In Mumbai, Nurse Prabha's routine is troubled when she receives an unexpected gift from her estranged husband. Her younger roommate, Anu, tries in vain to find a spot in the city to be intimate with her boyfriend. A trip to a beach town allows them to find a space for their desires to manifest.
This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.
Jeanne, a shy young woman, works as a night guard at an amusement park and has a close relationship with her mother. While no man can compete with this opposed duo, Jeanne begins to develop strange romantic feelings for Jumbo, the latest attraction at the theme park...
In the splendidly decorated barbaric world of Antwerp, an ordinary lonely Lucien has an inhuman capability to stick metal objects to his body. An introverted Buster Keaton-like man of a few words is a hapless artist, clown, freak, and musician with a wounded heart and a quiet violin. His vocation is to entertain the common people despite his burning pain and guilt for the inevitable loss of an estranged father.
Traveling through the abyss, underworld dog Rainer recounts the six lives of Conann, perpetually put to death by her own future, across eras, myths and ages. From her childhood, a slave of Sanja and her barbarian horde, to her accession to the summits of cruelty at the doors of our world.
Morán works as a clerk in a bank in Buenos Aires. He is as good as invisible to his colleagues. Over dinner with his colleague Román, Morán tells him that he stole exactly $650,000, which is exactly double what he would have made until his retirement. He plans to turn himself in, but not before offering Román to split the money if agrees to hide it for the duration of his incarceration.
Single mother Elaine is disturbed by her son Martin's aggressive behaviour, she visits his late father's estranged family in small-town Luxembourg, which hides a much darker nature. When she realizes that Martin could become like them, Elaine is forced into a desperate fight for her son's future.
After Margaret, a divorcée living in Dublin, loses her teenage son, she develops an unorthodox relationship with Joe, a homeless youth. Their tentative trust is threatened by his involvement with a violent gang and the escalation of her ex-husband's grieving rage.
While creating SHE IS CONANN, Bertrand Mandico also filmed two short films simultaneously to create an entire "Barbarian Cycle" that brings you deeper into the world that Mandico has created. Presented in this program are: Rainer, A Vicious Dog in a Skull Valley (26min); Apocalypse After (35min); and We Barbarians (27min).
Early one summer morning a young man, with a secret stashed away in a duffel bag, emerges from the forest. In a nearby village he asks around for work, but the farmers, suspicious to the point of hostility, are not very forthcoming. Only when Lucy, the mayor’s unruly daughter, takes a liking to him, does the village change its attitude: he is promptly offered a job as a farmhand and a caravan to live in. As time passes and he is gradually integrated into the community, it emerges that he’s not the only one with a past to hide. Something sinister is lurking under the immaculate surface of this picturesque little world - and it is slowly drawing him in.
This project is developing around Japanese art history and literature references (The Fukinuki Yatai, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book) and unfolds as a great sensory fresco with strong emotional potential. A heterogeneous collection of drawn, animated and sound scenes are taken from the digital material; they recreate a sort of subjective world (inner and outer world) in the form of a labyrinth composed of fractal architectures.
A meticulous ambulance driver working in poverty-stricken Bucharest, who takes part in an armed robbery together with three men he barely knows. As the robbery ends in disaster, Bogdan starts a thorough, almost compulsive investigation to dig up the true identities of his accomplices, but the more he discovers, the deeper he sinks into a spiral of fear and paranoia.
Vincent, in his thirties, works on a night shift on the gigantic Grand Ciel construction site, a futuristic district. When a worker disappears, Vincent and his colleagues suspect the team leader of having hidden his body on the site. Soon Vincent witnesses strange manifestations on the construction site and, in turn, another worker disappears.
John D, a septuagenarian living in a luxury hotel on the Côte d'Azur, is intrigued by his roommate who reminds him of the craziest days of the Riviera during the 1960s. At that time, he was a spy in a growing world full of promise. One day, this neighbor mysteriously disappears... and brings John face to face with his demons again: are his adversaries of yesteryear back to sow chaos in his idyllic world?
Strahinja and his wife Ababuo left Ghana with a dream of a better life in Europe. Instead of reaching the western part of the continent, they were deported back to Serbia. Strahinja has started to build himself a career, while Ababuo is unable to fulfil her ambitions and she feels increasingly frustrated. When she disappears one day, Strahinja sets out to find her… A crystal clear, humanistic story about the need to find one’s place in the world. It’s also a tale of love, the most profound testimony of which might also be the most painful.
In this enveloping second part of the Youth trilogy, shot between 2015 and 2019, Wang Bing deepens his vérité portrait of a generation struggling to survive on meager wages amidst a nation’s economic expansion, emphasizing the distrustful, increasingly combative relationship between workers and management.
Orphan, Oskar lives with Elvis and Fanny Egger, his guardians. Oskar is waiting for one thing, the majority, to finally be able to go to Zimbabwe and start a new life. While Oskar strives to raise money to get there, Elvis takes Oskar's success and makes it cost him to graduate. The balance of power is becoming more and more tense, swinging into a violence that will push Oskar to definitively abandon childhood, and Elvis, to fall the mask of his ambition and his madness.
On the set of a film in the making, four actresses take turns guiding us. They unknowingly drag us into their damnation.
Wang Bing concludes his monumental Youth trilogy in expansive fashion, giving ever wider scope to the lives of migrant workers in Zhili’s textile factories as they plan to go to their remote hometowns to visit their families and celebrate the festivities for New Year’s break.
