Brainy

Lars (9) is naive and innocent, all he wants is for his father to be happy and his family to be together. Lars' mother is gone and life has been empty and dysfunctional without her. On the eve of his birthday, Lars' dad, Peter, gets himself drunk and after an embarrassing argument with the next-door neighbor, Alma, masturbates in the backyard. Lars sees everything. Now things are worse than ever. Lars is all alone, struggling to understand what he has seen, he has to figure everything out by himself...

Adrian is a classic outsider. His playful, dreamy imagination distracts him from everyday life, for the reality he lives in could not be more different. Neither his chronically depressed uncle nor his overworked grandmother understand the ten-year-old’s games. His mother abandoned him when he was very young and he is bullied at school. Just as news arrives that three children are missing, a new family moves in next door. Adrian develops a close relationship to their tomboyish, ten-year-old daughter Nicole and believes he is getting close to solving the mys- tery of the missing children. New Zealand forms the backdrop for this universal story for adults and those who have never wanted to grow up. It is a story about friendship and loneliness, emotions which Adrian already feels so poignantly as a child. The Danish first-time director’s expressive visual language dramatically merges water and air, reality and a hint of fantasy.

In rural Afghanistan, people are storytellers who make up and tell each other tales of mystery and imagination to explain the world in which they live. The shepherd children own the mountains and, although no adults are around, they know the rules; they know that boys and girls are not allowed to be together. The boys practice with their slings to fight wolves. The girls smoke secretly and play at getting married, dreaming of finding a husband soon. They gossip about Sediqa; she’s eleven years old and an outsider. The girls think she is cursed. Qodrat, also eleven years old, becomes the subject of gossip when his mother remarries an old man with two wives. Qodrat roams alone in the most isolated parts of the mountains, where he meets Sediqa and they become friends.

Berik, a short drama about friendship and understanding, takes place in Semey, Kazakhstan. Berik, 33, blind and deformed due to radiation poisoning, spends his days at home alone, while his brother is at work. That is until Adil, 11, the smallest and least popular of the kids in the apartment block, turns up on Berik's doorstep looking for the local bully's football, which he has lost.

A work of fiction, the film is developed from the life of – and starring – a real woman, Pia, who is intellectually disabled. Pia is 60 years old and she lives in rural Denmark in the care of her mother Guittou, 84. In the story, Guittou is getting old, and Pia worries about what will happen when her mother dies. She is afraid of being left alone. Although Pia has never had a boyfriend, she thinks that she needs to find a man to love in order to survive. Then Pia meets a man called Jens at the harbour. Pia embarks on a quiet and simple relationship with him, not realising that in the meantime it is her mother who is left alone.

The dangerous paranoia lurking beneath the seemingly idyllic existence of a family of hermits living on a remote island begins to come to the fore when their daughter starts to question her parents' worldview.

When career criminal John - the character from Clausen's drama-comedy »Temporary Release« (2007) - is granted parole, he hastens to Jutland to visit his son who is in difficulty. John might be a dedicated father, a perfect employee, and a great line-dancer, but life isn't exactly plain sailing.

A young woman, Julie 23, starts her first day at her job, caring for the intellectually disabled. Suddenly she is left alone with two young men she has to take responsibility for.

Not So Special is the show I made after life kicked the door in and helped itself to the good glasses.

Olivia and Peter are a couple who occasionally have problems with their communication, especially when it is about Peter's dad. It puts the relationship at a risk.