatorship in Argentina, slightly inspired by the infamous Miguel Paulino Tato.

A Shadow of Dara(en)

A leader of a rebellion risks everything to find a powerful commander of an alien world who's been captured by enemies and put into a fabricated reality for the extraction of valuable information.

The Office Picnic(en)

Clyde is a typical junior clerk in a public service office. He watches the budding friendship between two co-workers and he turns it into the permanent office joke. At the same time he plays out his own neurotic relationship with a bored and frustrated secretary. The cruel mass victimisation of the young lovers is carried to the annual office picnic. Office tensions are changed by the unfamiliar surroundings where the disappearance of the two lovers forces Clyde to re-examine his own shallow emotional development.

The Black Beach(fr)

An exhausted militant wants to take a break from the incessant frenzy surrounding him. His country’s dictatorship is on its last legs and chaos reigns. His wife Sylvie leaves their country for France. She writes about the new democracy struggling to be born back home. His daughter Joyce must hide out in the deserted childhood home in the solitude and infinity of the Black Beach. Several adversaries – the militia of a hazy regime in his native land and the Paris police – wage a strange game of chess in which he is the pawn. Threats abound and he’s haunted by his past, his fears, dead friends. He has three allies: his wife, his daughter, and an old girlfriend from his fighting days.

Saved by Grace(en)

A retired police officer, despondent over the loss of his family, contemplates a dramatic decision which will change his life forever, until he meets a mysterious woman who, through her personal stories, gives him a reason to re-examine what is most important to him.

Flat Is Beautiful(en)

Flat Is Beautiful is an experimental live-action cartoon using masks, animation, subtitles, drawings, and dramatic scenes to investigate the psychic life of an androgynous eleven-year-old girl. Growing up in a working class neighborhood with her single mother and gay roommate, Taylor confronts the loneliness of living between masculine and feminine in a culture obsessed with defining gender difference. Shifting between black and white film and grainy pixelvision video, Flat is Beautiful explores the internal and external worlds of sad people.

The Judy Spots(en)

These five short videos introduce Judy, a paper maché puppet who ruminates on her position in society. Like Judy, of the famous Punch and Judy puppet duo, Benning’s Judy seems to experience the world from the outside, letting things happen to her rather than making things happen around her.

Murder on the Orient Express(en)

Genius Belgian detective Hercule Poirot investigates the murder of an American tycoon aboard the Orient Express train.

Quatretondeta(ca)

The wife of senior Tomás (José Sacristán) passed away, but they don't let him bury her, because the family of the deceased wants to repatriate the body to Paris. So Tomás steals the corpse to be able to bury it in Quatretondeta, a little village in the region of Alicante (Spain), as his wife had wanted.

Making Samuel Beckett's 'Rockaby'(en)

The filmmakers accompany Alan Schneider, director of the American premieres of most of Beckett's plays, and producer Daniel Labeille to the home of Billie Whitelaw, whom Schneider, ironically, had never met previously, and takes us through the rehearsal process of Beckett's newest play, including the recording of the dialogue, as almost all of it is voiceover. The final fifteen minutes of the film are the premiere performance in its entirety.

Lañinbwil's Gift(mh)

Laninbwil's Gift is the story of Jacob, an old island man with a complicated secret. When Jacob was a teenager, a noniep, a Marshallese fairy known for helping troubled souls, transformed him from a simpleton into a normal young man. This favor, however, came with a cost: The noniep made Jacob promise that one day he must bestow this new-found intelligence upon another deserving person. After a lifetime of pondering this otherworldly commitment to the noniep, Jacob discovers Laninbwil, a homeless young man. Just when Jacob begins to get close to the troubled youth, Laninbwil unwittingly gets caught up in a war of mystical power between an evil Mejenkwar, a demon that possesses pregnant women, and her archenemy, the gifted, shamanic old woman, Lijimu.

Nelson(fr)

Two teenage boys are looking to lose their virginity and visit a pair of prostitutes. But will the experience be anything like they expect?

Nur nicht weich werden, Susanne!(de)

Feux(fr)

A tiny Alsatian village’s summer bonfire brings all the inhabitants out for the celebration. Léa and Aurélie, two teenage girls with teenage woes, savor this first night of the summer, wandering about the bonfire until the bitter dawn breaks.

Naked in the Snow(el)

A woman is responsible behavior in prison for the murder of a man killed by a shotgun blast. Through a mixture of reminiscences and narrative of the facts, we discover to be Elisa, a professor who, intent on writing a book on Dionysus from his distant and mythical origins to the present, has retreated into an isolated house in the snow, without even telephone line, and then found to give aid and hospitality to a young man was found naked and half-frozen in the surrounding bush. Escaped from prison and wanted by the police, the young man is destined to reawaken the memory of her husband who died in a car accident, so as to push uncontrollably to start with him a passionate love affair. But the sudden arrival of his daughter Elisa from the United States ends up putting dramatically undermine the already tense situation. Written by lament

Marianne(fr)

Joseph has an intensely close and ambiguous relationship with his sister Marianne. At her going-away party the day before she leaves to go abroad, Joseph is caught between his feelings for his sister and the advances by other suitors.

De l'histoire ancienne(fr)

Guy's father was a hero during the French Resistance era but he never talks about it, or so little. When he dies,Guy, his brother and his sister have him incinerated, following a wish their dad had expressed when he was still alive. But Guy soon starts feeling uncomfortable about this move. Haven't they, by cremating the body of their father, make a hero disappear from man's memory? Haven't they used the same method as the Nazis to get rid of the remains of a hated enemy?

Bellyful(en)

Maverick director Melvin Van Peebles translates his own satirical novel to the screen with this multi-national portrait of race, class, and hypocrisy. The film's title refers to the name of a haute cuisine restaurant run by a self-satisfied conservative couple, Henri and Loretta. When the two find themselves overworked in the kitchen, they retreat to the local orphanage to find some cheap waitressing help, and the teenaged Diamantine fits the bill perfectly. The haughty couple has more plans for the girl than just waiting tables, however -- the conspicuously accommodating Henri and Loretta are actually bad-mouthing the girl behind her back to the townspeople and the restaurant's patrons. They go so far as to ask the naive Diamantine to pretend that she's pregnant, and she complies under the assumption that it's a harmless prank. When their intentions are revealed, however, the girl becomes wise to the couple's self-satisfied scheming, and sets her sights on revenge.

Strong Arms(it)

This tense thriller begins in the office of Claudia, a psychoanalyst whose sister was killed in a terrorist attack. Her newest client is Tancredi. He says that he is a journalist and that he suffers from having witnessed numerous atrocities in Bosnia. The events he describes sound just like those of Brescia, and Claudia, who still grieves for her sister, begins to wonder if Tancredi is telling the truth. Her investigation proves that he is lying, but it leads her to wonder why he has chosen her as his psychoanalyst. After talking to her husband, Claudia visits her old mentor who suggests she continue working with Tancredi but warns her not to call in the police. After that the story frequently jumps to 1998. By then Claudia and her newborn baby have become part of the witness protection program and she is preparing to testify against those involved in covering up government-sponsored terrorist activity.