In The Absence

Kamikawa Ryohei is a 35-year-old man who works in a foreign company and lives a happy family life with his wife and son. On the day he decides to switch careers and submit his resignation, his wife runs away from home, leaving his hands full taking care of the home and bringing up their son. Saeki Shinichiro is a 61-year-old man who decides to live alone when he loses his wife to illness not long after he reached the mandatory retirement age.

13-year-old Pablo is a quiet, lonely boy with a troubled past. His only friend is Julia, a shameless 15-year-old girl who is more than willing to help Pablo with his transition from childhood to adolescence, and give him some advice on sex, love, and life in general. On a quiet country road just outside of the village, Pablo meets Paco, an oddly calm, well-dressed stranger whose car just broke down. Nevertheless, he seems more interested in the boy than fixing his problem.

After ten years, Jacques comes back to France to handle his father’s succession. He had left France to live in the USA to escape a painful past he shared with Mado, his former wife, who in the meantime built a new life with Stéphane and their 7 year old son, Paul. Upon his return, Jacques and Mado meet again; he asks to meet her son Paul; Mado hesitates, then accepts but hides it from her husband. Soon, Paul and Jacques get close and they start to see each other secretly.

Rouzbeh arrives in Prague, far from his troubled family life in Tehran, to research his father’s past. Visiting the flat where his father, a communist expatriate, lived 50 years ago, in the times of Czechoslovakia, he is stopped by a policewoman investigating a recent accident. The current resident of the flat, Vladimir, who turns out to be Rouzbeh’s half-brother, has fallen out the window. Discovering hidden corners of Vladimir’s life and getting closer to his soul, Rouzbeh learns a shocking truth about his father, totally contradicting the image of a hero he had about him. This puts him on the path which led to Vladimir's fall from the window.

Five actors meet in a house on Christmas Eve to make a movie. While waiting to have dinner with someone they don't know or if they're actually going to show up, they reveal secrets and look back on their lives. From this encounter, joys, frustrations, absences and passions surface at the edge of tension.

After his daughters accidentally bleach his hair, before another stressful family dinner, Meir decides to escape. The middle-aged, suburban history teacher unexpectedly finds what he needed when a chance encounter with his former students plunges him into a night of pure rebellious energy.

After another failed relationship Hedvika takes her three-month-old daughter Adélka and her dog to stay with her mother and her mum’s boyfriend. Hedvika doesn’t get on all that well with her mother, nor are her feelings towards Adélka as maternal as they could be. One day she finds some diaries that her late father left behind… This small-scale psychological drama by debutant Josef Tuka is shored up by its realistic characters, an understated performance from Jana Plodková, and perceptive, discreet lensing.

Serginho has a hard time finding his place in the world as he works with his uncle at the market, supports his depressed mother, and takes care of his little brother.

Four nameless people -- the old man, the woman, the soldier, and the gambler -- journey to a desolate wasteland beyond the limits of an unnamed city.

A man returns home and in the process uncovers memories previously hidden away.

Luis died prematurely. Since then, Enrique's life has been sleeping beside his father's tomb. He tries to play with other kids, he tries hard to play the game of his life. Yet, he ends up curled up in his solitude, curled up next to his dad's tomb. This absence gets interrupted by Mary and Gold - a girl and her doll - who bloom in his life one casual day. The girl is both truth and lie. Mary is hope and she manages to make communication possible between father and son again, once again. But, unlike death, the opened door can't last forever.

Artyom, a regular butchery worker, gets confused with his life circumstances. Suddenly he comes up with an unusual way out of his crisis.

You can measure the light but you can’t measure the dark. In duality we see one as the opposite of the other. Yet darkness is the absence of light. And an absence is not a measurable thing. It simply does not exist. Light protects us from our fundamental fear of the dark. But where there is light, there must be shadow. We live in a technological era where our dependence on energy is greater than ever before. It became an irreplaceable commodity. The film takes us on a journey of how fragile our modern reality is.

While Jelena, a young immigrant, looks for a a better future in Canada, her mother Rada looks for a dog that she has lost in the streets of Belgrade. Although Rada would would like to see her daughter again soon, she hides the truth because she knows that Jelena would come back to find the dog.

Noiy, a deaf boy struggling to survive on his own in Luang Prabang, takes refuge in a small school where he learns with other deaf children — and befriends Jane, whose parents do not want her to socialize with the deaf children at the school. When the two find themselves in serious trouble, Jane's father blames Noiy and threatens the school itself.

A strange child comes to Eun-ah, saying she can make save her deceased mother. Unablae to accept her mother's death, Eun-ah wants to bring her back to life.

Vagelis Douskas' first attempt at a short film

A love triangle between a pioneer female writer; her husband -a retired military official-and the love of her life, the painter Moritz Rugendas, with whom she maintains an epistolary relationship for 10 years, with few personal encounters.

Short film directed by Lang Wu. In 2021, Absence was nominated for Best Short Film at the 74th Cannes. After ten years in prison, Han Jiangyu returns to Hainan Island. Housing construction is booming, his childhood friend is now rich. Searching for traces of the familiar, Jiangyu meets his old love who now has a daughter.