FATIH AKIN – THE CUT
Synopsis
Mardin, 1915: one night, the Turkish police rounds up all the Armenian men in the city, including the young blacksmith, Nazaret Manoogian, who is separated from his family. Years later, after managing to survive the horrors of the genocide, he hears that his two daughters are also still alive. He becomes fixated on the idea of finding them and sets off to track them down. His search takes him from the Mesopotamian deserts and Havana to the barren and desolate prairies of North Dakota. On this odyssey, he encounters a range of very different people: angelic and kind-hearted characters, but also the devil incarnate.

EN DUVA SATT PÅ EN GREN OCH FUNDERADE PÅ TILLVARON (A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE) – ROY ANDERSSON

Synopsis
Like modern times’ Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Sam and Jonathan, two travelling salesmen peddling novelty items, take us on a kaleidoscopic wandering through human destinies. A trip that shows us the beauty of single moments, the pettiness of others, the humor and tragedy that is in us, life’s grandeur as well as frailty of humanity.

SAVERIO COSTANZO – HUNGRY HEARTS
Synopsis
Jude is an American, Mina an Italian. They meet by chance in New York City. After a whirlwind romance, they get married and she becomes pregnant. A brand new life begins for both of them. Since the early months of pregnancy Mina is convinced that her child will be special; it is her mother instinct that tells her so. This child must be protected from all the pollution of the outside world and, to respect his nature, his purity must also be preserved. For the sake of his love for Mina, Jude plays along with her, until he reaches the point where he has to face a terrible truth: his son is not growing, and his life is in danger. Jude must act quickly. A covert battle of suspicions and resentments begins between Jude and Mina, leading to a desperate search for a solution in which everyone’s motive gets blurred.

photo hypesphere.com

PASOLINI – ABEL FERRARA
Synopsis
One day, one life. Rome, the night of November 2nd 1975, the great Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is murdered. Pasolini is the symbol of an art that’s fighting against the power. His writings are scandalous, his films are persecuted by the censors, many people love him and many hate him. The day of his death, Pasolini spends his last hours with his beloved mother and later on with his dearest friends, and finally goes out into the night in his Alfa Romeo in search of adventure in the eternal city. Dawn, Pasolini is found dead on a beach in Ostia on the outskirts of the city. In a film dreamlike and visionary, a blend of reality and imagination, Abel Ferrara reconstructs the last day in the life of this great poet.

MANGLEHORN – DAVID GORDON GREEN
Synopsis
Reclusive small town locksmith Angelo Manglehorn has never quite recovered from losing the love of his life, Clara. Fixated on her memory, he feels closer to his beloved cat than the people around him and prefers to find comfort in his work and daily routine. Still, he forges on with his tenuous human connections, maintaining intermittent contact with his son, taking misplaced pride in a former protégé gone astray, and establishing a cautious friendship with a kindhearted woman from the local bank. As this solitary man approaches the possibility of new love, he finds himself at a crossroads between remaining consumed by the past and embracing the present. Manglehorn is a movingly humanistic portrait of a man rendered with unsentimental simplicity and idiosyncratic humor.

BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE) [OPENING FILM] – ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU
Synopsis
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a black comedy that tells the story of an actor—famous for portraying an iconic superhero—as he struggles to mount a Broadway play. In the days leading up to opening night, he battles his ego and attempts to recover his family, his career, and himself.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE – JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER
Synopsis
Through Joshua Oppenheimer’s work filming perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered and the identity of the men who murdered him. The killers live just down the road, and have been in power ever since the genocide. The family’s youngest son, an optometrist, seeks to bring the past into focus, asking how he can raise his children in a society where survivors are terrorized into silence, and everybody is terrorized into treating the murderers as heroes. In search of answers, he decides to confront each of his brother’s killers. The killers still hold power, so these confrontations are dangerous. The killers respond with fear, anger, and naked threats. But he manages these encounters with dignity, asking hard questions about how the killers see what they did, how they live side-by-side with their victims, and how they think their victims see them. The Look of Silence does something virtually without precedent in cinema or in the aftermath of genocide: it documents survivors confronting their relatives’ murderers in the absence of any truth and reconciliation process, while the murderers remain in power.

LOIN DES HOMMES – DAVID OELHOFFEN
Synopsis
Algeria, 1954. While the rebellion rumbles in the valley, two very different men thrown together by a world in turmoil, are forced to flee together across the Atlas mountains. In the midst of an icy winter, Daru, the reclusive teacher, has to escort Mohamed, a villager accused of murder. Pursued by horsemen seeking summary justice and vengeful settlers, the two men decide to affront the unknown. Together, they fight to gain their freedom.

via labiennale.org