Agitprop

Together, a filmmaker and her characters venture into a personal research project about intimacy. On the fluid border between reality and fiction, Touch Me Not follows the emotional journeys of Laura, Tómas and Christian, offering a deeply empathic insight into their lives. Craving for intimacy yet also deeply afraid of it, they work to overcome old patterns, defense mechanisms and taboos, to cut the cord and finally be free. Touch Me Not looks at how we can find intimacy in the most unexpected ways, at how to love another without losing ourselves.

Warner lives in a cramped townhouse with his wife, Claire, and their two children. While buying a house in Calgary's competitive real estate market, he learns his job isn't as secure as he'd like, and when he asks Claire to reconsider, they fight. On the same afternoon, Claire is attacked; Warner emerges as the prime suspect.

Secretary of the most influential Communist Party in the Western world, Enrico Berlinguer challenged the international balance by seeking to bring the Communists to government in Italy and achieve socialism in a democratic country. From 1973, when he escaped an attack by the Bulgarian secret services, to the assassination of his main ally Aldo Moro in 1978, not forgetting his trips to Moscow and the covers of Time: the story of a man who wanted to change the world, but failed.

The factory that once employed the entire town and surrounding villages has been closed down due to a questionable privatization process, coinciding with a tragic incident where a group of its workers perished in a deliberately set fire. The remaining workers, devastated by the loss of their loved ones and the subsequent corrupt sale of the factory, initiate protests, but their efforts seem futile, yielding no concrete results. Feeling abandoned not only by the authorities but also by their cherished church, they find themselves seeking solace and answers in the supernatural.

A cinematic, character-driven insight to what it meant to produce and to own a car in communist times: the Socialist propaganda dreams and the hard reality of living that dream. The freedom that these slow and clumsy vehicles were giving to their owners; the cars as an instrument in the Cold War battle; legends and homemade tune-ups as an attempt to stand at least a little bit off the crowd.

Bobkata – a down-on-his-luck funeral director in a corrupt provincial town where old grudges never die but are passed down through generations. His business is on the verge of bankruptcy, his wife leaves him, and his main competitor – a local thug with connections at the hospital – smoothly monopolizes the entire “death market.” Crippled by debt and tormented by the painful loss of his parents, Bobkata is willing to do anything to save himself. In his desperation, he comes up with an absurd plan: giving dance lessons at a retirement home to recruit clients for his prepaid funeral services.

Astounding stories by women born in the USSR, pioneers and survivors, that reveal their heroic experiences from the time of the Revolution in 1917 to the present day through personal testimonies and intimate conversations with remarkable women and unseen archive footage. It opens a door to their inner thoughts, feelings, fears and hopes. Their experience foreshadowed that of women of today and yet their fate is also the story of their century.

Several very different characters – a pioneering physicist, an acclaimed minimalist composer, an intensive care doctor and a crematorium director – each in their own way find a strikingly similar answer to the cliché question: what is the universe made of? According to them, the ultimate source of reality is essentially empty space, which spontaneously manifests what we call matter in a magical display.

For years, Russia has been trying to rebuild its empire. The hybrid war doctrine introduced by Putin in 2013 assumes attacking Western countries without declaring war. The invasion of Ukraine made us lose our sense of security. A pair of documentary filmmakers from Poland set off on a journey to look for answers to the question about the threats that may face Central and Eastern Europe.

The debut documentary by Bulgarian-born German resident and renowned photographer Pepa Hristova is set in the Strandzha mountains, the natural border between Bulgaria and Turkey. In that sparsely populated land and in one of the last primeval European forests is a crossroads between ancient rituals, nationalism, migration and anarchy, as the bleak past blends with modern-day threats in a terra incognita for the West.

Chronicles Stephen C. Apostolof's rise from Eastern-European fugitive to producer and director of sexploitation films in the 60's and 70's, his turbulent relationship with infamous Ed Wood and his downfall in the late 70's with advent of hardcore pornography.

This is a modern pirate story complete with a captain, a mutinous crew of outlaws, a princess, her wedding dress and untold riches. Only one thing is missing: the ship. According to legend, Vulchan, a 19th-century gypsy pirate, attacked three convoys laden with gold. He robbed them, sunk them and hid his treasure by the coast. Fast forward to present day. Captain Jack, an ex-con himself, leads a motley bunch of homeless outcasts—alcoholics and petty criminals—in a search for the hidden loot. But their hopes of riches and glory are threatened when the brother of the Bulgarian Prime Minister announces plans to build a new mega tourist resort by the Black Sea.

What Swiss director Stefan Schweitert did for accordion music and for yodeling (Accordion Tribe, Cinequest, 2005; Echoes of Home, Cinequest 2008) he now does for traditional Balkan music. This wonderful film is also a love story – and a door into a world of musical wonders.

Elitza Gueorguieva films the making of the novel that her Belarusian alter-ego Aliona begins about her father, a maritime adventurer, physicist and dreamer, who disappeared off the Turkish coast in 1995.

The epic story of a village turned concentration camp, turned a city, turned nuclear power plant and of its population. A world instantly transformed by ideologies, regimes and dreams of economic prosperity. The tales of characters whose lives intersect in a sinister past, nuclear future and the stinging mosquitoes flying through time, sealing their fate together.

Georgi and the Butterflies tells the story of a man and his dream. This man is Dr Georgi Lulchev, a psychiatrist, neurologist, Chinese medicine man, administrator, amateur chef, entrepreneur and Director of the Home for Psychologically Disabled Men. His dream is to organise a farm in the yard of the home, where the patients can raise snails, ostriches and pheasants, produce silk fibres and soybean food. This is a story full of optimism, snails, ostriches, silk, charity, the Eastern Orthodox Church, soybean food, schizophrenics, oligophrenics, psychopaths, Korean investors, Western hunters, misery, acupuncture and compassion. Compassion, business, butterflies.

Philip looks like a man, who has it all: successful career and a beautiful girlfriend. However, he is still taking care of Victor, his sensitive brother, years after the death of their parents. Emma is slightly autistic, fallen out of time. At the night, she creates the model of a mystical garden in the back of her flower shop, where Victor works. Emma lives in spheres completely beyond Philip's reach. Through her garden, Philip realizes that he never felt so real until he met this otherworldly girl, he's falling in love with. His life is transforming - until Victor confesses that he, too, is in love with Emma. Torn between the love for his brother and for Emma, Philip feels the pain of loss for the first time. Under the surface of this contemporary urban drama, there are hidden invisible worlds, where unexpected miracles happen. "Perhaps the most tender Bulgarian film."

The life and death of socialist architectural monsters. An epic fairy-tale in five chapters.

The road linking Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania corresponds to the site of a huge EU infrastructure project called Corridor #8. Corridor No. 8+ is a mosaic film combining fragments from the everyday lives of the characters who live along this non-existent Balkan road. MUBI

Audrius Mickevičius puts the horribly disfigured face of his murdered brother at the start of his film. It is almost a meditation about the question whether a final act like murder can be atoned for in a temporal order – and whether the passing of time allows the victim’s family to forgive. Mickevičius uses the example of two lifers (one of them gets married and wants to have children, the other pours his whole passion into an idea of craftsmanship) and a philosopher with prison experience to make that strange state of suspended life comprehensible.