Documentary Films - Competition

In rapidly developing China, the educational system is geared toward producing competitive and productive workers, but not all parents want to teach their children to devote their life to work. Confucian Dream is the story of a mother looking for the right kind of alternative child-rearing that will take into account her son’s moral development.

Unlike the other young people in their forlorn mountain village, Hou Junli has remained with his family instead of leaving for the city. The dilapidated houses continue to resist the snow and rain, but how long will this place exist if there is nobody left to carry on local work and traditions? A long-term observational documentary about a difficult life and the love of one’s native soil.

How do the mechanisms of political power directly influence the lives of a country’s inhabitants? In seeking an answer to this difficult question, this cinematic essay looks at everyday life in a small Russian industrial city, uncovering along the way how dangerous and furtive an all-permeating ideology can be.

What happens behind closed eyes when we lose consciousness and give ourselves over to dreams? How is our perception of reality changed when the line between waking and sleeping is blurred? Let yourself be taken to a place where the rational laws of daily life do not apply.

If the world has an edge, then it is almost certainly visible from Iceland. On the outermost cape, beyond which there is only the inhospitable Arctic Ocean, lies a farm belonging to Úlfar and his wife. This autumn will be the last time their grandchildren come from the city to drive the sheep back down from the hills. An almost tangible cinematic fabric that weaves a tale of an abandoned place where the mist clings to the steel-blue surface of the sea and where the occasional human visitor is sometimes welcome.

Father and son Vít and Grisha travel to Russia to visit the boy’s mother and sister. Why did their previously harmonious family split in two? A documentary road movie about the distance between two Slavic countries, the difficulties of fatherhood and puberty, and the alienation between people who should, in theory, be the closest of all.

Valentin is over sixty and has spent more than forty years working at Kyiv’s oldest cinema. You don’t have to twist his arm to go out drinking and dancing – the eccentric man simply ignores his age. But as with everyone else, life puts up new obstacles that he must overcome.

The plastic spoon was able to feign harmless unimportance until the moment Laila Pakalniņa, a distinctive international documentary filmmaker, cast her piercing glance its way. Her wordless film, whose humor arises from the surprising possibilities cinema has to offer, sings a dirge for this ornament of our bloated civilization: a piece of cheap plastic that will likely soon fade into history.

Naples. Home of the unbowed, of madmen and paupers. A city that refuses to lick anyone’s boots, let alone stoop to pretense. This documentary bad trip takes us on a tour of the city’s dismal suburbs and into the homes of the marginalized and rejected: a man, a girl, and a masked boxer – three protagonists yearning for something else, although they’re not quite sure what.

The moment nine-year-old Emmanuel received his first video camera in 1999, he began to shoot a chronicle of the Sanford family, warts and all. Ten years later, filmmaker and journalist Davy Rothbart uses his material to complete this disarming tale from Washington, D.C., where the streets are ruled by poverty and violence just seventeen blocks from the Capitol.