A Polish vehicle traverses the roads of Ukraine. On board, people are evacuated following the Russian invasion. This van becomes a fragile and transitory refuge, a zone of confidences and confessions of exiles who have only one objective, to escape the war.

Freda lives with her mother, sister and little brother in a popular neighbourhood of Haiti. They survive with their little street food shop. The precariousness and violence of their daily life pushes them to do everything they can to escape their situation in the hope of finding a better life.

Two brothers, Pierre and Vladimir, wonder if their Russian grandparents, Lily and Constantin, worked for the Soviet secret services in Paris during the 1930s and 1940s. Their research begins in Russia. After meetings and conversations, yellowish photos and vodka glasses, a lost world begins to emerge harassing the present.

Deep in the lush mountains of Hunan province, Youbin lives with his father and two grandparents. He is 8 years old and he is a poet. The family is poor and lives on what they can grow. But at the village school, the children are taught Chinese poetry, and Youbin discovers the magical power of language to describe one’s feelings and place in the world.

It is the history of a ball. A grand ball. Each summer, more than two thousand people tributary of the whole of Europe in a corner of the French countryside. For 7 days and 8 nights, they dance, again and again, lose the concept of time, braving their toil and their body. It rotates, laughs, it spin round, it cries, it sings. And the life pulse.

Stemming from her personal experience, her close ones’ testimonies and surprising encounters, Gessica Généus, Haitian filmmaker questions the “disease of the soul” devouring her native island.

This is the story of Roger, a former pork butcher, who worked for 40 years in the beautiful town of Beaune in Burgundy. Since he retired, he has started a new life as a filmmaker: Roger films only on Super 8. Insects, birds, everything he can find in the countryside are his favorite subjects. His short films have won prizes all over the world, some of them have been shown during the Cannes Film Festival. Josette, his wife and number one fan, happens to work for him from time to time.

In the Moscow Metro, a choir is formed from employees—cashiers, train drivers, and station workers—learning to sing under the guidance of an enthusiastic conductor. For a contest, the conductor discovers the opera “Flood”, which is going to be performed for the first time. The opera tells the story of the last day before the world’s end. Following a triumphant premiere, the choir sets off on its first tour, only to face a real catastrophe.

In El Quiñon, a newly-built but half-finished city in Spain, the ochre facades are juxtaposed to the fields of La Mancha. Residents talk about their hopes and dreams, illustrating through these revelations different ways of living in a city that was hard-hit by the financial crisis – and its continuing fallout – of 2008.

The No. 6 People’s hospital is one of the largest hospital in Shanghai. Through a range of crossed stories, of weakened lives, this is a portrait of China today that stands out.

Three teenagers spend the weekend together in the great outdoors. Everything comes together for two days of fun. But the bad atmosphere sets in.The bad weather is brewing. Words betray thoughts. One of them insists on climbing a summit.

The Roya, valley in the South of France at the border with Italy. Cédric Herrou, farmer, cultivates its olive trees. The day where he crosses the road of the refugees, he decides, with other inhabitants of the valley, to welcome them. To offer them a refuge and help them to remove their request to asylum.

Gong Youbin was born into a poor Chinese family. He hasn’t seen his mother since he was three months old. Inspired by a poetry class in school, he embarks on an emotional journey, learning to write poems through imagination and exploration. By observing his upbringing in the Hunan countryside, shaped by dreams and the harsh realities of his family’s struggles, ALWAYS is an allegory for the loss of innocence, as Gong inevitably must grow out of childhood and face reality.

Carabina is a gay artist, travesty, and sex worker married to Hasmik, a heterosexual lawyer. Now that they are parents. They now have to face a dilemma: Is the kid going to grow up or not in Armenia where 93% of the population is against and hostile to homosexuality? In his performance, Carabina struggles as a gay travesty since his childhood. His show follows his relationship with Hasmik, which permits us to distinguish the Carabina from the show and the real Carabina, a funny personality, eccentric, and full of drama. The show and the personal life create a parallel between the experience that Caribina creates during his show and the tragic homophobic reality he lives in. Witch could be considered as a “performance” of society. Meanwhile, Hasmik is working as a lawyer. in her cabinet and in court. She defends the rights of the LGBT community. We distinguish here Hasmik as a hard worker, a lawyer, and as a loving wife and mother at home.

In an isolated farm amidst the French Alps, Jean-Philippe Valla, a farmer-electronic engineer develops energy and food self-sufficiency techniques. Julie Desprairies, a site-specific choreographer, joins in order to practice in this extraordinary place with dancers and musicians. Farming gestures and dance gestures merge as the agricultural and the choreography works seek together a fairer way to inhabit the world. Director Vladimir Léon returns to Doclisboa after presenting his previous film, Mes chers espions, in the 2020 edition.

Michel Jouvet, known worldwide since 1959 for his discovery of paradoxical sleep, dives in the twilight of his life in his notebooks of dreams, drawings and research. An abundant material which gradually animates an intimate portrait of this neurobiologist, oneirologist convinced that the dreams are the guardians of the singularity of our identity.