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Browse through the detailed list of the official nomimations of the 6th Firenze Film Festival edition.
2gether
Hampus, a young ex-on-the-beach participant, is playing his videogames when his girlfriend Olivia comes home and complains about the dishes. He realises that he has to break up with her. Director Kim Ekberg has long wanted to make a film about his brother. But the couple breaks up before Kim gets a chance to finalise the film. The previous script needs to be revised, and suddenly it becomes a film with an unexpected meta-level. Now it's a movie about breaking up instead of being 2gether. During an afternoon and night we follow the newly separated couple through the city in a slice of life until they both meet in their sleep and give each other a final dance goodbye.
Kim Ekberg
Ava
By moving into the apartment that was one of her refugee ancestors, Ava seeks to connect with her blind grandfather whom she never came to know, and to reveal the world in which she now lives.
Stella Brajterman
Coin Slot
Coin Slot paints a portrait of a young man trying not to unravel as the anniversary of a traumatic attack looms ever closer. Moments are shown in fragments, revealing an honesty and vulnerability that transports, while capturing the many shades of trauma and healing.
Scott Jones
Day after…
The steam whistle blows, the paddle starts rolling and the century-old boat, one of the last remaining epitaphs of the colonial past, starts from the bustling harbour of capital Dhaka to the remote coastal village of Bangladesh. The camera roams the crowded decks, which plays both as the stage and central character of this hybrid, framing the politicians and the proletarians, privileged and the poorest-all entrapped in a never-ending conundrum. The captain skillfully navigates his vessel along the busy, shallow waterway—cursing and ranting as he goes, brimming with stark contrasts, deep wisdom, and everyday concerns. A ballad of nuances, an ensemble of cinematic poetry, ‘Day after…’ is about claustrophobia of class, power and prejudices; it’s a metaphysical odyssey crossing valleys and mists, unknowing of the alluring abyss!
Kamar Ahmad Simon
Familiar Stranger
Sara's grandfather has left a void in her family. Who is Kamran Taan? The filmmaker sets off in search of clues and travels to La Spezia – the coastal city where he is said to have lived. What does kinship mean when you've never met? Unexpected events and revelations gradually form a narrative. A road movie about family and identity.
Sara Furrer, Fabian Lütolf
Gardez
Silvia Brockmann, the wife of a rich industrialist, is no longer considered by her husband. Fascinated by the sensual appearance of a young church attendant, she decides to bring a little joy into her dreary everyday life. She cleverly uses the unsuspecting and good faith pastor of the congregation to get the attention of the church attendant.
Julian Isfort
Get to the Wire
In a dystopian future, an Australian-Iraqi woman held captive in a chaotic and brutal British immigration detention centre takes up severe measures to survive and reconnect with her estranged family.
Paul Burns
Hole in the Head
Part-time projectionist and amateur filmmaker, John Kline Jnr, is mute and suffers from missing time. He hires local actors to play his parents in a series of recreated home movies in order to investigate their unsolved disappearance 25 years earlier. Hole in the Head is an independent feature film in which the protagonist re-stages his family’s home movies in order to recall a traumatic event. Melding new with old technologies and a film-within-a-film structure, this feature film proposes a hauntological discourse on autofiction, trauma and private ritual.
Dean Kavanagh
Home
Dùthchas | Home is a poignant, touching and emotive exploration of what it meant – and still means – to people, especially women, to have to leave the island of their birth to get an education, work, and live. We explore the effects of the resulting cultural and linguistic loss. Featuring unique and unseen archive film footage, contemporary interviews and a powerful soundtrack composed by Donald Shaw, this will be a particularly moving film for anyone with a connection with the Hebrides. This fascinating and unique collection of archive footage from the 60s and 70s reveals repeated iconic scenes of leaving the island, friends and relatives on the pier waving as they recede into the distance. Although the film is silent, you can almost hear the keening.
Andy Mackinnon, Kirsty Morag MacDonald
Jimmy in Saigon
JIMMY IN SAIGON begins as a personal exploration into the mysterious death and radical life of Jimmy McDowell, an American 24-year-old Vietnam veteran who died as a civilian in Saigon in 1972, when filmmaker Peter McDowell was only five. While investigating Jimmy’s drug use and sexuality, Peter takes us from the US Midwest to Vietnam, France and back home again. In his quest to get to know his brother| he uncovers a hidden romance, new family ties and a remarkable global love story.
Peter McDowell
Love, Deutschmarks and Death
LOVE, DEUTSCHMARKS AND DEATH tells the story of the independent and largely unknown music of immigrants from Turkey and their children and grandchildren in Germany in a very lively way, full of rhythm. In the form of a documentary essay, director Cem Kaya takes his viewers into a dazzling universe of musical diversity. In a cinematic experience of the highest sound quality| he brings the energy and spirit of those years to life. E.g., the stage shows of the eccentric folk duo Derdiyoklar at a wedding with thousands of guests in a multi-purpose hall redecorated as a festival hall somewhere in the Ruhr region: melancholic, but danceable, political, but cheerful, larmoyant in expression, but sincere.
Cem Kaya
Mutual Heart
Bozhidar is a young, artistic photographer who produces T-shirts with suburban photo collages. One day he comes upon Victor the bully. Despite the differences between them, the two guys find a common ground. Having a good time with Victor means more than just friendship for Bozhidar, and he finds an interesting way to express his feelings.
Dess Atanasoff
Mykonian Pastoral
“Mykonian Pastoral” is a real Noah’s Ark, where the last true natives of one of the most cosmopolitan islands in the world seek shelter, along with their animals, from the relentless wave of development that threatens to swallow them whole. Holding on to traditions rooted in the distant past, their lifestyle harkens back to a simpler, slower time when even the most trivial menial task was full of meaning and intention. Shot in and around Maou, the last agricultural stronghold of the island, we meet a cast of born and bred Mykonians who shed light on a little-known side of the island, closely resembling a lost utopia: a serene place that largely exists outside of time, where simple everyday pleasures are worth their weight in gold. But does that place really exist or is it just a figment of their imaginations?
Eliana Abravanel
On my Μind
Henrik wants to sing a song for his wife. It has to be today, it has to be now. It's a question of life, death and karaoke.
Martin Strange-Hansen
Postatomic Love
The film tells the dramatic story of a young woman, Titti, who finds herself in the whirlwind of a bitter media pillory, due to a hot video that ended up online. Titti is a comic artist and works for an important Neapolitan publishing house; lives with his mother, who, right from the start, understands the tragedy in which the young woman has encountered and tries to support her in every way, facing, with courage, the continuous offenses and denigrations that come from the rest of world.
Vincenzo Caiazzo
Purgatory
Seven different stories about love in modern Greece, by people who seek it, find it, lose it.
Vassilis Mazomenos
Red Ears
13 years after his civil service in a hospital in Thiès, Senegal, Paul challanges his memories and traumas. With old video footage, interviews and animations he questions his role as a volunteer within the German system of development aid.
Paul Drey
Skyscraper
Can I use the film strip structure as an architectural element? Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement? Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else? Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves? Can I melt skyscrapers? Skyscraper Film was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist's relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA) etc. Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage, created from scraps of orphan 16mm films from the 1980s. Originally produced to promote tourism in North America, these films are reassigned to a new context through the Emulsion Lifting/Emulsion Grafting technique that the director has been pursuing for years. In addition to tourism films and informational films, Skyscraper Film also uses rare family films and home-movies dating back to 1929 and 1954 in 16mm format.
Federica Foglia
Takbir
After two ISIS attacks eerily resemble passages from his latest book, a TV writer finds himself under thin ice when he realizes that the new TV show he’s been approached to develop by a mysterious Turkish production company might be used as a blueprint for the terrorist group’s new attack.
Jordi Calvet
Talia’s Journey
Talia is a 19 year old Belgian girl, with Senegalese roots, visiting her country of origin for the first time. She starts off in Dakar, in the luxurious villa of her cousin’s family| hoping to meet her grandmother. But her grandmother is nowhere to be found and the villa quickly becomes a “golden prison”. Until she meets Malika, a mysterious bird street seller.
Christophe Rolin
The Black Spider
The courageous young midwife Christine makes a pact with the devil to save her village from the brutal terror of the Teutonic Knights. Punished by a spider plague, Christine goes from saviour to hunted, and the violence escalates. Christine faces the decisive battle against the diabolical power that wants to take away the highest good she is willing to die for: humanity.
Markus Fischer
The Master of Sento
Shitamachi (traditional commercial district) Tokyo. Asakusa, Taito-ku. At an old public bath, there is an old fashioned, stubborn master who doesn't speak much and his beautiful wife. The couple runs the business well, but the wife leaves home due to the husband's bad drinking habit. Instead of learning from his wife's leaving| his drinking habit gets worse. Losing patience| his nosy neighbors visit him and persuade him into getting back together with his wife… Set in the public bath "Arimayu", which was built in 1930 and is still open, the story depicts the relationship of a married couple and humanity.
Yusuke Ishide
The Safest Place In The World
The film follows Marlon, a young man whose life is turned upside down after his town was buried by the rupture of a mineral tailings dam. A refugee from his house| he faces new challenges and witnesses the repetition of another mining tragedy in Brazil, which exposes the abandonment that companies and the government have with individuals. “The safest place in the world” is Marlon's way of referring to his original place, today surrounded by cameras and security guards. Ironically| he assures that nothing else can happen there, capitalism has devoured everything, and feeds his utopia of returning to the only place he recognizes as home.
Aline Lata| helena Wolfenson
Woman Meets Girl
As cocktails lead to revealing conversation, chemistry builds between Annabelle, an awkward in her own skin, forty-two-year-old woman and Tessie, an extroverted, eighteen-year-old sex worker. A surprising moment soon introduces the possibility of deeper connection.
Murry Peeters