Glocal Images International Competition Section 2024

A young filmmaker returns to his hometown and attempts to reconnect with his father as the pandemic rapidly accelerates across Brazil. However, their relationship proves to be more complicated with increasingly bizfarre phenomena occurring as they get closer.

Selected Awards:

• ​Best Original Soundtrack Award & Best Film Award,  Casa de Las Americas, Havana Film Festival, Cuba, 2023.
• Best International Narrative Feature Award, Best Performance Award (Carlos Francisco), Best Screenplay Award, Best Cinematography Award (Linga Acácio) – Tribeca Film Festival, USA, 2023.
• Best Screenplay & Best Supporting Actor Awards, Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, Brazil, 2023.
• Best Feature Narrative – El Gouna Bronze Star for Narrative Film, El Gouna Film Festival Egypt, 2023. 

Under the hot Greek sun, the animators at an all-inclusive island resort prepare for the busy tourist season. Kalia is the group leader. As the summer nears its peak and the work pressure builds up, their nights become violent and Kalia’s struggle is revealed in the darkness. But when the spotlights turn on again, the show must go on.

Selected Awards:

• Best Performance Award, Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland, 2023.
• Golden Alexander & Best Actress Awards, Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece, 2023.
• Vanguard Award, Vancouver International Film Festival, Canada, 2023.
• Prix Cineuropa, Festival Cinéma Méditerranéen de Bruxelles, Belgium, 2023.

Three middle aged friends reunite for the first time in years.  Each of them sets out to confess unexpressed feelings but their vacation takes a surprising turn when the undercurrent of their past lives threaten to resurface.

Awards:

• ​​​Pardo d’oro for Best Feature Film (Cineasti del Presente Competition), Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland, 2023.
• Best PerspecTIFF Film Award – Swatch First Feature Award, Tirana International Film Festival, Albania, 2023.

Two teenage sisters record their daily lives on a home camera, overwriting older recordings that periodically appear on tape. Their father is soon mobilized. Before he leaves, he asks them to film something nice for him. Days go by, they film nature, night sky during bombing raids and tease Tijana, their youngest sister. Things change when a mysterious boy and his shy baby sister arrive from Belgrade and move in the next door neighbor’s house. ​New friendships, first kisses and first disappointments take over the fear of bombs.

When Nawal’s husband suddenly passes away without leaving a will, the young woman and her little daughter are confronted with a bleak fate. Under Jordanian law, in the absence of a son to inherit from the father, all property goes to the brother. Her only means to avoid losing her home and even the custody of her daughter is to give birth to a son. Inshallah! 

Selected Awards:

• Golden Frog – Directors’ Debuts Competition, Camerimage, Poland, 2023.
• Gan Foundation Support for Distribution Award & Critics’ Week Grand Prize nomination, Cannes Film Festival, France, 2023.
• Best Actress Award, Golden Rooster International Competition Award, China, 2023.
• Best Actress Award, Meet the Neighbours Competition, Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece, 2023.
• Best Performance Award, Asia Pacific Screen Award, Australia, 2023.

Dancer Elena and sign language interpreter Dovydas meet and form a beautiful bond. As they dive into a new relationship, they must navigate how to build their own kind of intimacy.

A Palestinian school teacher struggles to reconcile his life-threatening commitment to political resistance with his emotional support for one of his students and the chance of a new romantic relationship with a volunteer worker.

Cyprus, 1940s. A couple, outlaws and hunted, arrive at a secluded mill house. The man leaves the distraught woman in the hands of the miller and runs off. As the young woman is cared for by the miller, love and affection grows between them. Their tranquillity is violently disrupted when her husband and those who are after show up at the mill house. 

Τhree generations of Cypriot women –mother, daughter, and granddaughter– whose lives were tragically altered by one man’s submission to temptation. Plagued by guilt over his act in 1945 and his failure to make amends in 1967, the now ailing octogenarian makes one last attempt in 2008. 

A petty thief enters a house unaware that it belongs to a retired police officer. He soon finds himself trapped in a twisted game of power, infidelity and sexual perversion. This soon becomes a public spectacle. Driven by power and ambition, truth and deception fiercely collide. Which will prevail? Is escape a possibility? 

In a world where time changes arbitrarily, a couple’s relationship is put to the test as their individual and shared recollections of the past, present and future change unremittingly. 

Awards:

• Audience Award & Best Greek Film Award, 36th Panorama of European Cinema, Athens, Greece, 2023.
• Film Forward Audience Award & Best Original Music Award, 64th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Film Forward Competition, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2023.
• Most Original Film Award, Sognielettrici – Festival dell’immaginario fantastico e di fantascienza, Milan, Italy, 2023.