LOCARNO 2015 (Concorso internazionale)

The foolish servant Pulcinella is sent from the depths of Mt. Vesuvius to present-day Campania to honor the last wishes of the poor shepherd Tommaso: his mission is to save a young buffalo called Sarchiapone. Pulcinella finds the animal at the former royal palace of Carditello, where Tommaso had looked after the ruined Bourbon estate in the heart of the Land of Fires. He takes the buffalo off to the north and the two servants, man and beast, travel through a beautiful and lost Italy, but their long journey's end does not bring what they were hoping for.

Revolves around the last year of the Balkan War general, just before his arrest and surrender to the Hague Tribunal.

A deadpan, picaresque buddy comedy about two old friends through a series of urban adventures they experience, loosely connected by the skull of an executed French aristocrat. Winter Song is a typically irreverent Iosselianian jaunt through a classy Paris apartment block contemplating the past, present, and future.

A fishing trip in the Aegean Sea among a sextet of friends becomes the perfect setting for a relentless contest of male dominance. Everything can spark a fierce competition; but, only one can wear the precious chevalier. Who will it be?

En route to meet his estranged daughter and attempting to revive his dwindling career, a broken, middle-aged comedian plays a string of dead-end shows in the Mojave desert.

A young man, hoping to write a novel, visits a French guest-house with a friend, he but finds himself distracted by a strange mystery and the stranger inhabitants of the home.

A slow-burning epic chronicling the emotional journey of four thirty something women in the misty seaside city of Kobe.

Ten directors of a new generation of filmmakers tell how differently people in Switzerland cope with the worst imaginable disaster; the fact of being dependent on other countries.

James, a twenty-something New Yorker, struggles to take control of his self-destructive behavior in the face of momentous family challenges.

A married film director falls for a young painter - twice.

The 25 years old Hanieh lives in the household of her married sister in Tehran. Every day Hanieh travels long and tedious hours to get to the suburbs where she works as a teacher at a girls' primary school. Hanieh tries to get shifted to a school inside Tehran but the paperwork seems stuck in bureaucratic channels. Increasingly exhausted by her paralysing everyday life and the two-faced reality she subliminally experiences as a woman, an employee, a younger sister, and unhappy partner, Hanieh struggles to find her way out, but despite her real intention, Hanieh plays a different role...

Filmmaker Chantal Akerman documents the life of her mother Natalia Akerman, a Polish immigrant and survivor of Auschwitz.

Sergio and his father, Simão, haven't seen each other for over 20 years. On the eve of the 2014 World Cup, Sergio returns to his hometown, São Paulo, hoping to watch the games with Simão, as they used to when he was a kid. It seems to be a perfect plan for a father-son reunion: a whole month together, their schedule based on the World Cup calendar. But as the days go by, their relationship starts to wander into unknown territory and their pact to watch the entire tournament together turns into a dangerous ritual...

On his birthday, a hitman reluctantly takes on the easy task of killing a writer, only to find the job a lot more difficult than expected.

This is a somnambulists' tale. There's Françoise, who goes back to Rennes to teach History of Art at the university, many years after studying there.

A Buddhist monk on a spiritual quest. A Student trying to test his limits. An organ dealer growing his business. A surgeon who heals by day and rapes women at night. The film interweaves various stories, on the threshold of pain, between life and death.

In a contemporary Mexico City, two skating lovers develop their relationship at the same time as they try to carry on business with drug mafia.

At the heart of the film's multiple narratives is an adaptation of A Distant Episode, the savage short story set in Morocco by American author Paul Bowles, first published in 1947. Moving between documentary, fiction and fable, "The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers" observes its protagonist, filmmaker Oliver Laxe, directing his own film Las Mimosas in Morocco, only to walk off set and into Rivers' narrative. Shot against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the Sahara, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, Laxe is drawn into a hallucinatory and perilous adventure of cruelty and madness to form a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself. "In a café in Morocco, about 50 years ago, Paul Bowles overheard a man, high on kif, say the title of this film. And so he wrote a story around this statement, a story that moves between different planes of reality. I read the story, and the story behind the story, and the strange phrase kept circling around my mind, creating images and dreams. This film is a manifestation of these images, along with obsessions about cinema and how far we will go to make it". Oliver Laxe.

An ultra-orthodox scholar is revived after dying for 40 minutes. After coming back to life, he suddenly feels a strange awakening in his body and suspects that God is testing him.