Tales of Two Who Dreamt

Each September, Bolot Tagaev and his family practice a centuries old tradition, harvesting walnuts in one of the oldest walnut forests in Kyrgyzstan. Over the course of a single season, director Zaheed Mawani gracefully captures delicate sequences such as a child interacting with a snake, or sacks of walnuts being laid gently across an attic bed. Stories attached to the forest are told and retold over the fire at night, adding a mythic dimension.

On the Oaxacan coast of Mexico, rumblings of previous times are never far from the surface. Tales of shapeshifting, telepathy and dealings with the Devil are embedded in the colonization and enslavement of the Americas. Characters from the Faust legend mingle with the inhabitants, while attempting to colonize and control nature through a seemingly never-ending building project. Through literature, myth and local entanglements, the frontier between reality and fiction, and the seen and unseen, no longer apply.

A masterclass in the art of digital cinematography thanks to the efforts of Mexican maverick Nicolás Pereda (director of Perpetuum Mobile), it's a highly unusual 'behind the scenes' record of a film-shoot in Mexico City - namely, Michel Lipkes' Malaventura. Bussmann concentrates on the elderly gents who appear in one atmospheric bar-scene, observing them between takes and interviewing them about their lives. The gently-paced results cast a steadily hypnotic, and intoxicating spell.

Enigmatic and deceptively playful in tone, this film from Gabino Rodríguez, in collaboration with Nicolás Pereda, boldly transforms mundane, realist observations at a rural Mexican schoolhouse into fantasy and a sly comment on childhood, rituals, and race.

On the outskirts of an isolated mining town, Lázaro discovers a dead body. He thinks he has a respiratory illness and doesn’t want to go back to the mine. Rumours, suspicion and desire surround him.