Education

Yuni is a teenage girl — smart with big dreams of attending university. When two men she barely knows ask to marry her, she rejects their proposals, sparking gossip about a myth that a woman who rejects three proposals will never marry. The pressure is building when a third man asks for her hand, and Yuni must choose between the myth of a final chance at marriage, or her dream of future happiness. BONUS:Interview with Kamila Andini, Toronto Filmfestival More

Eleven-year-old Chala (Armando Valdés Freire) lives with his addict mother Sonia (Yuliet Cruz). In order to provide for the two of them, he raises carrier pigeons and trains fighting dogs with a man who may or may not be his biological father. School provides a stabilizing force in Chala's life, thanks to his close relationship with his spirited sixty-something teacher, Carmela (Alina Rodríguez). More

A group of students decides to camp on a desolate Caspian region which runs a competition of kite flying during the winter solstice. Not far from the camp, live Babak and Saeed, two grim cooks. Armed with sharp knives, they roam the forest in search of meat to serve the decrepit restaurant they run nearby. More

1975, Mozambique’s rebirth. The young revolution sweeps the streets of Maputo from prostitutes and bad habits. Sent to re-education camps deep in the countryside, they will become “new women”. Margarida, a sixteen year-old girl from the countryside, was mistakenly taken. This is their story. Women bounded by adversity. More

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After studying literature at Cairo University, Dunia, 23 years old, wants to become a professional dancer. She attends audition for an oriental dance contest where she recites Arabian poetry without any body movement. She explains to the perplexed jury that a woman can't move her body or evoke act of love when society ask women to hide their femininity. She is selected and meets Beshir, an intellectual and activist who will supervise her thesis on ecstasy in Sufi love poetry. Their attraction is mutual. More

To celebrate the centenary of Jorge Luis Borges' birth, Tristán Bauer has created a very stimulating film essay: Skilfully, respectfully and poetically, he mixes archive documents, conversations and photographs of the writer's life, which reflect Borges' political stance, his problems with the Perón regime and his international successes. Tristán Bauer does not limit himself to a historian's work, he subtly reconstructs the writer's world: infinite fountains of the strange library of Babel, numerous corridors, circles, mirrors, stairs and hexagons. More

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Martin Echenique is a film director from Buenos Aires who has been living for more than 20 years in Madrid, spending his time with his much younger girlfriend Alicia and his best friend, the actor Dante. He has a 19-year-old son, named according to a tradition Martin as well, but known as Hache. Hache is living with his mother in Buenos Aires. After his girlfriend leaves him, Hache has a nearly fatal drug overdose, thought by many to be an attempted suicide. Consequently Martin flies to Buenos Aires and Hache is sent back to Madrid together with his father for a while. More

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Beshkempir (The Adopted Son) takes its title from the name of the boy whose story it tells. His life is sunny and carefree, spent in childhood games, until the day he hears terrible news from his playmates: he is not his parents’ biological child. Overnight, his best friend becomes his rival and the young girl of his dreams starts going bicycling with somebody else. His pleasant and peaceful existence is over: if his parents are not his own, Beshkempir feels he has lost his whole identity. He tries to gradually overcome the problems that arise from this new situation. More

There is an old Indian tradition according to which the parents teach their children the songs of wisdom, in order to enable them to bear their fate and their lives with more calmness. Pallavi - acted by India's most successful TV-star Kitu Gidwani - is a young, successful singer who has learnt her art with the help of her mother. She's convinced that she'd still had to learn a lot of her, whereas the mother thinks her already talented enough to keep the tradition of making music and oral deliverance alive herself. More

The news that Prince Sid'Ali has died suddenly confronts 25-year-old Ali with her past again. During the funeral she visits the palace where she spent her childhood and adolescence and where her mother was a servant. She never knew her father - he may even have been the prince. As she wanders the deserted corridors, the images of her youth return, such as her forbidden friendship with Sarra, daughter of one of the princes, who taught Alia to love the lute. More

The seven young Cambodian actresses who were chosen to play the main parts of The Rice People were all born during the Khmer Rouge genocide between 1975 and 1979 or under the subsequent occupation. When they are not on the set, they are all practicing the art of choreography between the walls of the former royal palace of Phnom Penh. More

"I dream exactly what I live every day," a professor, bored with her mundane life, tells her therapist. But the visual evidence on screen at the start of "Madagascar" suggests that dreams are never that banal. Bicyclists crowd the street, riding to work in slow motion in a haunting, shadowy blue dawn. The 50-minute "Madagascar" has the resonance and eloquence of the best poetry, as it deftly turns an adolescent's search for identity into a metaphor for post-revolutionary Cuba. Laura is a professor at a shabby, stultifying college. More

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The news that his first wife was pregnant with a child when they separated some ten years ago comes to official photographer Cao Depai (Li Xuejian) like a thunderbolt out of the blue. Now she is dead, and the son that he never knew was found wandering the streets. He is afraid to tell his new wife about this extra mouth to feed, and at first he attempts to house the lad at his darkroom. However, the boy sneaks visits to his father's current home frequently in order to play with his step-siblings, and eventually they are discovered together. More

A blind master wanders through a mythic landscape of a terrific beauty to play his songs and sing his ballads. His whole life he's had one hope, one dream of another world: According to a prophecy he shall be able to see, if he has broken 1000 of his banjo strings. His blind disciple, on the contrary, doesn't want to rely on one hope. He longs for a woman's love. Does sight await the saint when the 1000th string breaks? Can the disciple's strength of character overcome provincial prejudice to win the hand of his love and a place in the village? More

A great day for Joe: he has graduated from his bachelor degree with honors. He wants to study medicine in France. At the Ministry of Education in Ouagadougou, unable to satisfy his request, he is advised to address the ministry. This is followed by a string of administrative proceedings, leading to delays, anomalies. And also, the fact that in Burkina Faso – as anywhere else in the world – it’s connections that set the bureaucratic machine in motion. More

The young teacher Li Mingguang is to be murdered in the north of China because of having taken the virginity from the young girl Li Pingwa. The whole family wants to take revenge on him for that, even the whole village. Critical of society, the film is about the backgrounds origin of the deed. This is shown through the inquiries on the part of the prosecution, the conversations between the villagers and the social structures of the place. More

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A young girl's academic asperation conflict with her family's struggle against poverty. Both these aspects are made all the more potent by the clear view they have of Ernest Hemingway's mansion in their home town just outside Havana. More

Three people live in a remote Buddhist monastery near Mount Chonan: Hyegok, the old master; Yong Nan, a young man who has left his extended family in the city to seek enlightenment, and an orphan lad Haejin, whom Hyegok has brought to the monastery to raise as a monk. The story is mostly Yong Nan's, told in flashbacks: how he came to the monastery, his brief return to the city, his vacillation between the turbulence of the world and his hope to overcome passions and escape the idea of self. More

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Gaston Kaboré’s movie «Zan Boko explores the conflict between tradition and modernity with a family in a rural contexr. It has been for long time a central theme in many African films. Kaboré tells the poignant story of a village family swept up in the current tide of urbanization. In doing so, «Zan Boko» expertly reveals the transformation of an agrarian, subsistence society into an industrialized commodity economy. More

A simple farmer becomes the victim of a greedy landowner in this social melodrama. Bora is forced to give up the farm his father had paid for when the landowner asks for a mortgage receipt that was never given. He loses his livestock and sends his young son to work as an errand boy to the villainous landlord. Bora's ultimate humiliation occurs when he is forced to put up political banners that espouse the virtues of the man who drove him from his land and ruined his life. 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

Senegalese filmmaker Ababacar Samb says, «Jom is a Wolof word which has no equivalent in English or French, Jom means courage, dignity, respect. It is the origin of all virtues.» To celebrate the concept, Samb uses the griot as the nexus of multiple stories and Senegal’s collective memory. To inspire striking workers, the griot tells of a legendary prince, Dieri Dior Ndella, who sacrificed his life during colonialism, and Koura Thiaw, an entertainer who took up the cause of oppressed domestics in the 1940s, both becoming heroes to their people. More

In the deep Sardinia of the 1940s, at the age of five, little Gavino is forced to drop out of school after only two months because he now has to help his father keep the animals. He thus grows up in isolation, far from human society. It is thanks to military service at the age of 21 that he can escape his father's grip. He learns to read, which is for him a revelation (he will become a linguist), and when he leaves the army, he rejects the report of quasi-slavery imposed by his father. More

A fisherman, Kishore, marries a young girl accidentally when he visits a nearby village. After their wedding night, Kishore's young bride is kidnapped on the river. On losing his wife, Kishore becomes mad. Meanwhile, his young bride fights with the bandits, jumps into the river and is saved by some villagers. Unfortunately, the young bride knows nothing about her husband, she doesn't even know her husband's name. The only thing she remembers is the name of the village Kishore belongs to. Ten years later, she attempts to find Kishore with their son. More

Larks on a String is a Czech film directed by Jiří Menzel. The movie was banned by the Czechoslovak government. It saw release in 1990 after the fall of the Communist regime. Menzel tells the stories of various characters considered bourgeois by Czechoslovakia's communist government in the 1950s, who have been forced to work in a junkyard for the purposes of re-education. More

Young Dr. Yasumoto returns to Edo following three years of medical training in Nagasaki. Believing he will become a physician to Shogunate, he is badly disillusioned to learn he must work in the poorly-financed Koishikawa Clinic, which is headed by a Dr. Niide, known to most as Red Beard. Everything in the clinic is repulsive to Yasumoto, and he becomes determined to get himself discharged: He drinks, refuses to wear medical attire; breaks every rule he can think of, in fact, including venturing to a prison-like room, forbidden to all but Red Beard himself, to observe a lovely mental More

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