By keeping the focus firmly on the personal relationship between the two men Lioret lifts his story out of cliche and into a place where emotions flourish.
A Kurdish boy from Iraq trying to reach the UK strikes up an unusual friendship with a middle-aged Frenchman.
By pushing us into the day-to-day stress of the organisation, France gives a palpable sense of the desperation many of those fleeing feel.
This searing investigative work shadows a group of activists risking unimaginable peril to confront the ongoing anti-LGBTQ pogrom raging in the repressive and closed Russian republic.
There are moments of real brilliance in this film, taking viewers in unexpected directions emotionally as well as narratively.
An American woman visiting family in Latvia is sent to a convent after she has a breakdown and attacks her young daughter - but all is not what it seems.
A budding art restorer travels to a small Italian village to bring a medieval painting back to its former glory. Little does she know the sinister secret behind it - or what is going on down in the cellar.
Fairly pedestrian stuff, with nothing that will come as a surprise to fans of post-apocalyptic fiction.
In a world where environmental collapse has left survivors to fight over the precious remaining resources, a young woman's loyalties are tested by the arrival of a wounded man who discovers her family has a secret supply of fresh water.
Kat is styled with a punk sensibility which will appeal to young viewers tired of old fashioned notions about how young heroes ought to look and behave.
Two scheming demon brothers, Wendell and Wild, must face their arch-nemesis, the demon-dusting nun Sister Helly, and her two acolytes, the goth teens Kat and Raul.
Wendy makes an important point about children’s connection to nature.
Lost on a mysterious island where ageing and time have come unglued, Wendy must fight to save her family, her freedom, and the joyous spirit of youth from the deadly peril of growing up. The classic story of Peter Pan is wildly reimagined in this ragtag epic.
A cheerfully silly whodunnit, this film has more twists and turns than it can really sustain but enough entertaining characters and fully engaged performances to see it through.
A newly assigned forest ranger checks into a quaint Vermont inn just as a snowstorm cuts him and the eccentric townsfolk off from civilization. Yet frigid weather isn’t their biggest concern - that’d be the bloodthirsty creature picking them off one by one.
Whilst it’s never intrusive, the film makes room for the personal and, perhaps more importantly, for Herzog to meander, interlinking diverse ideas in his inimitable way.
It quite subtly toys with the iconography of the genre - poking at the outlying parts of it, the parts dealing with "foreigness" and "home" rather than the more dependable elements of right and wrong.
A group of German construction workers on a job in Bulgaria begin to compete for the approval of the locals.
Keeping Aapo and the viewer locked into the present moment, Wetiko takes control, single-minded and multifaceted.
In the depths of the Maya jungle, a young Maya man hired to deliver hallucinogenic toads stumbles into a spiritual war between indigenous rebels and Euro-Western seekers, led by a parasitic white shaman with a thirst for power - and blood.
There is a uniqueness to the way the story unfolds, blending Christian and pagan symbolis.m
On the day dedicated to the celebration of innocence, a girl is robbed of her own, and her ignorant surroundings push her into treating it like a normal event.
Through the lens of the men’s romance, Onir takes in a good deal more, exploring the complex realities behind assumptions of prejudice and the myriad factors that go into making each of us who we are.
Karun, a security man from southern India, is posted to Gurez, a remote village in Kashmir. There, he begins a relationship with Faheem, a young Kashmiri man. But it’s a romance that seems doomed from the start
Less about the physical journey the two take - one to Berlin and the other to Sweden - but the emotional ground that they have to cover in order to leave one home and establish another.
Two Syrian brothers decide to make a fresh start in different European countries and their cousin, the director, documents their journeys.
Nagahisa...understands and embraces the complexity of early adolescence, when kids are finding their own way,
Their parents are dead. They should be sad, but they can't cry. So they form a kick-ass band. This is the story of four 13-year-olds in search of their emotions.
It is in large part an ethnography, providing a glimpse inside a culture that gets relatively little exposure in media.
A documentary about young earth creationists building an enormous, $120 million, 'life-size' Noah's Ark in Kentucky with the specific aim of debunking the theory of evolution.
A pleasingly thoughtful and warm-hearted exploration of religion, morality and personal responsibility.
Tragi-comic depiction of events surrounding the election of a new Pope in Nanni Moretti's searching, satirical sideswipe at the Catholic Church in Italy.
Thorough and insightful, Penta’s film benefits from fantastic editing (his own) and from a self-consciousness about the viewer’s gaze which aptly reflects the genre it’s exploring.
A documentary about the sultry, shadowy world of direct-to-video erotic thrillers — films of mysterious strangers, sexual obsessions and crimes of passion that once dominated video store shelves and late night cable.
We quickly see the more poignant emotional landscape is every bit as important as that manufactured by pixels and bytes.
Filmed entirely inside the world of VR, this vérité documentary captures the excitement and surprising intimacy of a burgeoning cultural movement, demonstrating the power of online connection in an isolated world.
Something extra is needed and fortunately this film has that.
Trapped inside their bathroom for days after a tornado ravages their home, a family of four struggles to keep their composure. That’s nothing, however, compared to what’s coming for them beyond the bathroom’s walls.
Valia and Kirby work together with wonderful ease, whilst cinematographer Charlotte Hornsby and editor James Codoyannis give key scenes a fluid, volatile quality which keeps us uncertain of how they’re going to develop.
A commercial cleaning woman in Gary, Indiana, stumbles into a new job cleaning the homes of several rich suburban families. While working, she tells one small lie that spins out of control.
The story, such as it is, has the dreamy flow of childhood remembered, but though the honeyed tones of the magic hour are often used, there's never a glossing over the toughness of life being faced by these free-range kids.
Manny, Joel and Jonah tear their way through childhood and push against the volatile love of their parents as Jonah embraces a world of imagination.
The darkness in the film is carefully balanced by comedy.
Three friends attend an institution for delinquent girls on an isolated island In 1950s New Zealand. The trio rail against the system, finding strength in their bond. This is challenged when the school’s matron divides them.
Interviewees struggle not to break up as they recall the things they witnessed, even at this distance. But what also emerges here is the warmth of the community that sustained them.
A documentary charting the experiences of people caught up in the first major outbreak of AIDS in San Francisco.
