Florence November 30th – December 7th 2013

International documentary film festival

  • ‘A IUCATA

    Switzerland 2013 40'
    Directed by: Michele Pennetta
    Concetto, aka “the chemist”, wants to win the next clandestine race at all costs. He owns a formidable horse, a champion whom he named after a boss from a TV series: Vito Portanova. The chemistry of the injections mixes with the sweat of exertion and the harsh words pronounced by Concetto’s men. His son, Vittorio, takes care of Vito, and establishes with him a relation made of meek gestures and gazes in a world where there’s no room for doubts and feelings.

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Odeon, 6:00 pm - Tuesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 4:15 pm

  • Alba de un recuerdo
    Dawn of a Memory

    Colombia 2013 15'
    Directed by: Camila Rodríguez Triana
    Alba is a 75 years old woman who lives alone in the present time but lives in the company of his daughter Alai in the time of memory, which never leaves her. Everyday objects, children’s drawings, old toys accompany Alba in a continuous journey between the present and the past that is still alive.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Odeon, 6:00 pm - Thursday, December 5th, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • BUENOS DIAS RESISTENCIA
    Good Morning Resistence

    Spain 2013 20'
    Directed by: Adrián Orr
    David has the difficult task of getting his ‘team’ ready at the crack of dawn – three children who must go to school. The frenzy of peremptory and nervous instructions and the importunate or silent submissiveness of the still sleepy children conceal how precious it is to care for children every day. Every day a battle, an adventure, an unexpected occurrence. Every day the need to resist.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Thursday, December 5th, Odeon, 7:30 pm - Friday, December 6th, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • CHA FANG
    The Questioning

    China 2013 22'
    Directed by: Zhu Rikun
    Shot in exceptional and unique circumstances, the film shows a tense exchange between Power –the police – and Individual – the director himself, who is in a hotel room in the middle of the night. Like in a game of chess layed with inscrutable rules, the players make moves and counter-moves on the crazy chessboard of the strict control procedures which the Chinese police adopts with non-residents. An enclosed and claustrophobic film: an example of cinéma vérité in a Kafkian absurd.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Friday, December 6th, Odeon, 9:00 pm - Saturday, December 7th, Odeon, 12:00 pm

  • Costa da morte
    Coast of Death

    Spain 2013 81'
    Directed by: Lois Patiño
    Costa da morte is a Galician region in Spain and, during the Roman Empire,
    was considered as the place where the world ends. It is a location in which the earth, the sky and the rocks dominate the landscape. Its inhabitants seem immersed in a sort of eternity in which life is directly bound to the place. How to film this environment and its inhabitants? How to film this life? the film works on those question by making, take after take, an animated portrait of time and space, of bodies and territory being able to create animated portraits, full of life and time.

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Odeon, 6:30 pm - Thursday, December 5th, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • Géographie Humaine
    Human Geography

    France 2013 101'
    Directed by: Claire Simon
    Gare du Nord, a huge train station in Paris, full of departing and arriving travellers. The filmmaker and her assistant start talking to these people. One after another, people come out of anonymity and reveal their own identity, through gestures, tales and sensations. A film essay on how to tell stories, and on the thousands of stories which every day and every moment go through the spaces of a big train station.

    watch the trailer


    2013 Sunday, December 1st, Odeon, 6:00 pm - Monday, December 2nd, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • Hamdan

    Argentina/New Caledonia/Palestine 2013 75'
    Directed by: Martín Solá
    Hamdan is a Palestinian militant who was jailed for 15 years. We discover his story through his own words. What was his experience? How can cinema represent it? These are the questions that underlie a film which not only intends to reconstruct a story, but also to investigate feelings, the experience of a radical past and the memories of past experiences that remain in places, voices and faces.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Thursday, December 5th, Odeon, 4:30 pm - Friday, December 6th, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • L’Escale
    Stop-over

    France/Switzerland 2013 100'
    Directed by: Kaveh Bakhtiari
    In a narrow apartment in Athens, Amir and his comrades are waiting for the fake documents that will open the doors to Europe for them. They share games and despair, confrontations and affections: these are not only details of daily life but necessary, unique companions in the exhausting wait for an unknown, possibly cruel future. Greece, land of uncertainty amplifying the sense of precariousness, cannot stop the dreams and expectations of those who are forced to “stop over” there.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Friday, December 6th, Odeon, 9:00 pm - Saturday, December 7th, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • La parka
    The Reaper

    Mexico 2013 29'
    Directed by: Gabriel Serra
    Details of metallic machinery, cages, mechanisms. A cold and swift repetitive movement. Animal bodies, one after another, alternating, they can also be recognized thanks to some details: a back, a tail; the representation of a slaughter house and of a consciousness, the one of a man who has been working there for years. Words and images become a flow of thoughts on life and death, on aspirations, disappointments, traumas and dreams.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Odeon, 4:00 pm - Thursday -December 5th, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • Lettres à la mer
    Sea of Letters

    France/Spain 2013 5'
    Directed by: Renaud Perrin, Julien Telle
    At the end of the Spanish Civil War, two hospital ships stand off Marseille shores hosting hundreds of wounded people coming from the frontline searching for refuge in France. Three hundred letters were sent to those people, but they would never be delivered. They will be later found, decades after, in an archive in Bouches-du-Rhône (France). Drawing inspiration from these precious documents, the two filmmakers shot an original animated documentary using stop-motion and one of the simplest materials: water.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Sunday, December 1st, Odeon, 9:00 pm - Wednesday, December 4th, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • LEWA POŁOWA TWARZY
    Left Side of the Face

    Poland 2013 12'
    Directed by: Marcin Bortkiewicz
    The photographic project that Leszek Krutulski is conducting since 2010 contemplates that he will take a shot of a number of subjects in his itinerant photo studio. During the first session he takes a picture, in the foreground, of only the left side of the subject’s face. In ten years, the photographer will proceed to photograph the right side. While we wait for the camera shooting, we listen to the conversation with the models posing, we listen to their reflections and questions.

    < a href= http://youtu.be/blxEqMYeZO0>watch the trailer

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, 5:30 pm - Wednesday, December 4th, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • LOLI KALI SHUBA

    Ukraine 2013 52'
    Directed by: Aleksandr Balagura
    In Romani language, "loli kali shuba" means a red and black coat, but it’s also the nickname given by the Romani children of Trans-Carpathia to ladybirds, and the refrain of some kind of nursery rhyme. A song, recorded by chance twenty years ago, becomes a mystery to be solved by going back to the same location twenty years later. This film is an act of love towards marginal lives and the poetry of simple things such as the capacity of being surprised by a ladybird flying.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Sunday, December 1st, Odeon, 3:00 pm - Monday, December 2nd, Odeon, 12:00 pm

  • Metamorphosen
    Sebastian Mez

    Germany 2013 84'
    Directed by: Sebastian Mez
    In 1957, in a remote area of the southern Urals region (at that time part of the USSR), a nuclear explosion contaminated a vast area. Today, after decades and other accidents and irresponsible management of facilities and waste, the contaminated area measures 20,000 km2. The film builds up a portrait of the lives of people who, abandoned to themselves, they still live today along the Tetcha river, in the middle of a placid radioactive hell. A cinematic experiment, of great rigor, that uses highly original visual solutions to make the invisible visible.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Tuesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 6:00 pm - Wednesday, December 4th, Odeon, 12:00 pm

  • NIGHT LABOR

    USA 2013 62'
    Directed by: David Redmon, Ashley Sabin
    Sherman lives in a seemingly desert place. His face carries the signs of life. This man performs with an almost ritual calm and precision all the action that make up his hermit life in front of the camera, an indiscreet eye: shellfish harvesting by day and the work in a mysterious fish processing plant by night, in which Sherman moves in absolute solitude. A story-less tale, a visual phantasmagoria without any show, a diary of a marvel-oriented observation.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Friday, December 6th, Odeon, 4:00 pm - Saturday, December 7th, Odeon, 12:00 pm

  • NOTÍCIAS DA RAINHA
    News of the Queen

    Brazil 2013 19'
    Directed by: Ana Johann
    In an original combination of autobiographical documentary and theatrical performance, the news of the queen is spread on the boards of a stage that is reduced to the essential and populated by objects that are just as obsolete as evocative. Deliciously old fashion special effects re-create the “ambient sounds” which have always represented the magic of radio and which become the soundtrack of this modern fable: the story of Lucia Cecília Kubis, Queen of Brazilian radio.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Thursday, December 5th, Odeon, 9:00 pm - Friday, December 6th, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • ÖDLAND - Damit keiner das so mitbemerkt
    Wasteland - So That No One Becomes Aware of It

    Germany 2013 79'
    Directed by: Anne Kodura
    In the outskirts of a German town, between passing sheep and an old Soviet military base turned into a housing project, where the buses only come three times a day, Aya, Momo and Mustafa, three children of families who have taken refuge in Germany, spend their summer. Between freedom and restrictions, between desires for a better future and the uncertainty of the present, between play with friends and the threat of being repatriated at any time, these children could not do other than live in a suspended time and in an uncertain world.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Odeon, 9:00 pm - Thursday, December 5th, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • Onder Vrouwen
    Among Women

    Nethrlands 2013 51'
    Directed by: Kim Brand
    Everything you always wanted to know about sex and were afraid to ask…a Zambian woman. The filmmaker comes from the Netherlands to documents an ancient initiation ceremony to marriage life dedicated to women only: an all-female backstage where sex is prepared, learned, discussed, and staged. Because love and sex are too important to be left to incompetent, insecure
    individuals.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Sunday, December 1st, Odeon, 4:30 pm - Monday, December 2nd, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • PER ULISSE

    Italy/France 2013 92'
    Directed by: Giovanni Cioni
    How to represent the various and unpredictable experiences of those who attend Progetto Ponterosso, a socialization center of Florence dedicated to several categories of marginalized people? The film is a rhapsodic narration made of leaps, interruptions, pauses, but also of sudden revelations that light up the dullness of days, which seem endless. Life has not been kind to any of the protagonists of Per Ulisse. Their stories, their confessions, their creativity are the precious gifts which this film makes to us all.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Odeon, 9:00 pm - Tuesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • QUAND PASSE LE TRAIN
    Here Comes the Train

    France/Spain 2013 30'
    Directed by: Jérémie Reichenbach
    A group of women throws essential supplies to those migrants who leave Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala clandestinely, crossing the border on freight trains, often on the top of those trains. These women violate the law, because even in Mexico helping illegal immigrants is a crime, but they are glad to help people they don’t know, without any potential personal profit,
    making the most of their sense of solidarity.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Tuesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 5:00 pm - Wednesday, December 4th, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • SICKFUCKPEOPLE

    Austria/Ukraine 2013 72'
    Directed by: Juri Rechinsky
    They hide in the cavities of the city of Odessa as forgotten otters. They look for the holes of the previous time or the empty spaces in which to put the umpteenth needle. They are very young heroin-addicted people, and this film represents and listens to them avoiding easy humanitarian tones. A scream expressing courage and desperation at the same time.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Odeon, 7:00 pm - Tuesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • STO PHARMAKEIO
    At the Pharmacy

    Greece 2013 41'
    Directed by: Myrna Tsapa
    The meticulous daily life in a pharmacy in Athens, from 2010 to 2012, during the crisis that grips the Greek society. Through the dialogues between the owner, the employee and the few customers, we sense the escalation of the drama that takes place outside, with an every day more significant impact on ordinary lives. Without ever leaving the small local pharmacy, the film manages to tell an atmosphere and a condition common in Greece today.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Wednesday, December 4th, Odeon, 5:00 pm - Thursday, December 5th, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • UNE FEUILLE DANS LE VENT
    Leaf in the Wind

    France/Camerun/Gabon 2013 55'
    Directed by: Jean-Marie Teno
    In 2004, J-M. Teno meets Ernestine, daughter of Ernest Ouandie, hero of the struggle for the independence of Cameroon. In a beautiful morning, sitting under a porch, she decides to tell the filmmaker the story of her life. Can the story of an individual become the symbol of a country marked by repression and bloody struggles? The words of Ernestine take us into a world where childhood is denied and where injustice prevails. Her words are simple and straightforward, they touch our heart and leave a lasting impression.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Friday, December 6th, Odeon, 7:00 pm - Saturday, December 7th, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • WIP - Work in Progress

    Italy 2013 50'
    Directed by: Simona Risi
    In Trapani, a group of shipyard workers after the dismissal occupies the tanker "Marettimo" for six months. In Latina, a group of workers, for the same reason, occupies the factory for a year. Two parallel stories about the crisis of the work, depicted in the same phase: the end of the occupation. The filmmaker offers a refined, intelligent and complete exploratory system, which dilates the time of today’s reality chronicle in order to photograph the very deep change in our world.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Thursday, December 5th, Odeon, 6:15 pm - Friday, December 6th, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body

    Serbia/Germany/France 2013 62'
    Directed by: Marta Popivoda
    From the partisans who rebuilt in 1945 to kids who set fire to the parliamentary building in 2000, the film collects emotional curves and syncopated movements of the “collective body” reacting to the sound of patriotic songs and pro-government electronic guitars. The collectivity mourns the death of Tito, rages sparked by talk of Miloševic and finally converts to individuality. The film takes note of the crumbling of communism in and through the body of each individual.

    watch the trailer

    2013 Monday, December 2nd, Odeon, 4:00 pm - Tuesday, December 3rd, Odeon,

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