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© 2026 The Couch Critic
Browse 19 movies from Naoko Films
In Eastern Ukraine, childhood neighbors find their lives violently derailed by a shifting frontline. Natasha, a promising boxing talent, becomes a military paramedic. Angela, who lost her parents at a young age, survives by moving goods to both sides of the front. Caught in a modern Greek tragedy, brothers Mark and Ruslan now fight on opposite sides – against each other. In the safety of his adoptive family in the United States, their youngest brother Daniil follows the war from afar.
Mar 2026
Four entrepreneurs are searching for a narrative for their newly founded startup. Lacking inspiration, they discover an app that creates virtuous stories of revolution, community, sustainability... but it ultimately confronts them with the reality of current corporate models.
Nov 2025
Four friends tired of protests are thinking about another way to shake up capitalist society. Driven by fiction, they decide to blow up a Brussels shopping center. How to think the attack? What roles do they need to play in order to imagine taking action? Is their friendship reconcilable with such a radical act?
May 2022
How’s the Big Everything? Garba asks Nicole. For them, the “Big Everything” encompasses family, politics, History, daily life, the stars, small things, and time passing like the wind. By delving into their memories, at the time of Niger’s independence, we come face to face with the complexity of the present.
Mar 2025
Noé dreams of breaking away from the countryside. With Tom, his best friend, he spends time shooting whimsical DIY videos. When a real film shoot comes to the area, he sees a chance to escape and to reveal to Tom the true nature of his feelings.
Aug 2025
Samvel and Avo, Erik and Karen live in the land of a century-old conflict, rooted in the rubble of the Russian Empire. In Nagorno-Karabakh, people live, dream and prepare for a tragedy that is always on the horizon. Over 3 years, Alexis Pazoumian films the epilogue of the black garden, a land where war waits for no one.
Mar 2024
Benjamin and Little Pierre, cousins and local policemen, patrol Vitrival while listening to Radio Chevauchoir. They have a lot to do: dick graffitis are popping up on the village walls. Of course, no one has seen or heard anything. At the same time, one villager commits suicide, then two, then three. Season after season, dick graffitis and suicides proliferate. What can Benjamin and Pierre do about it? Days and celebrations will keep flowing, no matter what.
In a Bedouin village on the Lebanon–Syria border, a burned truck sets off a hunt for Gamra, blamed for burning her lover’s car. As her cousin searches for her, he accidentally kills a man from a rival clan, sparking a blood feud. His sisters are traded for peace. Will their sacrifice end the violence, or ignite a war across the village?
May 2026
Oct 2024
A hill in Kyrgyzstan inhabited by men, women, some children. Smoke, birds, a waste dump like a Leviathan. Among them, a traumatized former soldier, a grieving mother, young people deprived of a future, living and facing their destiny.
Apr 2023
Lou has a deformity that appears to delay puberty. Between her parents, her friends, and the eruption of "pirates of the flesh", Lou is determined to become a "real girl", in vain. So Lou will end up freeing himself from human genres…
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November 1989: in Brussels, Victor is looking for Elina, his summer love who mysteriously vanished. He meets Damian, an enlightened English journalist, and Rosie, a punkish Dutch barmaid. Together, they dive into the night, driven by the New Beat fever.
Between segregation and cosmic revelation, The Magic City traces the birth of Sun Ra, where a city becomes myth and a man, a galaxy.
Oct 2025
Through desktop documentary and forensics, this work explores how images of Medusa of Hatra, ISIS propaganda, and digital archives influence reality and memory while examining violence and witness.
In the darkness of the polar night, a scientist tries to shed light on a remarkable phenomenon: an Arctic village in hibernation. When she discovers that the sleepers are all breathing synchronously, however, she slowly abandons the role of the observer.
Oct 2022
A young girl struggles to come to terms with her mother’s psychological problems as she searches for her own female identity.
Nov 2024
From archival images, an improbable story is woven of a boy who couldn't stop crying, creating both floods and paradises.
May 2023