Sandpit #186

Based on a true story. 1996, open sea. During his shift on a transatlantic ship’s deck, Joel, a religious Filipino sailor, discovers Dumitru, a Romanian stowaway hidden between some containers. If he is spotted by the Taiwanese officers running the vessel, Dumitru is at risk to be thrown overboard. Joel decides to hide him, as a sign of his gratitude towards God. Soon, a dangerous cat and mouse game begins. When his crew, his own friends, even God itself start to turn their backs on him, Joel learns that he has to face his cruel destiny alone.

Water, earth, air, fire – and two children at the height of summer.

A young Kurdish man is torn between his mother's nostalgic search of a song in her dreams and an uncertain future with his pregnant girlfriend.

Together, a filmmaker and her characters venture into a personal research project about intimacy. On the fluid border between reality and fiction, Touch Me Not follows the emotional journeys of Laura, Tómas and Christian, offering a deeply empathic insight into their lives. Craving for intimacy yet also deeply afraid of it, they work to overcome old patterns, defense mechanisms and taboos, to cut the cord and finally be free. Touch Me Not looks at how we can find intimacy in the most unexpected ways, at how to love another without losing ourselves.

The late dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who died in 1989, resurrects in 2021 as a hologram to address the contemporary inhabitants of a small Romanian village. What happens next is captured in a hybrid documentary, observing the effects this unusual encounter has on the people involved, many of whom are first-hand witnesses of Ceaușescu’s rule.