Venice Winners

A spiritual shaman is a crucial member of the community, the one who everyone depends on when in need of moral and spiritual guidance. What happens when that shaman is a 17-year-old high school student who must balance his profound Spiritual responsibilities while also juggling another life - that of a high school student - working hard to success in the cold, callous society of modern Mongolia. Introducing Ze, 17-year-old gentle Mongolian shaman...

November 22, 1963: John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, is assassinated in Dallas. His widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Natalie Portman), a First Lady admired for her elegance and culture, struggles to overcome the trauma, determined to shed light on the president's political legacy and celebrate the man he was. Director Pablo Larraín portrays of one of the most important and tragic moments in American history, seen through the eyes of the iconic First Lady. "Jackie" celebrated its premiere at the 73rd Venice Film Festival.

Takumi and his daughter Hana live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. Like generations before them, they live a modest life according to the cycles and order of nature. One day, the village inhabitants become aware of a plan to build a glamping site near Takumi’s house; offering city residents a comfortable ‘escape’ to nature. When two company representatives from Tokyo arrive in the village to hold a meeting, it becomes clear that the project will have a negative impact on the local water supply, causing unrest. The agency’s mismatched intentions endanger both the ecological balance of the nature plateau and their way of life, with an aftermath that affects Takumi’s life. Following his Oscar-winning "Drive My Car", Ryusuke Hamaguchi's "Evil Does Not Exist" is a poetic parable about the complex relationship between humankind and nature. This subtly and precisely told film - awarded the Silver Lion at the 80th Venice Film Festival - proves once again that Hamaguchi is one of the most exciting voices in independent cinema.

Rashomon is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made: Three men take shelter at one of the gates leading to Kyoto, waiting for the rain to stop. We are under the Heian era (9th - 12th centuries). To pass the time, they discuss an event that took place recently: the discovery of the body of a samurai, probably killed by the bandit Tajomaru. The three men were in fact called to testify at the trial. They each report what they said at the trial, and what they saw. Four versions are opposed, the widow - who was allegedly raped by the bandit - also having her own. So what happened?

When teenage Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis Presley at a party, the man who is already a meteoric rock-and-roll superstar becomes someone entirely unexpected in private moments: a thrilling crush, an ally in loneliness, a gentle best friend. Through Priscilla’s eyes, Sofia Coppola tells the unseen side of a great American myth in Elvis and Priscilla's long courtship and turbulent marriage, from a German army base to his dream-world estate at Graceland, in this deeply felt and ravishingly detailed portrait of love, fantasy, and fame. With subtlety, director Sophia Coppola draws the portrait of a woman trapped in a gilded cage. She places Priscilla Presley, usually in the King's shadow, in the spotlight and shows the American myth of this turbulent marriage, from the point of view of this infatuated young girl who would become a strong, independent woman. Priscilla Presley was involved in the film as producer; her autobiographical book "Elvis and Me" was the starting point. This film, which tells the story of an emancipation, resurrects the 60s and 70s, with elaborate historical settings, elegant costumes, opulent make-up and, of course, a lively soundtrack by Phoenix. "Priscilla" premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Cailee Spaeny won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for her sensitive interpretation of the role of Priscilla.

Saint-Omer court of law. 30-year-old novelist Rama attends the trial of Laurence Coly, a young woman who stands accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter after abandoning her to the rising tide on a beach in northern France. Rama is planning to fashion a contemporary retelling of the myth of Medea from the case. But as the trial continues, nothing goes as she had expected, and the 4 months pregnant author will have to question the truth of her own experience of maternity.

France, 1963. Anne is a bright young student with a promising future ahead of her. But when she falls pregnant, she sees the opportunity to finish her studies and escape the constraints of her social background disappearing. With her final exams fast approaching and her belly growing, Anne resolves to act, even if she has to confront shame and pain, even if she must risk prison to do so... An adaptation of Annie Ernaux's eponymous novel, looking back on her experience with abortion when it was still illegal in France in the 1960s.

In the midst of a divorce, Miriam Besson decides to ask for exclusive custody of her son, in order to protect him from a father that she is accusing of violence. The judge-in-charge of the file grants a shared custody to the father whom it considers abused. Taken as a hostage between his parents, Julien Besson will do everything to prevent the worst from happening.

This time, Jafar Panahi is making a film about a pair of lovers who want to flee to France with forged passports - from Turkey. But how does the Iranian director, who is banned from working and not allowed to leave the country, manage this? "No Bears" portrays two parallel love stories. In both, the lovers are troubled by hidden, inevitable obstacles, the force of superstition and the mechanics of power. Like in some of his earlier work, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi plays a version of himself.

In the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so called “green border” between Belarus and Poland, refugees from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach the European Union are trapped in a geopolitical crisis cynically engineered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. In an attempt to provoke Europe, refugees are lured to the border by propaganda promising easy passage to the EU. Pawns in this hidden war, the lives of Julia, a newly minted activist who has given up her comfortable life, Jan, a young border guard, and a Syrian family intertwine. 30 years after EUROPA EUROPA, three-time Oscar Nominee Agnieszka Holland’s poignant new feature GREEN BORDER opens our eyes, speaks to the heart, and challenges us to reflect on the moral choices that fall to ordinary people every day.

Young Dr. Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama) returns to Edo following three years of medical training in Nagasaki. Believing he will become a physician to Shogunate, he is badly disillusioned to learn he must work in the poorly-financed Koishikawa Clinic, which is headed by a Dr. Niide (Toshiro Mifune), known to most as Red Beard (Akahige). Everything in the clinic is repulsive to Yasumoto, and he becomes determined to get himself discharged. "Akahige - Red Beard" is an ingeniously crafted plea for humanity, a still topical appeal for a medicine (and science) that does not treat people as "cases", but serves them by working together and taking precautionary measures - and thus helps them. "Akahige" was Kurosawa's last film in which Toshiro Mifune appeared, and it is Kurosawa's last film shot in black-and-white.

Yumiko is a young woman from Osako, whose life is defined by the death of her loved ones. She lost her grandmother at the age of twelve, and her husband Ikuo, who is the reincarnation of her grandmother to her, commits suicide some months after the birth of their child. Once more Yumiko loses a person she had really loved. Five years later she marries Tamio, a man who lives by the sea together with his eight-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Her pain has ceased until the day she returns to her place of birth and gets caught up by her memories.

With his father in prison and his brother abroad for work, young Rakib works as the lone housekeeper in an empty mansion belonging to Purna, a retired general whose family Rakib’s clan have served for centuries in a rural Indonesian town. After Purna returns home to start his mayoral election campaign, Rakib bonds with the older man, who becomes a close mentor and father figure, and finds his calling as Purna’s assistant in work and life. When Purna’s election poster is found vandalised one day, Rakib doesn’t hesitate to track down the culprit, kicking off an escalating chain of violence.

In the wake of Princess Diana's death, the very private and tradition-bound Queen Elizabeth II and her family remain stoic and hidden behind the castle walls. While the heartbroken public becomes disillusioned with the Queen's absence, the increasingly popular new Prime Minister, Tony Blair battles to convince the monarchy that its desire for privacy could lead to its ultimate downfall. Director Stephen Frears focuses on the British royal family and shows the life of the royals at the time when the British throne was at its most shaky. For her spellbinding performance, Helen Mirren won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

The film is a study of the 20th century cult of personality - the myth, the lure and the corruption of the political hero who is a fusion of two characters. Drawing from the so-called Dilessi incident of 1870 (updated in the film to the dawn of the twentieth century), this Megalexandros is a bandit of the sort that typically plagued nineteenth century Greece. Wrapped in the spiritual cloak of yet another Megalexandros - a legendary Greek liberator and King Arthur-like figure whose tale originated in 1453 under Turkish domination and has come down through oral tradition over the centuries - he becomes a leader of mysterious charisma. He kidnaps a group of English aristocrats and takes them to a mountain village where he is attempting to establish an agrarian commune among a company of Italian anarchists. The socialist hero becomes a Stalin-like tyrant whose trademark silence only reinforces his power. The film is a true work of demythification - from the roots of myth to the false promises of the new century.

The background of Andrei Tarkowski's first feature film is the Second World War, with the 12-year-old boy Iwan at the centre. As part of the official programme of films, it is still astonishing today how the Russian managed to shoot a film that stood across the system and showed the war from the perspective of a boy. Iwan seems totally hardened after losing his family and escaping a camp, he sees little prospects and quite simply wants to avenge the death of his loved ones. Tarkowski shows his masterly skills in cinematography in this early oeuvre. Using simple means, he tells the story in incredibly strong black-and-white tableaux.

The second part of Satyajit Ray's famous Apu trilogy, this Indian drama focuses on young Apu, who lives with his mother, Sarbajaya (Kanu Bandyopadhyay), and father, Harihar (Pinaki Sengupta), near the Ganges River. When Harihar dies suddenly, Apu and Sarbajaya move to a small village to be near relatives. Eventually, she reluctantly allows her son (now played by Smaran Ghosal) to attend school in Calcutta. As Apu acclimates to life in the city, Sarbajaya struggles with his absence.

Let’s imagine that there is a new craft, and that it is called "replacing". Let’s imagine an unemployed man who would practice such craft every day. So much so, that he would actually work beyond measure, and that he would be, in his own way, a happy man. All he does is take on, for a few hours, the role of absentees who duck - for more or less serious reasons, their official occupation. He makes do with just enough, our hero, because money isn’t everything in life: one needs to keep in shape, and not letting oneself go in times of, how to say, dark crises. Let’s imagine, also, that there is a twenty years old young man (his son) who plays the sax like a God, and is therefore lucky, as he is an artist. Let’s then imagine Lucia, restless and wary, that hides a secret behind her desire to get ahead. Will they get to the next episode safe and sound?

Sudan, province of Aljazira, nowadays - When Muzamil was born, a prophecy by the holy man of the village predicts that he will die when he is 20 years old. Muzamil’s father cannot stand the doom and travels away from home. Sakina, as a single mother, raises her son with over protection. One day, Muzamil turns 19.

A Nurse, a Paramedic, a Gymnast and her Coach have formed a service for hire. They stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends, or colleagues of the deceased. The company is called Alps while their leader, the Paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc. Although the Alps members operate under a discipline regime demanded by their leader, the Nurse doesn’t.

LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST is a film about the void. It is a film about despair, about the failure of contemporary society. The prodigal father who figures in almost every Angelopoulos film here has evaporated into his mythical essence - leaving his children to become the wanderers in search of him. In the «chaos», two children appear, little Alexandros and his older sister Voula. In order to exorcise their loneliness, they invent a secret universe for themselves, inhabited by their dreams. Every night they go to a train station to watch the departure of a train to Germany, where they have been deceived by their mother (herself an off-screen presence) into believing that their absent father is living. One night they finally dare to get on the train. But their voyage turns out to be hazardous and pointless and disappointing. They confront suffering, physical and moral illness, jealousy, evil and death, if also love - as many ordeals and rites as initiations. Evading the half-hearted pursuit of the police and uncaring relatives, sneak onto trains, hitchhike in vans and lorries, and suffering poverty, rape and exploitation, take a dangerous leap of faith, an eerie plunge into liberation and danger. The familiar Greek landscape - the cafes, the depopulated towns and deserted beaches - are played for a strangely harsh fairytale quality, seen through the eyes of two children whose introduction to the real world borders on the surreal. The film is filled with extraordinary, unforgettable moments that are at once real and hallucinatory and contains intriguing references to other Angelopoulos' films. The children even encounter the Travelling Players now, thirteen years later, without a stage to act on, their costumes put up for sale. At the end Alexandros tells Voula the same story from Genesis that she told him at the start: «In the beginning there was chaos.» The children do finally reach the border, but of course there is no border with Germany and perhaps the river they cross is actually the Styx and perhaps their whole journey was a search for order in a chaotic world.

Marina is 23 and lives together with her father in an industrial village on the Greek coast. She finds the human species to be peculiar, almost daunting, if it weren't for Bella, her only and very unconventional friend. Marina derives her first sexual insights from the animal documentaries of Sir David Attenborough - "Attenberg", as she calls him. Bella, on the other hand, shows Marina a completely different approach to her own sexuality. This leads to bizarre moments in Marina's approach to an unknown table football player, as well as in discussions with her sick father. Her dad, an architect unimpressed by the twentieth century, prepares for his self-determined "exit" from life. He considers this epoch to be overestimated and does not want to surrender to his cancer. Using these two men and their friend Bella, Marina examines the last mysteries of the human fauna.

The news of the death of their son Jonathan, who was doing his military service, throws the life, psyche and marriage of Michael and Dafna off track. Driven by deep sadness and lack of understanding, a storm of raging anger develops in Michael, marked by uncertainties and traumas.

A Japanese man searches the internet looking for his dream car, a 1967 Citroen DS (in French: Déesse, or "Goddess") . He locates one in Australia and travels there to buy it. Upon his arrival he finds the seller dead. A 17 year-old blind girl tells him she can take him to find the real owner. Together they embark on a strange and erotic journey into the arid Australian desert, populated by abandoned mining towns - a desolate land and a dark haunting past. Before long, their separate quests become one: a shared desire to transcend the past and find redemption, achieved under the benevolent eye of the Goddess.

When Miron’s beloved wife Tanya passes away, he asks his best friend Aist to help him say goodbye to her according to the rituals of the Merja culture, an ancient Finno-Ugric tribe from Lake Nero, a picturesque region in West-Central Russia. Although the Merja people assimilated into Russians in the 17th century, their myths and traditions live on in their descendants’ modern life. The two men set out on a roadtrip thousands of miles across the boundless lands. With them, two small birds in a cage. Along the way, as is custom for the Merjas, Miron shares intimate memories of his conjugal life. But as they reach the banks of the sacred lake where they will forever part with the body, he realizes he wasn’t the only one in love with Tanya...

Anberber has studied in Germany and returns post-graduate to Ethiopia. He is full of hope that he can support his country with his newly acquired knowledge. It's a story about hope and disillusionment, about foreignness and homeland.

After a forty-year civil war, the radio in Chad announces that the government has decided to grant amnesty to all war criminals. Outraged by the news, Gumar Abatcha orders his grandson Atim (Ali Bacha Barkai), a 16-year-old youth, to trace the man who killed his father and to execute him. Atim obeys him and, armed with his father's own gun, he goes in search of Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro), the man who made him an orphan before he was born. It does not take long before he finds him. Nassara is running a bakery. Unexpectedly, the taciturn Nassara takes Atim under his wing as the son he never had and begins teaching him how to run the bakery. The emotionally conflicted Atim is drawn into the life of Nassara and his pregnant wife (Aziza Hisseine), before a finale that Variety described as "sharp, fast and unexpected."

In the sorrow of exile, a group of Argentinians in Paris seek solace and connection to their culture by staging a set of tangos. The film alternates between their vibrant rehearsals and their circumscribed lives in low-rent apartments, underemployed, fitfully communicating with families back home, trying to make do with what they hope are only temporary arrangements in a foreign land. Director Fernando Solanas had to spend several years in exile, some of them in Paris. There he tells us the story of people from Argentina spending their time in Paris and longing for Buenos Aires. One of the strongest movies about living in exile.

About Endlessness sees writer-director Roy Andersson surveying the human condition with equal parts striking clarity, tenderness, and deadpan existential wit.

Mira, a young woman from Russia, comes to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, to visit her father, a player who often loses and finally even has to give away Mira to an old man. But Daler, a young player, falls in love with Mira and simply abducts her into his rather weird world. Daler is the boss of the local, thoroughly rotten aerial cableway. Its faded yellow cabins are suitable for every cargo: tourists as well as for hay, beer crates, stolen goods and even as a love-home for a clandestine rendez-vous. For Mira, Daler arranges a romantic picnic, floating between heaven and earth. And so begins the love story of Mira and Daler. When the movie ends (but not the love), Mira will have got to know a strange, sometimes exotic world. She will have seen a civil war. She will have accompanied her father to his death and Daler on the way to a new life.

A documentary about how a dominant cultural and demographic institution both sustains their traditional activities and adapts to the digital revolution.

Sam Ali, a young sensitive and impulsive Syrian, left his country for Lebanon to escape the war. To be able to travel to Europe and live with the love of his life, he accepts to have his back tattooed by one of by the World’s most sulfurous contemporary artist. Turning his own body into a prestigious piece of art, Sam will however come to realize that his decision might actually mean anything but freedom.

Eternity And A Day traces the final days of Alexandre (Bruno Ganz), a celebrated Greek writer as he prepares to leave his seaside home forever. While packing, he finds a letter from his long-dead wife, Anna (Isabelle Renauld), who wrote about an enchanted summer day they spent thirty years ago. From that point, Alexandre embarks on a mystical journey through his past and present. Realizing that after spending his entire life chasing after the words of poems and novels, Alexandre wants one final chance to capture the lost precious moments of true happiness, even if only for one day.

Sixth film from the Argentine director Daniel Burman, author of Esperando al Mesías (2000), El abrazo partido (2004) and Derecho de familia (2006). El nido vacío explores the emptiness experienced when children grow up and leave home, suddenly revealing the marital cracks (hidden for years beneath the everyday noise and chaos of family life). In El nido vacío, it’s Leonardo, a successful if somewhat weary author, who finds himself in this situation. Uncomfortable in the social situations demanded by his life as a member of the middle classes in Buenos Aires, Leonardo behaves like a man on the verge of a middle-age crisis, indulgent towards his neurosis and phobic towards the changes occurring around him.

Robbie, a young ne'er do well (Paul Brannigan), a broke new father with a good heart is in serious trouble with the law. When he holds his newborn son for the first time, roguish Robbie is determined that the boy will have a better life, one with more opportunities than he has been offered in this insular, blue collar world. But first Robbie must sort out a variety of pressing problems --his girlfriend's family wants to do him harm and run him out of town being first and foremost among them. He is given a lucky break by a judge who shows mercy, granting him community service instead of jail.

Zama, an officer of the Spanish Crown born in South America, waits for a letter from the King granting him a transfer from the town in which he is stagnating, to a better place. His situation is delicate. He must ensure that nothing overshadows his transfer. He is forced to accept submissively every task entrusted to him by successive Governors who come and go as he stays behind. The years go by and the letter from the King never arrives. When Zama notices everything is lost, he joins a party of soldiers that go after a dangerous bandit. Adapted from Antonio di Benedetto's 1956 classic of Argentinean literature.