Intezaar

Mauro Bosque was an adventurer, a survivalist, but most of all, he was a dreamer. Mauro spent his days exploring some of the most dangerous places in the world and sharing those adventures on his Internet reality show, HOMBRE Y TIERRA. In January of 2005 he sought out to explore the dense forests of Belize to search for a series of legendary caves which he believes were once home to a clan of historic Mayan warriors. While on that excursion, he was believed to have disappeared without a trace. What happened during that three day hike has remained a mystery until the recent discovery of classified footage stolen from a Belezian government office. This is the story of, Hombre Y Tierra.

A victim of racism and jealousy, Juan's had to fight his entire life. After he is kicked out of college, fired from his job, and loses his girlfriend, Juan finds out his grandmother needs an expensive operation to save her life. Turning to the only thing he knows, Juan enters the dangerous world of underground street fighting where he can make a lot of money putting his life at risk.

Angry at his wife and defeated in battle, the king of Judea is taken prisoner. After being spared by the Romans, King Herod comes to believe he's been a victim of court plotting.

Via the Chicago Reader: "After World War II an Italian soldier returns to his hometown near the Alps and, unable to find a job, hooks up with a crotchety hermit who scavenges buried shells and bombs for scrap metal."

The ostensibly simple story of a sympathetic veteran teacher giving Italian lessons to a weekly class of diverse immigrants is given infinitely more depth and complexity by the manner in which director Daniele Gaglianone renders his story. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, truth and artifice, and between documentary and drama, Gaglianone has created a film within a film. You see the apparent artifice of Gaglianone’s crew using professionals, including the noted film actor Valerio Mastandrea as the teacher, interlinked with ‘real’ immigrant protagonists, studying the language to improve their chances of employment and of gaining a permanent residence permit. Thus in the course of the lessons there is simultaneously the painful and upsetting relation of the students’ personal stories but also humour, as they interact and share their humanity, bridging cultural differences, united in their striving to make a better life for themselves. (Source: LFF programme)

When Sergio learns that he will soon have a baby brother, his imagination kicks into gear in devious and alarming ways. But when his mother suffers a miscarriage, Sergio's feelings of guilt are all too real.

Inhospitable at the best of times, the snow-covered mountainscapes of Eastern Anatolia constituted a fatal frontier for many war exiles after the battle of Sarikamish in 1915, and provides a canvas laced with beauty and threat for this bone-chilling survival yarn, the superb debut feature of Alphan Eşeli. Starting out with three characters – a refugee mother and daughter and their grizzled guide – the film traces their daunting trek across this barren terrain to safety, with the Russians encroaching and other stragglers, including a pair of wounded, frostbitten Ottoman soldiers, all orbiting the same burnt-out village they find in their path. Puncturing its aura of ghostly impasse with some shocking narrative reversals, and constantly prickling with the mutual dread of strangers in gruelling extremes, the movie stakes out hugely credible ground next to established Eastern Front war classics (In the Fog, Come and See) while remaining thoroughly its own beast. (Source: LFF programme)

Revenge is a recurrent theme in thrillers, usually dispensed by action heroes with a well-stocked arsenal. But in Yorgos Tsemberopoulos’s nuanced moral maze the protagonist is the bookish Kostas (Manolis Mavromatakis), a suburban florist well versed in social and political theory, which he discusses at length with a local publican. But when his home is invaded by masked hoodlums, who bind his family and rape his teenage daughter, our everyman hero finds his intellectual stance untenable. Encouraged by his paranoid, militarist neighbour, Kostas decides to take the law into his own hands, and in doing so begins to understand – for the first time – the world he has been living in. The vigilante movie is a well-explored genre too, but Tsemberopoulos gives it a whole new urgency, subverting the cliched right-wing fantasy structure and seeing it through the eyes of a man who comes to find his real self while trying to live up to the (imagined) expectations of others. (Source: LFF programme)

This one is modelled on the painting by Paul Delaroche and is an extension of the stage act known as “tableau vivant”.

10 years after a young girl goes missing on Halloween night, her sister returns to their hometown to look for answers. Along the way she becomes entangled with two mysterious identical twins who run the town's roadside haunted house.