Spotlight: Songs of Exile

This latest humanist drama from Eran Riklis, director of The Lemon Tree, centers on a 12-year-old Palestinian refugee and an Israeli fighter pilot shot down over Beirut. The pair forms an unlikely alliance as they make their way across the war-torn country to the Israeli border in 1982. Orphaned Fahed longs to fulfill his father’s dream of planting an olive tree at their ancestral home inside Israel while pilot Yoni is fleeing for his life.

A dream-like elegy about a war-torn part of Colombia as well as a nicely underplayed coming-of-age story, Towrope centers on 19-year-old Alicia. Traumatizing memories invade her mind like a ceaseless storm. Uprooted from her destroyed village by the armed conflict, Alicia tries to start a new life in La Sirga, a decadent hostel on the shores of a great lake in the highlands of the Andes. The house belongs to solitary Oscar, her only family member still living.

In the mountains of Algeria, Islamist groups continue to spread terror. Rashid, a young Jihadist, takes advantage of a national amnesty to rejoin civil society. In keeping with the law “of pardon and national harmony,” he must surrender to the police and give up his weapon. Those who do so are known as “repentants.” But the law can’t erase his crimes. For Rashid, it is the beginning of a journey of violence, secrets and manipulation, especially when he crosses paths with a separated couple whose lives were destroyed five years earlier.

Sharing a common desire to build a better life in Spain, and following the path of thousands before them, 30 Senegalese men and one woman set out across the rough seas in a pirogue – a boat resembling an oversized dinghy. Both heroic and tragic, the journey is the focus of director Moussa Touré’s (author of 8 documentaries and 2 other features) narrative, which premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard competition, and ultimately provides an examination of Senegal, a country that has drifted far off course.

Director Patrick Farrelly & Kate O’Callighan Scheduled to Attend
The title of this film refers to Nuala O’Faolain (1940-2008), author of the bestselling memoir Are You Somebody? and the novel My Dream Of You.

Slovakia’s 2013 Oscar submission offers a gritty look at a Slovak Romany girl’s sad trajectory from textile factory novice to sex worker. With no jobs available at home, naïve Dorotka travels to the Czech town of Ash, near the German border, where foreign girls like her toil long hours as seamstresses and live in crowded hostels. There she falls under the influence of her hustler roommate who pimps her to an unattractive, older German man, one of many who cross the border to sexually exploit the financially-strapped Eastern European women.

Renato Zucchelli lives in the beautiful mountain farmlands just outside Milan. He is the last traveling shepherd in the Lombardy region, an area ever more consumed by urbanization. Renato has a dream: to lead his flock into Milan’s Duomo Square to meet school children who have never seen someone like him; showing them that dreams and freedom will always exist as long as there is still room to believe in a last shepherd.

The deserved winner of the prestigious Lion of the Future award at the 2011 Venice Film Festival for its succinct and powerful cinematic storytelling, this compelling insider drama about life on the African fringes of Naples is set in the town of Castel Volturno, home to more than 20,000 African migrants, half of them illegals. Yussouf, a talented sculptor, is newly arrived from West Africa. Although his uncle Moses promised him a better future as an honest artisan, he instead lures Yussouf into working for him as a cocaine dealer.

Tomas, an Afro-Colombian teenager who fled across the country from the war, faced the difficulties of growing up in Bogota, a city of exclusion and racism. When his younger brother and closest friend disappears, Tomas plunges in the streets of the city. His search becomes an initiatory journey that reveals a unique perspective of a vibrant and unstable city that, like Tomas, stands on the threshold between what once was and what might be. Premiered at Cannes 2012.

Every day dozens of decommissioned school buses leave the United States on a southward migration that carries them to Guatemala, where they are repaired, repainted, and resurrected as the brightly-colored camionetas that bring the vast majority of Guatemalans to work each day. Since 2006, nearly 1,000 camioneta drivers and fare-collectors have been murdered for either refusing or being unable to pay the extortion money demanded by local Guatemalan gangs.