Dictatorship

Chile, 1976. Carmen heads off to her beach house to supervise its renovation. Her husband, children and grandchildren come back and forth during the winter vacation. When the family priest asks her to take care of a young man he is sheltering in secret, Carmen steps onto unexplored territories, away from the quiet life she is used to. More

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. More

The recent Rumanian cinema delights the screenland The current Rumanian cinema is very exciting, which could also be seen at the Festival in Cannes: In 2006, the gentle feature film "Comment j'ai fêté la fin du monde" (Cum mi-am petrecut sfârsiful lumil) by Catalin Mitulescu was honoured with the award "Un certain regard" for the actress. A brilliant Dorotheea Petre represents the young woman Eva at the time, when the Iron Curtain disintegrated. More

One from the heart, “Salvador Allende” is the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s plaintive look back at the rise and violent fall of the world’s first democratically elected Marxist president. Mr. Guzmán, who went into exile after the Sept. 11, 1973, coup that led to Allende’s death, has returned to the country of his birth with a camera in hand and a storehouse of passionate memories. Alas, little of that passion informs the filmmaking in this documentary dirge, a memento mori about “the other Sept. More

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An eclectic group of actors struggle to save their theater from being demolished and replaced with a shopping mall. Max, the leader of the troupe, is a workaholic director who abandoned his family to build his career and is forced to confront the daughter he deserted. Then there is Enrique, the playwright-poet who is reduced to pawning his belongings to sustain his livelihood when his state pension is severed. Finally, there is Fulo who is driven to succeed so that she can bring her daughter from Rio de Janeiro. (L. Wong) More

As in Alice in Wonder Village, Díaz Torres creates a world of his own, where fantasy and reality intermingle. Alice was banned from Cuba three years ago after winning the Silver Bear in Berlin. It resembled reality too much. Despite this, Díaz Torres is one of the few directors who have been able to make a film in his country since the political crisis. In Love Me and You’ll See . . . , Juventino and two of his friends are robbing a bank when the Cuban revolution explodes. More

«A Place in the World» by Adolfo Aristarain, looks at people who, having fought for a better world, are in the aftermath of defeat. Federico Luppi plays the main character as a teacher who is back from along exile he shared with his doctor wife, Cecilia Roth. Both are living with their teenaged son, Batyi, in a San Luis valley seven hundred miles away from Buenos Aires. While baking bread for his poor pupils, Luppi inspires and leads a community effort aimed at getting fair prices for the farmers' output, sidestepping ruthless landowner Rodolfo Ranm. More

Ta dona is the story about a young forest ranger and his life in the African country of Mali in the 1990s. He's a young Bambara man, an employee in Mali's Ministry of Rivers and Forests, searching for an ancient herbal remedy for childbirth, a plant with mythical healing powers. The secret knowledge he is trying to achieve, he wants to use for the people's good. He sees that his work holds the key to the future of his country (through reforestation) and he dislikes the short-sighted, money-grubbing ways of his superiors. More

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Floreal is released from prison prior to the end of a military coup d'état in 1983. Coming home he discovers that his wife has cheated on him and so is not sure he wants to return to his former life and family. A friend called El-Negro, who was killed during the miliary coup in the streets of Buenos Aires, appears in the night with a special mission: to help Floreal face what has happened when he was serving time in prison. El-Negro helps him to live through the important events that happened in his absence. More

1983. Alicia, the mother of an adopted 5-year-old girl, teaches history in a Buenos Aires high school. Both in her profession and in her private life she has always accepted the "official version," until one day when the regime's façade and that of it surroundings begin to fall to pieces around her. In the crevices of this enormous lie Alicia suspects that Gabi, the girl she has adopted, might be the daughter of a "desaparecido." It is then that she begins a painful and inexorable journey towards truth - a journey in which she might lose everything. More

Vivid social satire with overtones of Romeo and Juliet, Finye (The Wind) tackles the generation gap in post-colonial West Africa. Its heroine is the pot smoking daughter of a provincial military governor who falls in love with a fellow university student, the descendent of one of Mali's chiefs of an earlier age. Both families object to the union and to the lover's growing involvement in student strikes against the corrupt government. A mix of politics, romance and social commentary, Finye casts a critical eye on both the ancient and modern values. More