Echo of You
When 86-year-old Rene buys flowers, he always thinks about what color his wife would have chosen if she were alive. Like most people in this film, he spent more time with this partner than without. Through candid, revealing interviews, Echo of You presents a group of Danish men and women, all aged 80+.
"A poetic and touchingly honest film about lifelong love and what remains when it disappears. The echoes of love resound in the poignant, humorous and life-affirming stories of those left behind." - CPH:DOX
A Golden Life
Rasmané, alias Bolo, 16, is a teenage gold miner at the Bantara site in Burkina Faso. Like all teenagers of his age, he is playful and dreamy. His daily routine is organised around cooking, working in the gallery and going down to dig at a depth of more than 100 metres. His hope hangs on a rope that ascends indefinitely from the depths. He hopes to find gold with which to build his future. But the long days of labour are fruitless. As time and his trials go by, his body changes, his features become more pronounced. Inside, he gradually loses his childhood innocence.
"a beautifully shot, evocatively structured dive into the world of Sub-Saharan Africa’s chaotic and risky gold mining business" - Modern Times Review
The Life of Sean Delear
A blazingly colourful and exuberantly transgressive personality who dazzled Los Angeles' underground musical and artistic scenes in the late-1990s and 2000s, Sean DeLear (1964-2017) suddenly emerged as a genuinely seminal cultural figure via the posthumous 2022 publication of their intimate and explicit teenage diaries from 1979. The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off, sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style.
"a sparkling, lively, cheerful, ironic and self-ironic documentary. A true hymn to life" - Cinema Austriaco
The Hamlet Syndrome
A few months prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, five young women and men participate in a unique stage production that attempts to relate their war experiences to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For each of them, the stage is a platform to express their grief and trauma through the famous question, “to be or not to be,” a dilemma that applies to their own lives.
"This film brilliantly articulates Hamlet's dilemma for the Ukrainian youth. The film mediates their experiences of having to make hard choices when their options are very limited, because of a grinding war. A very elaborate filmic language forms a universal film“ - Locarno, *Winner*.- Semaine de la Critique, Grand Prix
Le Film de Mon Pere
Le Film de Mon Père is my first film. The one my father always dreamt I would make. And perhaps, that’s the issue. One day he bought a video camera and started filming himself daily. His goal: to offer me this autobiographical footage in order for me to make my first film. The diary of a lonely widower, living with my adopted brother and sister on the family property ‘La Belle Poule’. Before he dies, he would like to accomplish three things: to make my older brother Oskar autonomous; to reconcile with my sister Iwa; to build a house in the garden so that I can come back and live with them. I film my father, his desire to transmit, my sister avoiding him, my brother trying to find his own way. And me, in the middle of it all, making a film as an inevitable step to move on from my youth.
"Guarneri’s documentary is especially fascinating in how it acknowledges the limitations of the medium itself." - Guardian