Florence November 28th – December 5th 2014

International documentary film festival

  • ¡BELLO, BELLO, BELLO!
    Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!

    Cuba 2013 24'
    Directed by: Pilar Álvarez
    In the empty rooms of the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, a camera wanders among the paintings. You can hear an increasing murmur of voices. These are voices of the visitors, leaving their echoes on the surface of the paintings. Their imagination and their gaze allow us to view paintings as if it were the first time. The works of art change before a visitor gaze and become the trace of lives of the admirers. One of the voices lingers. It belongs to a visitor who has abandoned himself to a unique journey, conversing with the paintings and projecting his deepest fears onto them.

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    2014 Wednesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 4:30 pm
    Friday, December 5th, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • 15 STRON SWIATA
    15 CORNERS OF THE WORLD

    Poland/Germany 2014 79'
    Directed by: Zuzanna Solakiewicz
    The whole world surrounding us, plants and insects, micro-organisms and big predators, the sky and the ground, the streets of our cities and the performance of some dancers combine in a spectacular choreography going along with the sensitive compositions of Eugeniusz Rudnik, a pioneer of electroacoustic music.

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    watch the interview with the filmmakers

    2014 Tuesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 6:45 pm
    Wednesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • As Cidades e as Trocas
    Trading Cities

    Portugal 2014 139'
    Directed by: Luísa Homem, Pedro Pinho
    In 2008 the damages of the tourism industry to Cabo Verde culminated into a severe geological crisis due to the alarming erosion of beaches. Through the observation and the reconstruction of the daily routes of goods loaded on huge cargo ships, sailing from Lisbon and headed to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, we can notice the physical and social changes of the landscape caused by such exchanges and mass tourism.

    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Tuesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 4:00 pm
    Wednesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • Chen
    Dust

    China 2014 85'
    Directed by: Zhu Rikun
    In an industrial and mining area in China, people are affected by pulmonary diseases that cause death. This film creates a pathway that connects these lives asking to be filmed and recorded to tell their story. By way of images, these condemned existences, who never cease to fight, find and recognize each other. This compelling cinematic journey has to do with the vital force of both film and humanity.

    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Thursday, December 4th, Odeon, 6:30 pm
    Friday, December 5th, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • Death & the Maiden

    Israel/Germany 2014 29'
    Directed by: Yael Lotem
    A few years after WWII, in a basement in the South of France was found the autobiographical work of a German Jewish young woman, Charlotte Salomon, made of words and painted panels. In-between graphic novel, intimate journal, and 19th-century feuilleton, Salomon’s work is quasi animated in the film, which makes it re-echo hypnotically, using the empty rooms that once sheltered her as a sounding board, beyond space and time.

    Watch the interview with the filmmaker



    2014 Thursday, December 4th, Odeon, 4:30 pm
    Friday, December 5th, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • ESCORT

    Netherlands 2013 19'
    Directed by: Guido Hendrikx
    In the Netherlands, it takes three weeks to transform a man into an officer specialized in the forced return of refused asylum-seekers. This film follows the recruits' first simulations and first escort on a scheduled flight. It takes on the outlook of young officers who are learning to do their duty and practise a “humane violence”, leaving doubts and emotions outside their uniforms.

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    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Sunday, November 30th, Odeon, 4:45 pm
    Tuesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 11: 30 pm

  • I COMME IRAN
    I for Iran

    Belgium 2014 50'
    Directed by: Azari Sanaz
    In order to learn modern Persian, one must become familiar with rounded and juicy sounds and learn to follow the dance of alphabet letters, which flow as quickly as musical notes on the blackboard and which only seem to obey Behrouz Majidi, the Farsi language teacher who welcomes the film director in his classroom. The director wants to rediscover the language of her forefathers, being aware that, for those living in exile, language remains the only connection with the lost motherland.

    Watch the trailer

    watch the interview with the filmmaker


    2014 Monday, December 1, Odeon, 7:00 pm
    Tuesday, December 2, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • LA LLAMADA
    The Call

    Brasil 2014 19'
    Directed by: Gustavo Vinagre
    An old Cuban revolutionary and his ethical world; a small kiosk of sundries from where Lázaro observes and comments on the world around him, in the unique scenario of Cuba. Human relationships, choices in life and memories of the revolution mingle with conversations on fruit and goods in the store, until the phone company installs a telephone for the first time and Lázaro has to decide who he wants to call first…

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    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Sunday, November 30th, Odeon, 4:45 pm
    Monday, December 1st, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • LE RÊVE EST FINI
    The Dream is Over

    Spain/Serbia 2014 50'
    Directed by: Maria Ruido, Khairi Jemli
    In a dense interrelation between intimate diary, cinema essay and anthropologic film, this film connects past and present, European policies for the management of migration flows to the history of the last colonialism campaign in Northern Africa, setting its point of view with an urgency that is opposed to any emergency rhetoric. Written words, voices, images are saved from the waters of oblivion, and linked together building a story that is incredibly short and, at the same time, tragically deep.

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    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Thursday, December 4th, Odeon, 4:45 pm
    Friday, December 5th, Odeon, 11:30

  • Léone, Mère et Fils
    Léone, Mother & Son

    France 2014 40'
    Directed by: Lucile Chaufour
    Léone is a woman with an overwhelming vitality. Glowing, smiling, blonde: she is the soul of a small and crowded bistrot in the outskirts of Paris. Her son’s name is Patrick and she is very fond of him. The love between mother and child creates a visceral and permanent bond, however, excessive attentions from the mother could turn into a dead weight preventing the puppy to become independent.

    2014 Monday, December 1st, Odeon, 5:45 pm
    Tuesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • Les tourmentes
    For the Lost

    Belgium/France 2014 77'
    Directed by: Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd
    In a poetic and evocative style, Vandeweerd filmed the place where he has lived for years, the Lozère mountains. This is one the most forsaken sites of France, plagued by terrible snow storms and blizzards. The several local myths and stories of lost men and ancestral presences are likely based on them. The film makes the meaning of a territory, its story and atmosphere, visible.

    2014 Sunday, November 30th, Odeon, 3:00 pm
    Monday, December 1st, Odeon, 11:45 am

  • Maidan

    Ukraine/Netherlands 2014 130'
    Directed by: Sergei Loznitsa
    A square – Maidan, in the center of Kiev –, a regime – the one of pro-Russian President Yanukovich – and a fuse – the decisions of the Ukrainian government to reject, at the end of 2013, the agreements with the EU and to sign at the same time a new formal agreement with Russia: this is how one of the largest popular revolutions of the early 21st century broke out. Sergei Loznitsa not only chronicles the evolution of a revolt into a revolution, but he also includes it in the wider history of modern Western democracy.

    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Wednesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 9:00 pm
    Thursday, December 4th, Odeon, 11:15 am

  • MEMORIA OCULTA
    Hidden Memory

    Mexico 2014 60'
    Directed by: Eva Villaseñor
    A woman totally lost her memory for a period in her life. She is now trying to explore the void of memories and images by way of film. Three people close to her tell her their version. Lost memory and hidden memory becomes a space from where so many new images can be created, as well as visions in progress, until the visionary ending – a play of shadows and of cinema.

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    Watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Wednesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 4:30 pm
    Thursday, December 4th, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • NEBEL
    Fog

    Germany 2014 60'
    Directed by: Nicole Vögele
    Fog is a sort of impossible desire that generates an ‘other’ place. Nicole Vögele and Elsa Kremser made a powerful film bathed in a suspended atmosphere, rich in wonderful images. Within the dense, but intangible conglomeration of air and water wander several solitary existences: an astronomer, a musician, a sea captain. On one hand is nature. Its eyes can see what is invisible. On the other hand is man. In the fog as in dreams, he finds himself alone and helpless.

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    watch the interview with the filmmakers

    2014 Monday, December 1st, Odeon, 4:30 pm
    Tuesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • NO TODO ES VIGILIA
    Not All is Vigil

    Spain/Colombia 2014 98'
    Directed by: Hermes Paralluelo
    Like in a novel on never-ending love, Felisa and Antonio have spent sixty years together, loving each other and taking care of each other. We enter the world of a couple of elderly lovers who, looking back at their past preserve the shared memories of an entire life, memories that the film brings back such as in a daydream, in which reality and fiction merge.

    watch the trailer

    Guarda l'intervista alla produttrice Lianca Aymerich



    2014 Wednesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 6:30 pm
    Thursday, December 4th, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • PHOTOFINISH
    Una stagione alle corse

    Italy 2014 30'
    Directed by: Chiara Campara, Davide Cipolat, Giovanni Dall'Avo Manfroni, Lorenzo Faggi
    Selling and buying the “beautiful beast” by auction. Betting on the “beautiful beast”. Racing as fast as lightning on the “beautiful beast”. Cheering and screaming its evocative name in a photo finish. These are the verbs that govern the racetrack of Milan and the training center of Trenno, and the “beautiful beasts” are purebred horses among the most beautiful in the world.

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    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Sunday, November 30th, Odeon, 4:45 pm
    Tuesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • Propaganda

    Chile 2014 61'
    Directed by: Collective MAFI
    The media throng of the Chilean presidential campaign of 2013 is filmed by a group of authors. The make-up, the songs, the advertisements, the posters, the smoke bombs, the flags make up the kit for the perfect electoral campaign, in which everything is soon unwrapped and wrapped again. Marketing guides body gestures and voices, promoting an approval/a disapproval which almost no longer goes through politics.

    Watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Saturday, November 29th, Odeon, 5:15 pm
    Sunday, November 30th, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • Superjednostka
    Super Unit(s)

    Poland 2014 20'
    Directed by: Teresa Czepiec
    The ‘machines for living in’, as Le Corbusier loved to define them, are huge blocks of concrete in which, in 15 floors, 3,000 people are housed. The most pure practice of forms, which almost does not contemplate errors, must face the stories of its inhabitants, their emotions, expectations, desires… and also the time passing by and the mutation of spaces.

    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Monday, December 1st, Odeon, 5:45 pm
    Tuesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • Toto si surorile lui
    TOTO AND HIS SISTERS

    Romania 2014 93'
    Directed by: Alexander Nanau
    Can you escape your destiny? Toto learns to dance hip hop and to read and write while his mother is in jail. Ana and Andrea, his elder sisters, are looking for some substance different from the one everybody is injecting in their veins in this, their milieu. A different world is possible if you are born on the side of those who can afford choices. Toto and his sisters remind us that another world is at times necessary. Even trying is beautiful.

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    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Sunday, November 30th, Odeon, 6:30 pm
    Monday, December 1st, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • Yaar

    Belgium 2014 19'
    Directed by: Simon Gillard
    The gold-diggers of Burkina Faso in an elegy of colors, sounds and gestures of work. In a wonderful alternation of light and shadows, bodies without roughness move rhythmically and faintly to make time and space a visual as well as sensory experience. Yaar is the center of a mine, a separate universe shining by its own light.

    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Tuesday, December 2, Odeon, 9:00 pm
    Wednesday, December 3rd, Odeon, 12:30 pm

  • Živan Pravi Pank Festival
    ŽIVAN MAKES A PUNK FESTIVAL

    Serbia 2014 61'
    Directed by: Ognjen Glavonic
    Every year, Živan organizes a punk festival in his small rural village in Serbia. With a relentless enthusiasm and without any money he dedicates himself to organize an event that “in one hundred years, will be like Woodstock”. Every year, the outcome is a complete failure. Živan Makes a Punk Festival is a poetical biography - with some pinches of comedy - of a tragical Don Quixote, affected by a very dangerous illness: enthusiasm.

    watch the trailer

    watch the interview with the filmmaker

    2014 Saturday, November 29th, Odeon, 9:15 pm
    Monday, December 1st, Odeon, 3:00 pm

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