Benjamin Mirguet

In August 1961, speleologists from Italy’s booming North arrive on a Calabrian plateau where time stands still. The intruders discover one of the world’s deepest caves, the Bifurto Abyss, under the gaze of an old shepherd, the only witness of the pristine territory.

Set in Mexico City, Carlos Reygadas's sexually explicit drama centers on a man in turmoil over his past actions. Chauffer Marcos feels compelled to reveal a dark secret to his boss's daughter, Ana, a wealthy woman who works as a prostitute just for the thrill of it. Marcos confesses that he and his wife committed a crime that ended in horrible tragedy. Haunted by his past, Marcos searches for redemption.

Katya, 8 years old, spends the summer with her grandparents in the countryside. Time stands still, adults remain silent, and a war in the background destroys lives. Meanwhile, kids are growing up and the clouds are flying.

After climbing Broad Peak mountain, Maciej Berbeka learns his journey to the summit is incomplete. 25 years later, he sets out to finish what he started.

When her sibling Zara suffers a nervous breakdown, the introvert Eva is forced to take on Zara’s job as a Foley artist. She struggles to create sounds for a commercial featuring a horse, and then a horsetail starts growing out of her body. Empowered by her tail, she lures a botanist into an affair, through a game of submission. Piaffe is a visceral journey into control, gender, and artifice.

A girl roams through the city looking for a place to sleep. Along the way she meets young mothers who celebrate motherhood religiously, goes home with an abstinent existentialist for whom sex is “just another market”, and waits for the end of capitalism in a drag bar. Her attempt to write a book doesn’t make it beyond the first sentence of the second chapter, and she finds no space between art galleries, yoga studios and the beds of strangers. Instead of trying to fit in, she starts regarding her depression as a political issue.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Berlin, a self-proclaimed priest is preaching to a group of people with addiction and mental-health problems in a run-down building that houses a psychosocial support group. A recent arrival at the facility, which aims to be both a home and a religious community for its residents, is Egon, who is struggling with a psychotic disorder. He cannot sleep, refuses to help on the farm, won’t wash, and has trouble following the priest’s instructions. More than once, the pastor crosses a line and humiliates his charges. For most people here, turning to religion is something of a last chance, affording them some kind of support. Egon, however, claims to have conversations with Jesus in which the latter condones his defiant behaviour. His attempt to take the Messiah at his word and understand his miracles eventually propels Egon deeper and deeper into his psychosis.

In the splendidly decorated barbaric world of Antwerp, an ordinary lonely Lucien has an inhuman capability to stick metal objects to his body. An introverted Buster Keaton-like man of a few words is a hapless artist, clown, freak, and musician with a wounded heart and a quiet violin. His vocation is to entertain the common people despite his burning pain and guilt for the inevitable loss of an estranged father.

The plot follows an ordinary woman whose family are becoming estranged. Her daughter is a compulsive liar, and her husband seeks escape by working as a stuntman in a B movie with a third-rate film company. The chances of him dying while filming are high, and everybody in the family knows it. Tormented by the thought that she is no longer needed and is unloved by her family, the woman will go to any extreme to prove the opposite, and to keep her family together for ever.

In the mid-20th century, in a forested valley between Italy and Yugoslavia, a stingy widower befriends a young woman and helps her depart across the ocean to find there a better life. A chance encounter gives rise to a dreamy parable on loss, loneliness and the power of imagination.

This is a passage between two faces, each the same, yet different. Bibicha’s face first appears in the dark, her eyes open and expression impassive, only her heavy breathing betraying the strain she feels. She will withstand the strain and take the vow of silence, retreating to her grandmother’s house for the 40 days to pass. The house and the landscape outside at least offer Bibicha certain sensory distractions: the taste of honey, the texture of a wall, an eye-catching bedspread, the view out over a sea of cloud, water fizzling on the stove. But it is not just her under strain, as her aunt’s frantic text messaging, her grandmother’s rueful acknowledgement of the stories of marital strife on the radio and her little cousin’s illegitimate status bear witness to. Four generations of women in the complete absence of men, yet all marked by their presence, the similarity of their fates blurring together different times and customs.

An older man begins to work in a modern dairy factory. He feels distant and does not identify with the place, the people and even the society. Little by little, he is approaching cows and oxen, transforming into an animal and returning to his ancestry.

A Warsaw-based Vietnamese cook struggles to fit into the European culture, which his ten-year-old daughter has already embraced as her own. A story about love, misunderstanding and food.

In the nineteenth century, a French adventurer sets off to establish a kingdom in the inhospitable South of Chile, uniting the feared Mapuche under him. The response of the Chilean army is devastating.

A young woman, overcome with hunger, trades her brother for a sack of rice. The cost will be even higher than she bargained for.

A teenage Karol, who is conditionally released from the correctional facility, stays in a training flat. Under electronic supervision, he starts his life anew. In his daily "life training" he can count on Marta's help. The relationship between them deepens and creates a chance for something more. With time, Marta's lessons become more and more unconventional, and her relationship with Karol turns into an ambiguous bond.