One morning, Jessica Holland, a Scottish orchid farmer visiting her sister in Bogotá, is woken by a loud ‘bang’. This haunting sound dispels her sleep for days, calling into question her identity and guiding her from recording studios to secluded jungle villages in an attempt to find its source.
Suffering from acute kidney failure, Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave—the birthplace of his first life.
The passionate relationship between two men with unusual consequences. The film is divided in two parts. The first half charts the modest attraction between two men in the sunny, relaxing countryside and the second half charts the confusion and terror of an unknown menace lurking deep within the jungle shadows.
In a hospital, ten soldiers are being treated for a mysterious sleeping sickness. In a story in which dreams can be experienced by others, and in which goddesses can sit casually with mortals, a nurse learns the reason why the patients will never be cured, and forms a telepathic bond with one of them.
A story about director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s parents who were both doctors, and his memories of growing up in a hospital environment.
Min is an illegal Burmese immigrant living in Thailand who has contracted a mysterious painful rash covering his upper body. His girlfriend, Roong, and a middle-aged woman, Orn, take him to see a doctor. Min pretends that he cannot speak because he is not fluent in Thai and speaking would reveal him to be an illegal immigrant.
An empress commissions a painting of herself from a French outsider in hopes of stirring her husband's interest in this lavish period piece. The Lady in the Portrait is a period yarn evoking the unique rapport between a French missionary and the Manchurian Empress whose portrait he's ordered to paint.
In 1948, French singer Charles Aznavour (1924-2018) receives a Paillard Bolex, his first camera. Until 1982, he will shoot hours of footage, his filmed diary. Wherever he goes, he carries his camera with him. He films his life and lives as he films: places, moments, friends, loves, misfortunes.
A companion to the director's Le Dos Rouge/Portrait of the Artist. A famous filmmaker works on his next film, which will focus on monstrosity. He is obsessed by the idea of finding a painting that will be central to the film and will crystallize all the power and beauty of monsters.
Short lo-fi film set in Senegal. Mostly focussing on a group of Senegalese youths, discussing their hopes and fears concerning the crossing of the atlantic to get to Europe. Will life be easier there or not?
“Le Pont du Trieur”, co-written by de Meaux and Philippe Parreno, with an original score by Dave Stewart, is set in Pamir, a region situated in the highest part of Tajikistan, at the border between Afghanistan and China. This is a strategic zone controlled by various armies in the midst of a region that awaits reconstruction. The film stems from the simple question of how to tell the story of a country of which the West is deprived of images. Both fiction and documentary, it is about reality and the means of telling it.
In 1972, Djibril Diop Mambety shoots "Touki Bouki." Mory and Anta are in love. Two young lovers share the same dream: to leave Dakar for Paris. At the fateful moment, Anta embarks. Mory stays alone on quay, unable to tear himself away from his land. Forty years later, "A Thousand Suns" investigates the personal and universal inheritance which represents "Touki Bouki." What has happened since? Magaye Niang, the hero of the movie, has never left Dakar. And today, the old cowboy wonders where Anta is, the love of his youth. Stories about family, exile and cinema meet between the sphere of intimacy and that of myth.
Between Bali, where Ioanis Nuguet lived and found refuge after the sudden death of his father in a diving accident, and Provence, where he grew up and where his mother lived before she, too, died of cancer, the director weaves together fragments of his family history: a mosaic of places and impressions where life and death, beauty and pain, love and loss are intimately intertwined.
«Melvil» is the name of a character who manoeuvres between cinema and reality, searching for a family, a place to take over, a role to play.
A nature-hating aesthete, Jean des Esseintes attempts to furnish and decorate a country home where he will be able to live without ever again having to deal with the outside world.
Atomic Park is a place in the White Sands desert (New Mexico), not far away from Trinity Site, where the first atom bomb exploded in 1945. This national park provides an ambivalent landscape, as well suited for a picnic as for ballistic tests. A white desert, like a natural exhibition hall every movement can provoke diverse interpretations. Like a faint echo we hear Marilyn Monroe's desperate monologue and accusation about man's violence from The Misfits (1961). - Torino Film Festival
