FILMS 2018

Michael and Dafna are devastated when army officials show up at their home to announce the death of their son Jonathan. Michael becomes increasingly frustrated by overzealous mourning relatives and well-meaning army bureaucrats. While his sedated wife rests, Michael spirals into a whirlwind of anger only to experience one of life’s unfathomable twists which rival the surreal military experiences of his son.

Countries: Israel, Germany, France
Language: Hebrew, Arabic, German
Duration: 114 min.
Directed by Samuel Maoz
Written by Samuel Maoz
Produced by Michael Weber, Viola Fügen, Eitan Mansuri, Cedomir Kolar, Marc Baschet, Michel Merkt
Director of Photography: Giora Bejach
Main Cast: Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler, Yonatan Shiray

Einstein said that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. Foxtrot is a dance of a man with his fate. It’s a philo- sophical parable trying to deconstruct this vague concept called ›fate‹ through a story about father and son. They are far from each other, but despite the distance and the total separation between them they change each other’s fate, and of course their fates. The challenge I set for myself was to deal with the gap between the things we control and those that are beyond our control. I chose to build my story as a classic Greek tragedy in which the hero creates his own punishment and fight against anyone who tries to save him. He is obviously unaware of the outcome that his action will bring about. On the contrary, he is doing something that seems right and logical to do. And that’s the difference between a casual coincidence and a coincidence that looks like a plan of fate. Chaos is settled. The punishment corresponds to the sin in its exact form. There is something classic and circular in this process. And there is also an irony that is always associated with fate. A structure of a Greek tragedy in three sequences seemed to me like an ideal dramatic platform to deliver my idea. I wanted to tell a story that would be relevant to the crooked reality in which I, and we, live. A story with a relevant statement – local and universal. A story about two generations – the second generation of the Holocaust survivors and the third generation – and each of them experienced trauma during his army service. Part of this endless traumatic situation was forced upon us and part of it could have been avoided. A drama about a family that breaks apart and reunites. A conflict between love and guilt; love that copes with extreme emotional pain. And as in my previous film, Lebanon, I wanted to continue to investigate, in an intensive manner that combines criticism and compassion, a human dynamic created in a closed unit.
The film has a shot where you see a screen of a laptop with a notice of mourning and next to it a bowl with oranges. This frame is the story of my country in four words – oranges and dead soldiers. When my eldest daughter went to high school, she never woke up on time, and in order not to be late she would ask me to call for a taxi. This habit cost us quite a bit of money, and it seemed to me like a bad education. One morning I got mad and told her to take the bus like everyone else. And if that’s why she’d be late, then she’d be late. Maybe she should learn the hard way to wake up in time. Her bus was line 5. Half an hour after she left, I see in a news site that a terrorist blew himself up in line 5, and that dozens of people were killed. I called her but the cellular operator collapsed because of the unexpected load. Half an hour later, she returned home. She was late for the bus that exploded. She saw him leave the station and took the next bus. And I’m still considered lucky because I have girls …

Samuel Maoz was born in Tel Aviv in 1962. At 13, he received a 8mm movie camera and a roll of film. He wanted to recreate a gunfight scene he had seen in a western and set his camera on the tracks of an approaching train. It got smashed to smithereens. However, by 18, he had already made dozens of films.As a young soldier he was part of a tank crew. He trained as a gunner, firing at barrels of fuel that exploded like fireworks. It felt like a Luna Park game. Only when war broke out in June 1982, did he learn the horrors of being a gunner. In 1987 he completed his cinema studies, but it took him 20 years more to finally create his first feature film, Lebanon. He has worn a suit only twice in his life: on his Bar-Mitzva, and when he won the Golden Lion Award in Venice for Lebanon. Eight years later he wrote and directed his second film, Foxtrot.

The transformation of a strong woman torn from her contentend world during a sailing trip.
Rike – mid-30s, a doctor from Europe – embodies a typically Western model of happiness and success. She is educated, confident, determined and committed. We see Rike’s everyday life, as an overworked emergency doctor, before she sets out on a much-needed holiday on Gibraltar. There she fulfils a long-held dream and sails out to sea alone in her sailing boat. Her goal: Ascension Island in the Atlantic Ocean. But her dream holiday is quickly broken off on the high seas, when, after a storm, she finds herself near a stricken refugee boat. Unless she intervenes, around a hundred people will drown – their utterly overloaded boat has sprung a leak. Rike follows maritime law and radios for help – legally, she is not obliged to do any more. But when her calls are left unanswered, and then rejected for spurious reasons, she decides to overcome her fear and try to rescue whoever she can.

Countries: Germany, Austria
Language: English, German, Swahili
Duration: 94 min.
Directed by Wolfgang Fischer
Written by Wolfgang Fischer, Ika Künzel
Produced by Marcos Kantis, Martin Lehwald, Michal Pokorny
Director of Photography Benedict Neuenfels
Main Cast: Susanne Wolff, Gedion Oduor Wekes

RESEARCH: Every day at Europe’s external borders, people die in their quest for peace as they attempt to save themselves by crossing the sea to our continent. That these people, according to our research, can still rely on little support from official institutions was confirmed by our discussions with SEA WATCH, ME´DECINS SANS FRONTIE’RES, BORDERLINE EUROPE and MOAS, who are among the private aid organisations present.
GENERAL: Encounters in the middle of the ocean between pleasure boats and overloaded, stricken refugee boats are a nightmare scenario much-discussed among sailors, and such incidents are becoming increasingly common. What happens if a solo sailor (a yachtswoman alone on a boat) finds herself in this situation? Inspired by true events, Styx pursues this question in a fictional fashion, illustrating how economic interests compete with humanitarian principles, how excessive demand usurps compassion, and how indifference destroys all hope. The film deals with individual dreams of paradise, and revolves around central questions of identity: Who are we, who do we want to be, and who do we have to be?
CAST: Our central character is a determined, successful woman with life experience, and is also a passionate water sports enthusiast. Award-winning actress Susanne Wolff – herself a blue-water sailor with an International Certificate of Competence – encapsulates the main character’s central qualities. Leading man Gedion Odour Wekesa is a schoolboy from Kibera/Nairobi. He takes acting classes as part of the ONE FINE DAY organisation’s funding programme, and beat 40 other boys to win the role.
STYLE: Styx documents, in a realistic fashion, the hero’s journey of its female protagonist. She spends half the film alone on the high seas, on board an 11-metre yacht. Consequently, for the most part, dialogue plays little role. Instead, the sounds of extreme nature, and of the technical measures employed to confront her, take over. The majority of the film was shot in real-life conditions on the open sea. The set is confined to the actual unmodified surface area of an 11-metre yacht. Sound and noises are genuine. The camera focusses throughout on the female protagonist. Only at the beginning and end, in which she becomes a vanishing part of a larger whole, is her location contextualised. In the film’s second half, a confusion of international languages complements the constant background noise, underlining the proverbial redundancy of language with such subject matter. Only at decisive turning points is there complete silence.
STRUCTURE: The film’s narrative is consistently linear, and divided into three main phases.
Phase 1: We begin in Cologne, “on safe ground”, where the heroine dominates the situation. Here, she can exercise her full capabilities, relying on the unconditional help of all involved as well as on the smooth running of failsafe systems.
Phase 2: Now, as she sails without firm ground beneath her feet, the heroine remains mistress of the situation. Even in difficult conditions, she keeps her boat fully under control, staying connected via radio to her surrounding world, on whose cooperation she can count at any time. Expertly, she eliminates any smaller impediments alone.
Phase 3: Only in the wake of her encounter with the shipwreck, and the subsequent lack of support from others, does our heroine gradually lose control of the situation.

Wolfgang Fischer was born in 1970 in Vienna/Austria. He studied Psychology and Painting at the University of Vienna followed by studies of Film at the Art Academy of Du¨sseldorf and at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne. Beside various teaching assignements he was working as an assistent for Paul Morrissey and Nan Hoover. He was awarded a scholarship by the Munich Screenplay Program and by Equinoxe Europe.

Sukhum is the capital of Abkhazia, a tiny, unrecognized republic on the shores of the Black Sea. On its highest hill lies a medical institute of research on monkeys, established by the Soviets in the 1920s. Legend states that it was meant to create a hybrid between man and ape. This creature never came to life, neither did the communist New Man. Today, men and monkeys are caged in a territory ravaged by war and decades of cruelty, both victims of a failed series of experiments.

Original Title: OUALE LUI TARZAN
Countries: Romania, France
Language: Russian
Duration: 107 min.
Directed by Alexandru Solomon
Written by Alexandru Solomon
Produced by Ada Solomon, Cedric Bonin, Pascaline Geoffroy
Director of Photography: Radu Gorgos

This film takes us to a country that doesn’t exist on international maps. It was born from the ashes of a system supposed to bring only happiness to humanity: Soviet communism. In the capital of this country lies a relic of another utopia: that of Science, which was meant to solve the rest of our problems. None of this happened. Here, human and non-human primates look into each other’s eyes. Humans cling to their hopes, while inflicting pain to the monkeys. Animals are brought to life in cages, with no other end in sight. And people live in a limbo, stuck between the memories of a savage war and a present that doesn’t offer much. We slide among these post-utopian ruins; we travel on the thin border between humanity and its animal nature; we look for a crumb of faith. What is left to cling to?

In the early 1990s, Alexandru Solomon emerged as a young director of photography, making documentary and fiction films. He was among the first Romanian filmmakers who committed themselves to a then compromised genre; today, he is one of the leading political filmmakers coming out of Romania and active on the international documentary scene. His recent work triggered public debates about the function of documentary film within the public sphere and contributed to re-establishing documentary film as an arena for re-framing Romania’s recent history.

On July 22 2011 more than 500 youths at a political summer camp on an island outside Oslo were attacked by an armed, right-wing extremist. Earlier that day he bombed a Government building in Oslo before making his way to Utøya island. In this first fictional movie about the attack we get to know Kaja (18) and her friends. The movie starts when the youngsters, shocked by the bombing in Oslo, are reassuring their relatives that they are far away from the incident. Suddenly, the safe atmosphere is shattered when shots are heard. We then follow Kaja as she tries to survive – minute by minute.

Original Title: UTØYA 22. JULI
Country: Norway
Language: Norwegian
Duration: 92 min.
Directed by Erik Poppe
Written by Siv Rajendram Eliassen, Anna Bache-Wiig
Produced by Stein B. Kvae, Finn Gjerdrum
Main Cast: Andrea Berntzen

Erik Poppe (born 24 June 1960) is a Norwegian film director, screenwriter and former cinematographer. Poppe is regarded as one of Europe’s most experienced and compelling directors recognized for his work with actors and impeccably well crafted multi-pronged narratives. His movies are often built around strong ensemble casts, sharp writing, impressive camera work and an uncanny knack for rhythm and music in the editing. During the last decade Poppe has become one of the most frequently awarded film directors from Scandinavia. Poppe is probably the only director in Norway who have showed the ability to hit both the critics as well as the audience, taking high admissions in domestic release. His Oslo Trilogy as well as A Thousand Times Good Night and The Kings Choice has been sold to territories worldwide. Erik Poppe is co-owner of Paradox Film and the Paradox Group. A series of companies producing features.