Desire Lines

A breathtaking quest for the dream the imposing city of Brasilia was based on, a marked contrast with the chaos of the adjacent construction workers' village. Everything about Brasilia was devised and designed, but not on the basis of some cold urban design concept: the plan proves to originate from 19th-century priest Don Bosco’s dream. The chaos and disorder of the adjacent construction workers' village Vila Amauri long stood in stark contrast to the grandeur and majestic regularity of Brasilia. Now the village has disappeared beneath the reservoir’s surface, the necessary order has been restored. All Still Orbit examines both these histories.

After a 13-year-old student disappears without a trace for a week and suddenly reappears, his mother and teachers are confronted with existential questions that change their whole view of life.

Borrowing its title from an experimental text by Walter Benjamin. Many years ago, the cities by the river were gripped by a contagion. Things started to change and everything slowly became something else. It was not clear if transformation was a symptom of the disease or a way to escape it. The contagion touched everything and everyone: animals and plants, stones and soil, men, women and children, their thoughts, their dreams, their memories. An old woman once told me how all memories turn into trees, I could hardly make out what she was saying. She said she could hear the trees singing: To be a body, to be any body. After the years of contagion ended, the cities appeared untouched. One had to look hard to see the traces of the previous time. If one could listen to the trees, what would they say? A way out, a way out?

It’s like almost all is lost. Yet still they are here – abandoned bungalows, an artificial lake, dirty plastic bottles, lost donkeys and stray dogs, draining pipes running over fields of salt, deserted factories, statues of revolutionaries, concrete playgrounds covered with weeds, rotten fruit, folded T-shirts, pop songs, decades of forgetting, a single room with a blue tent inside. And it felt like a kiss.

Through the intimate stories of seven young directors, October is the generational attitude towards Serbia today, shown in different perspectives and through different genres - from black comedy to melodrama, poetic portrait to the socially engaged horror. Motif that binds all of the stories together is the tenth anniversary of the democratic revolution. Each film is taking place on that day, 5th of October in 2010, and each film is differently related to the anniversary and what that event means 10 years after. The film brings fresh visions of the seven young directors who were teenagers at the time of the overthrow of president Milosevic and his regime. On a personal and emotional way they show a complex picture of modern Serbia.

Jonasz studies insects and fishes, Signe leaves and herbs. After a day spent in gardens and libraries, they meet, take the train and leave the city, pitching their tent on the shores of a lake. As they read, eat fruit, wander the forest and swim in the cold water, the outside world feels further and further away. A stranger appears and a trio is formed. But there are also other trios, other lakes, different places, different times.

Bobby drives back and forth between Vienna and Salzburg, giving lifts to strangers on the way, sharing conversations that drift from the mundane to the deeply personal. In this tender portrait of today’s Europe, anonymity and warmth still go hand in hand.

Transient Witness unfolds through the eyes of three protagonists: Christina, the manager of an art collection; Maurizio, an art mover; and Präsens, the collector's dog.

In her feature-length debut director Paula Ďurinová sets out to wander among varied rock formations in order to try and come to terms with the loss of her grandparents.

Two men - one in the West, one in the East, brothers. In both places, life is muted, solitary, nondescript. Here, windows are painted, switches rewired and cigarettes smoked; there, lengths swum, boxing matches prepared for, transactions made. What is it that links these things? Winter swimming pools, the sound of a bell, a bullet passing through bone?

Adnan is driving a grocery van on his way to sell produce at the market. While he is waiting for a friend's phone call, he suspects his loyalty.

Alexandru Popovici is a man obsessed with women, whom he films relentlessly. This montage of family and anonymous archives questions the male gaze in the era of Romanian totalitarianism.

In the flat where I grew up, in a closet, hidden behind his clothes, uniform and a pistol, my father kept a box with papers, school documents and volumes. After he died, I searched the box. In his student report book I found a name of professor who lectured "The basics of Marxist sociology" in 1976. I went to the professor and asked him: "What is friendship?" - "A tiny bird," he said.

From here, you can see everything: the sea to the right, the mountains to the left, the sky in between.

Forty-six years after its completion, the International Trade Fair Complex in Lagos, Nigeria, lies waterlogged and in disrepair, its modernist concrete pavilions flooded and overgrown with vegetation, and its shopping stalls and convention centers now serve as makeshift workshops, bike repair stalls, and playgrounds. Shooting in a soft-edged standard-definition video, Komljen observes the complex’s grounds with equanimity and warmth, marking both its history as a former utopian project and its present-day vernacular uses.

The boy is new to the city. Daniel doesn't know what to do with himself. He visits his sister, he visits friends. Noise begins to emerge: how to say no to yourself?