Films from the 2019 edition
THIS IS THE 2019 PROGRAM
All festival films are eligible for the Audience Award for Most Popular Film. Please vote!
Opening Night Film
Closing Night Film
Hands of a Mother
Winner of the Young German Cinema Award for Best Director as well as the Best Actor prize (for lead Andreas Döhler) at the Munich Film Festival, Florian Eichinger’s per...
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Cetaceans
Subtle, funny, unpretentious, and completely charming, Florencia Percia’s debut is a warm comedy that starts from a basic premise and builds into a witty exploration of one woman’s desi...
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Clean Up
Given its depth of feeling and precise visual style, it’s astounding to learn that Kwon Man-ki’s debut drama, Clean Up—which shared the Best Film award in the New Cu...
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The Dragon Defense
First-time director Natalia Santa’s droll drama about three middle-aged men whose friendship centres on chess manages to draw trenchant parallels between the careworn lives of its protagonists and the sh...
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Genesis
Probably the best Canadian film of 2018, Philippe Lesage’s audacious, double-focused coming-of-age drama follows the differing trajectories of Salinger-reading 16-year-old Guillaume (Théodore Pellerin, riveting) and his older, more hedonistic hal...
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Holy Air
Writer-director-star Shady Srour’s alternately funny and compassionate satire tackles a subject you rarely see onscreen—the lives of modern Arab Christians scraping by in Israel—and it does so in a w...
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The Line
Winner of the Best Director award at the 2017 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Peter Bebjak’s thriller is all about crossing ‘lines’—both physical and moral—and the tragic consequences for doing ...
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Newton
India’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award in 2017, Amit V. Masurkar’s darkly comic political satire centres on Newton Kumar (Indian star Rajkummar Rao), an idealistic government cler...
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Sicilian Ghost Story
When the hypnotic Sicilian Ghost Story opened the Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2017, it received a thunderous ten-minute standing ovation, and it is not hard to understand why. Based on a t...
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That Trip We Took With Dad
Set amidst the turbulent events of 1968 in Eastern Europe—the crushing of the Prague Spring by the Russian Army, the consolidation of power by future Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu—write...
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Volcano
‘It is total anarchy. If you get used to it, you’ll survive.’ So says the eccentric Vova (a deadpan Viktor Zhdanov) to our hero, city-bred interpreter Lukas (Serhiy Stepansky), after ...
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Winter Flies
Two mismatched boys in a stolen Audi wend their way clear across the Czech Republic in Olmo Omerzu’s road movie, an alternately melancholic and uplifting tale that won the Cz...
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