Florence November 27th - December 4th 2015

International documentary film festival

  • A FESTA E OS CÃES
    The Party and the Barking

    Brazil 2015 25'
    Directed by: Leonardo Mouramateus

    Leonardo Mouramateus looks at some pictures taken with an analogue photo camera. Each one of them brings back a memory, a conversation and a story related to it. However, A Festa e os Cães does much more than merely describe the memories of the typical parties, hangovers, and friendships of adolescence, wandering about the streets of Fortaleza in the company of stray dogs. It also brings us back to the doubts, hopes, and lightness of those years.

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    2015 Wednesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 7:00 pm
    Thursday, December 3rd, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • BABOR CASANOVA

    Switzerland 2015 35'
    Directed by: Karim Sayad
    Adlan and Terroriste are two street urchins in Algiers. Their life is made of expedients to earn some dinars, their common passion is the Mouloudia football team, and their only perspective is to sail towards France or Italy. Filmmaker Karim Sayad follows these boys as brother who doesn’t judge, giving us a delicate and merciless film at the same tame.

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    2015 Wednesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 7:00 pm
    Thursday, December 3rd, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • ČAKÁREŇ
    Waiting Room

    Slovakia 2015 73'
    Directed by: Palo Korec
    By way of a series of ingenious and unpredictable ‘variations on the theme,’ the film demolishes the cliché according to which waiting is an empty moment, deeply boring and basically useless. On the contrary, the sharp gaze of cinema unravels how waiting condenses in itself intense emotions, subtle transformations of one’s state of mind, and silences filled with meaning.

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    2015 Tuesday, December 1st, Odeon, 6:30 pm
    Wednesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • CONTRE – POUVOIRS
    Checks and Balances


    Algeria, France 2015 97'
    Directed by: Malek Bensmaïl
    Malek Bensmaïl goes in the premises of the “El Watan” Algerian independent newspaper, unveiling its decision making processes in a key moment in the his- tory of the country: while the “Algerian spring” stimulates the population’s need for democracy, the polling campaign is dominated by President Bouteflika, run- ning for his fourth mandate in a row...

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    2015 Sunday, November 29th, Odeon, 7:00 pm
    Monday, November 30th, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • DES HOMMES DEBOUT
    Standing Men

    France, Lebanon 2015 55'
    Directed by: Maya Abdul-Malak

    A microcosm becomes a universe. In a little Internet café, a meeting place of im- migrants, located in Belleville, the Parisian district, the camera watches the trac- es of a man’s life. Moustafa has been away from his native country for many years. The words and gestures of his daily life disclose the complexity of a displaced existence with great sensitivity.

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    2015 Monday, November 30th, Odeon, 5:00 pm
    Wednesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • L’INFINITA FABBRICA DEL DUOMO
    The Never-Ending Factory of the Duomo

    Italy 2015 74'
    Directed by: Massimo D’Anolfi, Martina Parenti
    A sophisticate film, based on a philosophical premise, splendidly photographed and edited, and with a beautiful sound track. It tells what the title announces, i.e. the endless construction of the Milan Cathedral. Act I of the tetralogy Spira Mirabilis, that deals with the notion of immortality through the elements found in nature, L’Infinita fabbrica del Duomo represents the earth element.

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    2015 Saturday, November 28th, Odeon, 7:30 pm
    Monday, November 30th, odeon, 10:00 am

  • LA FAMILIA CHECHENA
    The Chechen Family


    Argentina 2015 60'
    Directed by: Martín Solá

    This film is a sensory experience where image and sound meet. Its inner rhythm produces a resonance in those who watch it. La familia chechena encourages the audience to enter in the innermost peculiarity of a mystical experience, such as the one performed by Sufi Muslims in Chechnya. The dances, the religious- mystical rituals become a form of cinema, pure immersion in a spiritual gaze onto the world.

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    2015 Wednesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 4:00 pm
    Thursday, December 3rd, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • LAS LETRAS
    The Letters


    Mexico 2015 72'
    Directed by: Pablo Chavarría Gutiérrez

    June 2000, Simojovel municipality, in the North of Chiapas. A few policemen are killed in an ambush. Alberto Patishtan, a native from the tzotzil ethnic group, is charged with the murders and condemned to 60 years in jail. Departing from the re-evocation and re-enactment of events that upset the entire community, this film resorts to expres- sionistic, experimental, and evocative devices to immerse in the crime scene and the colours, atmospheres, and ghosts of a faraway rural community of Chiapas.

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    2015 Tuesday, December 1st, Odeon, 4:30 pm
    Wednesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • MALLORY

    Czech Republic 2015 101'
    Directed by: Helena Třeštíková
    It was on 2002, Mallory, a young mother with a heroin-addict background, decided to change her life. However, that life she will desperately strive for will continu- ously put her to test. In her Kafkian existence – filmed for 13 years by H. Trestikova – Mallory will be forced to live in a car, to cope with the failures of the social welfare system, wrong men and the hard quest to find a normal life for a son who, growing up, will never lose his mother as a point of reference and a model of strength and courage.

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    2015 Sunday, November 29th, Odeon, 5:00 pm
    Monday, November 30th, odeon, 3:00 pm

  • O FUTEBOL
    On Football

    Spain 2015 68'
    Directed by: Sergio Oksman
    Football as passion and obsession but also as a wire sewing a relationship. The games of the football World Cup (Brazil, 2014) mark the days spent together by a father and a son (the director) after years far from each other. On the sofa, in the car, behind the counter of a bar or in a hospital bed, the scores of the matches mark the passing of time. In this renewed vicinity, the son reconciles with the father, forgiving his past and mutating his present.

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    2015 Monday, November 30th, Odeon, 7:00 pm
    Tuesday, December 1st, Odeon, 3:00 pm

  • ONDER ONS
    Among Us

    Netherlands 2015 24'
    Directed by: Guido Hendrikx
    Guido Hendrikx faces a dark and disturbing topic in the contemporary horizon: pedophilia. The story is told by the voices of three cases of “responsible pedo- philes”, who with lucidity express with their words their torments but also their unspeakable emotions. The visual counterpoint of the words is a stream of images that takes the rhythm of the voices. The images take sharper edges or, on the contrary, fade into vague visions of fog according to the prevalence of the rational idea or the emotional.

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    2015 Tuesday, December 1st, Odeon, 4:30 pm
    Thursday, December 3rd, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • OZONERS

    USA 2015 19'
    Directed by: Jean-Jacques Martinod, Kyle Bell
    The last summer of a drive-in that screens motion pictures on film. Ozoners dwells on the melancholy atmosphere of a season drawing to a close. It captures the details, such as the manuality, the noise of film slippage, the obsolete ma- chineries still in use. With a nostalgic look, Ozoners outlines the portrait of an ‘America’ that is no more.

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    2015 Monday, November 30th, Odeon, 5:00 pm
    Tuesday, December 1st, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • PEDRO M, 1981

    Switzerland, Spain 2015 27'
    Directed by: Andreas Fontana
    Childhood memories are, for many people, old amateur films with worn-out col- ours. For the unknown protagonist of this film, the mystery surrounding her father is related to fairly different images: the camera shots inside the Spanish Parliament in 1981, during the military coup attempt. Historical images shot by an unknown cameramen of Spanish National Television: Pedro M, the father she never met.

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    2015 Thursday, December 3rd, Odeon, 5:30 pm
    Friday, December 4th, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • POR LOS CAMINOS DEL SUR
    Down Southern Roads

    Mexico 2015 29'
    Directed by: Jorge Luis Linares Martínez
    When a path among dense woods, rivers to cross and mountains to climb be- comes a chance to expose one’s own feelings, it is a path that it is created while we walk. Mariana and Miguel, father and daughter, don’t know much of each other’s lives and learn - walking Southbound - the hard task of turning rancor into hope and reconnecting a broken relationship.

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    2015 Thursday, December 3rd, Odeon, 5:30 pm
    Friday, December 4th, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • RAZGOVOR
    The Conversation

    Russia 2015 21'
    Directed by: Anastasia Novikova
    Valentin Stepanovich is the one and only inhabitant of a forsaken place. The City is a metallic sound from the radio. In the solitude of such a remote place, Valentin can only keep on dialling the same phone number and wait for the only healing voice, i.e. the voice of his beloved. Until when, suddenly, his own phone rings, breaking the silence.

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    2015 Tuesday, December 1st, Odeon, 6:30 pm
    Wednesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • SOMOS CUBA

    Germany 2015 91'
    Directed by: Annett Ilijew
    Andres goes back to Cuba after spending two months in Germany. His project is filming the life of people in Marianao, a suburb of La Habana. Somos Cuba is a selection of the images filmed by Andres from 2008 to 2014. In a painful micro-world, strangled by poverty, little Leyda grows up and becomes aware of herself. un microcosmo dolente, soffocato dall’indigenza, la piccola Leydis cresce e prende coscienza di sé. The dreams and the remarks of the girl expose the contradictions of an insecure world, a urban nightmare feeding on innocence.

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    2015 Monday, November 30th, Odeon, 9:30 pm
    Tuesday, December 1st, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • SPONDE. NEL SICURO SOLE DEL NORD
    Shores. In the Safe Northern Sun

    Italy, France 2015 60'
    Directed by: Irene Dionisio

    Vincenzo, a gravedigger in Lampedusa, buries the bodies of the migrants who died during shipwrecks, raising the protests of the religious community protesting for the use of crosses to bury non-Catholic people. In Zarzis, Tunisia, postman the postman Mohsen Lidhabi builds a museum with clothes of the dead bodies and the objects that the sea returned to the land. One day, Vincenzo and Mohsen begin to write letters to each other.

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    2015 Thursday, December 3rd, Odeon, 9:00 pm
    Friday, December 4th, odeon, 10:00 am

  • SPOON

    Canada 2015 60'
    Directed by: Michka Saäl
    Besides your daily life and a research for another film, you stumble in the poetry of Spoon Jackson, detained in a Los Angeles prison since 1977, when he committed murder at 19 years of age. You entertain an epistolary and telephonic relationship with him for eight years. Inscribed in the Mojave Desert, Spoon’s poetry is set free from the “shadow fighting with death.”

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    2015 Thursday, December 3rd, Odeon, 7:15 pm
    Friday, December 4th, Odeon, 11:30 am

  • TERRITORY

    United Kingdom 2015 17'
    Directed by: Eleanor Mortimer

    Gibraltar is not ruled by the Queen of England or the Spaniards, but by monkeys. Monkeys became so prevalent in dominating the territory that it was found the need to employ some people to keep them at bay and to push them out of town with the help of some blowpipes. In this film we can observe a day in the life of these apes, which, as in a play of Police and Thieves, try any kind of strategy to fool their “tamers”.

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    2015 Monday, November 30th, Odeon, 7:00 pm
    Tuesday, December 1st, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • UNE PARTIE DE NOUS S’EST ENDORMIE
    Sound Asleep

    France 2015 50'
    Directed by: Marie Moreau

    Djilali, a Moroccan migrated in France who spent nearly eleven years in prison, is a homeless man struggling to find his identity among those used and stolen dur- ing his incredible life and he introduces himself as Alias, giving account of those “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” composing his ego. As Virgil in the Inferno, Djilali will guide Marie Moreau through the labyrinths of the old town of Avignon as in the labyrinths of his existence, telling another face of our era.

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    2015 Wednesday, December 2nd, Odeon, 5:30 pm
    Thursday, December 3rd, Odeon, 10:00 am

  • VITA BREVIS

    Belgium 2015 39'
    Directed by: Thierry Knauff
    Vita Brevis is a poem of the moment, an evocation of the fragile and fleeting dance of life” (T. Knauff). This film, made as a jazz score in which improvising musicians are both human and natural elements, it’s a mesmerizing and surprising hymn to life as a whole and as evanescent beauty. Spread your wings and try to dance, too.

    2015 Saturday, November 28th, Odeon, 3:00 pm
    Tuesday, December 1st, Odeon, 10:00 am

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