Award Nominations 2021
Best Editing Competition
Le Virage
Dir. Mathilde Soares
20' • France • 2020
Jonas, a late thirties family man, is driving in his underground parking company. Béatrice, the new hostess, is coming to meet him. Glamorous, mysterious, this young woman intrigues him and awakens a hidden deep desire...
Phélia
Dir. Elia Kalogianni
17' • Netherlands • 2020
A night shift security guard in Athens, attempts to escape her suffocating routine by introducing a more intimate relationship into her life. She will soon realize that when it comes to human contact, a scheduled routine is not always the answer.
Alexandre the Fool / Alexander Odyssey (Alexandre le fou)
Dir. Pedro Pires
65' • Canada • 2019
Fifteen years after a psychotic event on the South China Sea flipped his life upside down, Alex, a sensitive, refined and schizophrenic man is at a crossroads. His grand-mother and confidante, who would like to die with peace of mind, insists that he tries to find a girlfriend. His encounter with a young psychotic woman gives birth to an ardently passionate relationship, making him slowly drift away from his usual emotional boundaries. While the South China Sea’s troubled waters well up in his mind, he gradually isolates himself, in danger of being swallowed by paranoia’s unfathomable abyss. An intimate odyssey, at once troubling and sublime.
My Father’s Naples
Dir. Alessia Bottone
20' • Italy • 2020
Giuseppe looked out at the horizon as if there was something there that he longed for, as if there was something there that would set him free. As a young girl, his daughter, Alessia (director), had seen him gazing out of the window day after day, always wondering what was there, what held his attention so firmly. Some years later, during a journey back to Naples, her father’s birthplace, Alessia finds herself observing her father once again. Now too, to her eyes Giuseppe is always in profile, and while the landscape slides past beyond the frame of the train’s window, he tries to grasp every moment with his gaze, tries to capture them and save them from the fast-flowing river of time. Her father describes his Napoli and his childhood in the Vicaria neighbourhood, surrounded by the migrants who crowded the station, Nanninella, Don Mario and his friend Napoleone with whom he used to explore the city, two "taralli"in his pocket and a head full of dreams. Giuseppe’s story also centres on themes of escape and the fear of the unknown, which ties the Italian emigrants of the twentieth century, cardboard suitcases in tow, to the boats of migrants arriving on the shores of southern Italy today. As the train devours the tracks, mile after mile, Alessia begins to understand what her father was thinking and seeing when he looked out of the window: his memories. And so, the return to Naples becomes an opportunity to get to know her origins, and to tell the story of a life. Because however far we go, we always come back to where it all began.
*SCREENING SELECTION 2021*