Jimmy, a 40-year-old former popstar turned engineer, is sent to the region of his childhood to supervise the renovation of an old hotel. Once settled, Jimmy finds out the once flamboyant hotel has become a ruin, a maze of narrow corridors and a relic of a bygone era, which still bears the scars of the American occupation. In the heart of this mysterious place, Jimmy will wander between dream and fantasy and retrace his family's history.
Together, a filmmaker and her characters venture into a personal research project about intimacy. On the fluid border between reality and fiction, Touch Me Not follows the emotional journeys of Laura, Tómas and Christian, offering a deeply empathic insight into their lives. Craving for intimacy yet also deeply afraid of it, they work to overcome old patterns, defense mechanisms and taboos, to cut the cord and finally be free. Touch Me Not looks at how we can find intimacy in the most unexpected ways, at how to love another without losing ourselves.
The film focuses on the suffering of Chinese who were imprisoned in a forced labor camp called Jiabiangou in the Gobi Desert in winter 1960 under Mao Zedong on the grounds that they were "rightist elements". The film tells of the harsh life of these men, who coped with physical exhaustion, extreme cold, starvation and death on a daily basis.
In 1989, Mozambique is a country ruined by civil war. The train that connects Nampula to Malawi is the only hope for people willing to risk their lives to exchange a few bags of salt for sugar. Running slowly over sabotaged tracks, the journey is filled with obstacles and violence. Mariamu, a frequent traveler, shares her trip with her friend Rosa, a nurse who is going to her new hospital, living the reality of war for the first time, Lieutenant Taiar, who only knows the reality of his military life, and another soldier, Salomão, with whom he doesn’t get along. Amongst bullets and laughter, stories of love and war unfold as the train advances towards the next stop.
Summer, 1918. Two young women, Luise and Elsa live alone on a secluded farm in Alsace. As young German deserter Hermann comes along, a new relationship forms between the three, filled with love, competition and hate.
La Patagonia, southern Argentina. After his mother's death, Nahuel, a violent teenager, meets his biological father, Ernesto, a skillful hunting guide; but their reunion is harsh, since their souls are only ruled by pride and resentment.
Near a coastal village of Thailand, a local fisherman rescues a stranger, who does not speak a word, offers him his friendship and names him Thongchai. When the fisherman suddenly disappears at sea, Thongchai slowly begins to take over his friend's life—his house, his job and his marriage.
In a forest, near a border, a young Bengali and a European soldier attempt to get the better of one another. In Calcutta, Rahul, an architect who had gone off to build a career in Dubai, begins a huge construction site. He is reunited with his girlfriend, Paoli, who has long awaited his homecoming, living alone far from her family. Both set out to find Rahul's brother, who is said to have gone mad and who lives in the forest and sleeps in the trees.
A home-guard serviceman assigned the task of standing watch over a barren no-man's-land begins to experience an existential crisis after years of lonely service.
Amidst the popular uprising against the Syrian regime that began in 2011, a group of former Lebanese detainees decides to break their long-held silence about the horrific years they spent imprisoned in Tadmor (Palmyra), one of the Assad regime's most dreadful prisons. They decide to testify publicly about the systematic torture and humiliation they experienced. To reclaim and overcome this dark chapter in their lives, they rebuild Tadmor in an abandoned school near Beirut. By playing the role of both "victim" and "victimizer," they will relive their survival.
A 15-year-old boy goes on a hiking trip with his estranged grandfather, and overcomes the grief of losing his parents on a mountain above the clouds.
