My top 25 of SIFF 2006

From the youth directed novel of the same name by Greogor Tressnow comes a film by Detlev Buck that is a realistic portrait of life in the section of Berlin called Neukölln. It's about power and weakness, delinquents and victims, and the difficulties a 15-year-old faces in a poor and criminal environment.

In a Copenhagen suburb the 19-year-old Per is found unconscious after having been badly beaten up. He is taken to hospital in a coma. The police have no clues, but the air is thick with suspicion. His mother struggles to maintain her faith in his survival. His younger sister, Mie, begins to pick up rumors. Her boyfriend, Shadi, suspects that his elder brother is behind the assault but he cannot tell anyone. Many well-meaning people find themselves at sea in a fable about emotions leading us astray.

A matriarch organizes a feast with her family, in which she will name her successor.

A Lebanese boy gets separated from his family during the civil war and ends up in Sweden.

A neo-Nazi sentenced to community service at a church clashes with the blindly devoted minister.

A boy, inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., challenges a repressive school authority in 1969 Denmark.

14-year-old Madeinusa comes of age during the Easter festivities of her tiny, isolated village.

A woman is taken along with her mother in 1910 to a far-away desert by her husband, and after his passing, is forced to spend the next 59 years of her life hopelessly trying to escape it.

A woman breaks up with her boyfriend of seven years. Devastated, she throws herself into another relationship and decides to get married, only to have her exboyfriend return to her...

A group of teenage boys from Tbilisi take a trip to Azerbaijan to buy drugs, and end up fighting in the Nagorno-Karabakh War, when they are captured by Azerbaijani militants, with one subsequently being captured by the Armenians. During the course of events, the main character has flashbacks to his relationship with his father, as well as a depressive prostitute.

Chinese-Canadian Eve Eng was born in 1966, in the year of the fire horse. In Chinese culture, fire horse children are notorious for being troublesome. In 1975, nine year old Eve is looking for some meaning for her life, especially after her mother, May-Lin Eng, miscarries, and her paternal grandmother passes away, the latter event particularly concerning not so much for the event itself but the circumstances leading to the death. The Engs follow traditional Buddhist philosophy, primarily as a cultural tradition. While her husband Frank Eng is away in China dealing with his mother's burial, May-Lin doesn't stop their eldest daughter, Karena Eng, from pursuing knowledge of and eventual faith in Christianity, most specifically Catholicism. May-Lin sees it as a cushion for ensuring a good life and good after-life, as much of Christian teaching follows that of Buddhism anyway. Eve follows in her sister's footsteps. While Karena becomes a devout Catholic to the expense of her Buddhist upbringing, Eve takes whatever she can from wherever she can to apply to her life for it to make sense, often with disastrous or confusing results. It isn't until she comes face to face with the fire horse that life becomes a little more understandable for Eve.

A college professor abandons his family and his career in order to champion his mistress, a student radical accused of killing a policeman.

The life and times of Albert Pierrepoint - Britain's most prolific hangman.

In order to pay for his divorce, a plumber marries a Chinese woman who needs citizenship.

In the 1980s, encouraged by the government, a large number of families leave Chinese cities to settle in the poorer regions of the country, in order to develop local industry. The film's main character is a 19 years old girl who lives in the Guizhou province, where her parents have settled. That's where she has grown up, where her friends are and where she first experiences love. But her father believes that their future lies in Shanghai. How can they all keep on living together when they don't share the same dreams ?

A music group of girls need to learn to play a song before the school festival.

"Ladrones & Mentirosos" is the heartrending story of three Puerto Rican families struggling to stay together in a society overcome by corruption and drugs. Using a parallel structure, the film focuses on the three generations that comprise each family: teenagers, their parents and their grandparents.

Cui, a Korean woman in China with an incarcerated spouse, supports her son selling kimchi roadside until an ill-fated romance breeds disastrous repercussions.

Scarred Baghdad 2003... confusion, uncertainty and death engulf the bombed ruins of a Psychiatric asylum. Voyeuristically we move between the past and the present of three Iraqi lives entangled by the chaos of the American 'Shock and Awe' campaign...

After 22 years, Aziz decides to return to his hometown, to sell some family possessions, including the house where he was born. But for his astonishment, the place is now a small restaurant, run by four women, one of them a girl whom he once dated. Attieh, the girl, tries to convince him not to sell the place by, instead of telling him a story a day as Sheherazade, cooking him a delicious dish every day.

After surviving a shipwreck, Juan Olmedo seeks solace and redress together with his brother Alfonso (a mentally handicapped person) and his niece Tamara in an Andalusian village in the Atlantic coast of the province of Cádiz, seeking to overcome the death of Charo (Juan's child love, wife of his brother Damián, and Juan's lover) in a traffic collision. He develops a bond and sexual relationship with the maid, the lively Maribel, while Panrico (Maribel's former partner) and Sara (Juan's neighbor and Maribel's friend) stay aloof.

The film takes place today in a small southern town on the territory of the former USSR. The main character, Edik Letov, helps people to look for relatives. He finds them in Canada, Israel, Switzerland - For Edik, this is business, and business is reliable. If the real relatives are not, Edik will arrange a replacement. And everything seems to be going well in his small company. But since his clients are lonely people, they pour out so much love and warmth on their foreign guests that they cannot even think about their imagination - and they get imbued with a reciprocal feeling .

Dr. Alam, a very profiled specialist in neurology and a successful surgeon, is drowned in his professional and social work, in a way that he has totally forgotten all about his son Saman. Samantha the beautiful nights of desert with it starfull sky attracts Saman to itself and the young boy falls in love with night sky and observation of stars. Due to an event the doctor leaves his profession and work behind and goes through the desert to find his son.

Famous pianist Zetterström returns home to his native Denmark, to give a concert, just to find out that the choices he has made in his life have affected his love life greatly.

When a man and woman flirt with each other at a wedding reception, the sexual tension seems spontaneous. As they break from the party to a hotel room, the flirtation turns into a night filled with passion and remorse.