A Place To Call

Three little stories about the evolution of our sensual behavior with the advance of technology. A young woman passes a short waiting time, by feeding playfully the male attention she gets, with the help of her umbrella. The plot development of each story changes along with the zeitgeist of each generation.

Four Inuit families build a qaggiq, a large communal igloo, to mark the approach of spring with singing and games. A young man woos a girl but her parents are in disagreement over whether he shall get to marry her.

The hands question what they can have in common with hands covered in cement, in mud, in dust, dressed in blue construction gloves and yellow cleaning gloves. Those hands that, instead of building houses, repeat images, stretch sounds, construct films.

In a juvenile prison three young delinquents are forced to reinvent themselves under the preventive custody of the state. Absurd psychotherapeutic conversations are alternated with intimate moments when the boys film themselves in the solitude of the night.

B.EX. falls in love with a random guy he just met. From that moment, his life will change forever. B.EL, his psychologist, talks to him in an unusual matter. He is not happy that his patient felt in love with a guy. Because of that, B.EL. tries to psychologically abuse B.EX. and make him suffer.

Paolo Virno is one of today’s most influential philosophers, one of the most respected exponents of post-Fordism. Along with Toni Negri and Franco Bifo Berardi, he is one of those Italian intellectuals who are known abroad under the name Italian Theory, or post-workerist thinkers. Today, he teaches philosophy at the Università di Roma 3, but during the late 1970s he was arrested and imprisoned for about four years, after an antiterrorism raid targeted the extra-parliamentary group Potere Operaio, which Virno belonged to.

Years after the Salvadoran military destroyed the village of Cinquera in that country’s civil war, survivors have returned to rebuild their community. Soulful, beautifully rendered, this amazing debut is an evocative testament to place, memory and the power of life to rebound from tragedy.

In defiance of the war in former Yugoslavia and ethnic and religious antagonism, which is still alive, women from Bosnian Rogatica who belong to different nations, denominations and generations live together in an old house.

A documentary about a housing situation of Nowa Huta workers. They weren’t lucky enough to get a flat in clean and modern estates. It’s a ‘black series’ documentary from the fifties.

A complicated and nonliteral Jewish film about feelings the name for which has not yet been invented. A friend of the family in which the wife died in labour loved her more than life itself, although he will never say it out loud. He gladly agrees to babysit the child for a day and brings her home, where he is suddenly faced with resentment from his relatives. This multifigured film with beautiful unspoken truths talks about widowhood of other people and oneself, about others’ children who can be dearer than the yet unborn children of one’s own, and about love that does not follow the loved one into the grave.

Maison d'Être is an exploratory documentary about people's emotional place attachment in highly dynamic Greater Paris undergoing large-scale urban renewal campaigns. Parisien suburbia has been a frontier between world civilisations where wellbeing encounters despair. Here local habits get confronted by government-sponsored plans for urban transformation and social aid. In Paris "home" manifests itself as one of the key existential challenges of the modern culture - a "raison d'être" of everyday life. The film is addressed to both professional audiences of urbanists, city planners, architects, and curious public. It displays numerous conversations among residents, city activists, politicians, city planners and scientists, those who reflect on the regeneration strategy of the socially depressed urban neighbourhoods.

Everyday life of one cafe

Konoko wakes up on the beach and goes looking for a barber to take out the bug stucking on her head. Doi, who will soon be a father, goes to make gloves for her wife as a gift, Kazuko wakes up at the theater, and goes home where she finds a blue monster. She goes to a shop to get rid of the monster.

At the famous Grand Hotel in Sopot, each worker - whether a porter, a maid, a cook or a stoker - feels an important part of their workplace. Perhaps even the most important.

A former prostitute and her reformed convict boyfriend try to make a new start in life. They begin to refurbish a derelict building close to the sea, but people from their past come back to haunt them.

Rebels without a cause in a globalized world. Kevin, David and Dominik, three troubled teenagers who were deemed too difficult to be “re-educated” at home, are shipped off to Romania by the German authorities. There, they live with local families while hoping to go back to Germany as soon as possible. Exiled from their previous lives and country, they try to adapt as well as possible to their new environment.

A teenager finds himself torn after the death of his mother and falls on the wrong side of the law.

A suitcase is about to leave its surroundings, but he soon realizes that things inside that load have weighed her down. The suitcase tries to lighten its load. He pulls something out of himself every time. But it is not light. Until he finally realizes that the things within him are not the cause of heaviness and in fact heaviness has another cause. In fact, memories, belongings, and attachments are the reason for the weight of luggage.

Margarita and Güte live in an unhealthy and stagnant environment that they can neither leave nor change. Meanwhile, the radio broadcasts messages and the world awaits the launch of the spacecraft that will take humans to the edge of the solar system. When Maria falls ill, Margarita persuades Güte to do something, but they fail and become separated until they realize what the real hurdle is.