BETTER MAN
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QUIET LIFE
Director: Alexandros Avranas
Sergei and Alina, both teachers, have fled persecution in Russia with their two daughters to Sweden, where they have applied for asylum. They do their best to fit in: the parents work hard, the children throw themselves into their Swedish school lives and the family welcomes regular inspections, proving what excellent Swedish citizens they would be. It is a shock when their application is rejected, after which the younger daughter Katja collapses into a coma caused by Child Resignation Syndrome, a well-documented phenomenon among refugee children. The callousness of the authorities and its institutions, which seem designed to strip everyone of humanity and hope, is chilling, only just trumped by the film’s core values of justice and resilient love.
U ARE THE UNIVERSE
Director: Pavlo Ostrikov
Far into the future, Earth is peppered with nuclear waste storage units overstuffed with radioactive garbage which, thanks to an increase in volcanic activity, is destroying the planet. Space trucker Andriy’s mission is to dump this waste on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons, from a rig with only a down-at-heel gym and a wise-cracking robot called Martin to keep him entertained. Then he sees the Earth explode behind him. Does this mean he is the last person left alive? Apparently not: the voice of a French woman reaches him from a distant space station. He just has to find a way to blast in her direction. Ostrikov contemplates the awful reality of loneliness, but provides plenty of laughs along the way.
BLACK DOG
Director: Guan Hu
While China buzzes in anticipation of the Beijing Olympics, Lang returns from a decade in prison to his home town to find it largely deserted, its crumbling concrete blocks being torn down to make way for a new industrial city. The exodus of humans means that the area is now overrun with stray dogs; Lang, needing a job, joins a hastily assembled extermination team supposed to round them up but, when a dog suspected of having rabies adopts him, he realizes his real mission is to save the animals, including the ones at the nearly deserted local zoo.. In a riveting, almost wordless performance, Eddie Peng shows Lang recover his humanity, even as the landscape around him becomes increasingly desolate.
YALLA PARKOUR
Director: Areeb Zuaiter
One of Zuaiter’s strongest memories of her mother is her radiant smile as a young woman on the beach in Gaza on one of the family’s regular holidays to Palestine. Her cousins would mock Areeb’s “outsider” accent, but according to her mother, this was where she belonged. From her current home in the US, Zuaiter combs the web for images that evoke something of her mother and finds teenager Ahmed Matar and his friends, a parkour team who use the ruins of Gaza’s bombed buildings as obstacle courses, laughing for joy against a background of explosions. She tracks Ahmed down online and the two become friends; meanwhile, he is determined that parkour will be his route out of the prison their shared homeland has become.