Transcinema 2019

Josefina, a radical homemaker, committed a crime of passion that led her to self-exile at a coastal town. She tries to find peace in solitude, immersed in the house routine, while coexisting with a past of lovers and Molotov cocktails.

The fantastic stories about the music of the rituals in the north of Potosí in Bolivia, are the perfect excuse for the return to the idyllic place of childhood, where the director will face the uneasiness of the passage of time and uprooting. Finding more than one ritual, where music is a balm and a link with the mystic.

The year is 1949, and Hungary has once again descended into darkness. Now in total control of the country, Mátyás Rákosi obeys his Soviet masters and prepares to stage the most spectacular show trial that the country has ever seen. A production of such scale not only requires scriptwriters and actors but also cameramen and directors.

While a director makes a film about this the origins of Cinema in Colombia, suddenly, his mother, apparently suffers a strange mental disease: without explanation she stops talking. This situation forces him to stop his film and starts recording his mother's everyday activity, trying to understand what possibly is happening to her. The director decides to revisit his family's past and finds a video footage of a children's theater play, shot by his mother, in which he himself acts as a false guerrilla fighter. This discovery brings him back to his original film and leads him to find the relationship that exists between the origins of Colombian cinema and what the media called "falsos positivos" a painful recent even in which it was found out that the army killed innocent youngsters and dressed then up as guerrilla fighters to give the impression they were winning the armed conflict.

In the middle of the Algerian Sahara, in her relay, a woman writes her History, she welcomes, for a cigarette, a coffee or eggs, truckers, wandering beings and dreams, Her name is Malika.

The portrait of a father as seen through the eyes of his daughter by means of a photo album. A travel diary from the 1970s, starting in Japan and around the world. Father and daughter cross views on the memories of the old images and words, sharing the will to bring them to the present day.

Is it possible for a building to change the life of a neighborhood? Yes, more so when it makes the view of the Province and the Andes Mountains disappear.

Four celluloid letters sent from different parts of the globe to Paul Morrissey, director of Trash, Flesh and Heat, collaborator with Warhol and agent for the Velvet Underground.

Chola and Football are a couple of street dogs that live in the Los Reyes skatepark. A microcosm is organized around them, composed of things, animals and young adolescents in conflict with an adult world that they reject but are required to enter.

During a sleepover one night, teenage girls share stories with each other about things that frightened them.

In his apartment in São Paulo, between making coffee and gay hook-ups, Marcelo casually and sincerely discussed his longings and beliefs.

His home is war. Her home is Portugal. Yet the young, newly married wife of Lord von Ketten is determined to make her husband's family abode, an inhospitable castle on a cliff in northern Italy, into her home.

Four queer and trans youth in New York City struggle to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world as their lives curiously merge with the 1980s German novel So Schön by Ronald M. Schernikau.

Two women who have shared a life together are faced with the terminal disease of one of them. The sick woman decides to decline treatment and they move to a small house in the forest until the day death comes.

Two lives cross in New York. Lamis, a Lebanese woman, has just moved to the city and describes her impressions while the Brazilian man Wilson has already lived there for 10 years. We never see them on the screen, but their relationship is described in poetic Arabic and Portuguese voice-overs, which contrast starkly with the images, shot in New York, Berlin and Brazil. In this way, the film speaks literally to the imagination: the events take place between what we see and what we hear. This hybrid form of documentary, fiction, travelogue and letters makes this 'film diary' reminiscent of News from Home (1977) by Chantal Akerman. Whereas Akerman brings together two different worlds based on letters from her mother in Belgium and images of New York, While We Are Here adds macro and geopolitical issues, such as globalisation and migration, to this approach. The main thread remains intimate and human: desire, love, fear and memories.

A young man, posted to a bird shelter as part of his rehab, joins a soft spoken community that includes a mice breeder, a vet, a keeper, and a first aid giver.

What divides us and what keeps us together? Maybe, both questions have the same answer. The body revealing itself to the mind. The mind to the space. The space, a place without walls which its inhabitants can't get out of. Confinement in a place that seems open. People like the objects of a place. A place as a body they can't get out of. The body, a group of membranes, the tissue that contains us. The fear that this tissue might not contain us anymore. A giant's skeleton appears.

"Sacavém" is a journey through Pedro Costa's films and focuses on his work on "Casa De Lava", "Ossos", "In Vanda's Room", "Colossal Youth" and "Horse Money". Built on the visual and sound landscape of Pedro Costa's films and accompanied by his owns reflections on the matter, "Sa-cavém" serves the audience as a window on how Costa's cinema is sensed and conceived.

After getting out of jail where she learned how to take care of the sick, Alma, an albino woman, decides to recover something much more important than her own freedom. In order to do so, Alma is forced to take care of Clemente (a hypochondriac with an OCD to avoid a sudden death) at night. The relationship between them will transit from suspicion and fear to tenderness and love.

The Unicorn is about outsider musician Peter Grudzien, the lone musical force behind The Unicorn LP, possibly the first openly gay country album. This film documents Peter as he navigates mental illness and the chaos of his family to ultimately find refuge in the creative world of music.

Indianara fights for the survival of transgender people in Brazil and braces up for one last battle.

30 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain the legacy of the German Democratic Republic is at stake in the ruins of the 'Progress' factory. Once producing harvester machinery the factory grounds today house asylum seekers who are confronted by weekly racist demonstrations in East Germany. Former factory workers of 'Progress' help Syrian refugees with their German Integration Course. What starts with a German language lesson in the 'Progress' ruin ends with classes of political education and a GDR military camp. Driven by the personal entanglement of the director the re- enactments are deconstructed and the social conditioning of the GDR everyday life becomes apparent. In this memory work the language itself is of importance which invites assumptions, but never confirms them. It wallows in memories and forbids itself to do so at the same time. Archive material re-establishes the bond of a socialist friendship between the GDR and Syria that connected both countries in the 1980s. The local choir comments with GDR-songs whereby everyone and everything stands for more than just himself. The 'Progress' ruin becomes a symbol of the lost homeland which blurs the borders between the GDR and Syria and between the past and today. The attempt of a convergence, a socialist utopia.