Ginestra Film

Sang is one of 300.000 children left behind by American soldiers after the Vietnam War, born to Vietnamese woman. When he unexpectedly finds his father in the U.S., he wants to meet him, even though it comes at a price of leaving his beloved family. Cultural barriers and unspoken pain collide when the past catches up with the present.

With just a mobile phone and a gun, Mahmud, Ziyad and their group risk their lives trying to save Yazidi women and girls being held by ISIS as Sabaya (abducted sex slaves) in the most dangerous camp in the Middle East, Al-Hol in Syria.

A lovesick misfit, a mysterious beauty, a retired civil servant, a randy fortuneteller and a couple of doubtful, young, charismatic lovers meet in late summer on a Russian river cruise. They have one thing in common – similar emotional problems of suffering and doubts. However, they’ve come to the right place. River cruises in Russia are colloquially called “floating matchmaking agencies”. What does fate have in store for them?

Vintersaga, is a song-structured homage to the Swedish melancholy. Through 24 stanzas the film observes a mosaic of situations and individuals, each with their own doubts, memories and dreams, shaping a picture of a land tinged by the bitter cold wind.

In the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein, Fakhir, a father of eight, is serving in the Iraqi army. All around him, he sees innocent civilians getting injured by landmines, so he determines to disarm them with his own hands, using just a pocketknife and some wire cutters. He clears thousands of roadside bombs, mines and car bombs, knowing that every time he cuts a wire it could cost him his life—which he seems to find less important than the lives of others. In 2014, by this time having lost a leg, he starts working for the Kurdish Peshmerga, disarming boobytraps left behind by Daesh in and around Mosul. An enthusiastic home video maker, Fakhir collects hundreds of hours of footage of his day-to-day work.

The film is about the seemingly small, but extremely important steps children take in kindergarten to become big, empathetic people.

Observes the mechanisms of construction and assimilation of gender in contemporary Italian society, through a kaleidoscopic mosaic of scenes of daily life: what are the choreographies of bodies, collective rituals, behaviors for each of the genres that condition our identities? Through paintings with a strong visual impact, Normal tells the story of normality making it alien to us, exploring the daily and collective staging of the male and female universe in which we all participate.

Neverending Roads is the story of Afghan refugees born in Iran who fled racial persecution to Europe only to be deported from Sweden to Afghanistan.

Just outside the city of Genoa, Italy, lies a vast, monumental cemetery. Alongside its graves, through the arcades and galleries, all kinds of people work and wander. For a place that’s all about death, the cemetery is curiously alive.

Twenty-two-year-old Oleg doesn’t live up to his mother Marina’s idea of a real man. She thinks he’s an autistic loafer. He’s enrolled at the University of Nizhny Novgorod and is supposed to be watching online lectures, but his mother says all he actually does is hang around watching TV. Oleg doesn’t have any need for friendships, either. Marina wants him to improve his life and subjects him to a series of unconventional treatments. In one particularly uncomfortable scene, we see the therapist riding him as if he were a horse. Another psychiatrist tells Oleg how useless he is and that he will always be alone. Strangely enough the camera seems to be welcome everywhere, and it closely follows these dramatic developments.

A Russian producer, with his directing wife, will make a documentary in Sweden about Scandinavian mentality. Maybe the project can save their marriage. The wife and daughter arrive in Sweden, but the producer does not show up and this is not the first time. He is still in Moscow, drunk and happy.