Synopsis

Seven-year-old Sol spends the day at her grandfather’s house, helping her sprawling family prepare a birthday party for her dying father, Tonatiuh. Behind the closed doors of his bedroom, Tona attempts to gather the strength for a celebration he never wanted, yet may be his last. As the daylight fades, complex webs of family tensions begin to tangle and break as each of Tona’s loved ones is overwhelmed by the duality of this celebration of life and death.

The childlike illusion of a harmonious family fades from Sol’s vision, and as the celebration comes to a close, she must learn to embrace the essence of letting go. A film whose spirituality transcends its story, Tótem is a warm and delicate meditation on life and loss.

Synopsis

A triptych of sisters sing about their suffering after the eruption of a volcano in Cape Verde. Separated from each other and surrounded by darkness and fire, their voices overlap as we hear their moving words of pain and resistance: “There will come a time when we’ll know why we suffer, and the mystery will end.” The musical ends with silence and archival footage of Cape Verdean people and landscapes after a volcanic eruption in 1951.

Directed by Pedro Costa, The Daughters of Fire represents a radical step forward in form and ambition for the singular Portuguese maestro.

This short film screens along with in water.

Synopsis

At once a heist film, a hilariously plotted workplace comedy, and a wistful ode to the human desire for freedom, The Delinquents, like its main characters, is playfully elusive and difficult to pin down. Morán works a dead-end job at a bank in Buenos Aires. Tired of the grind, he dreams up a scheme to get himself and his coworker, Román, out of there for good. The plan is simple. The fallout is not.

Crafted with impeccable wit and surreal flourishes, director Rodrigo Moreno mischievously ponders the pitfalls of modern working culture, the rigors of urban living, and the seductive allure of an unburdened life in the wide open countryside.

Synopsis

In the small rural Mexican village of El Eco, a teenage girl, Montse, dutifully works alongside her family, caring for the sheep and her grandmother with the same sense of curiosity and devotion. While frost and drought punish the land, she learns the ways of life and death. As in her auspicious fiction feature Prayers for the Stolen, with this lyrical coming-of-age docu-fable acclaimed Mexican-Salvadorean filmmaker Tatiana Huezo beautifully captures both the preciousness of adolescence and the region’s unforgiving elements.

Exquisitely textured and deeply empathetic, The Echo unfolds like a dream, shifting between the sweet and the dark. In sumptuous, vivid images, Hueso observes how children’s lives in these hardscrabble towns mirror those of their parents and grandparents in a generational cycle of struggle and hope.

Synopsis

Nobody likes teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) — not his students, not his fellow faculty, and not the headmaster, who all find his pomposity and rigidity exasperating. With no family and nowhere to go over the Christmas holiday in 1970, Paul is forced to remain at school to supervise students who are also unable to go home. After a few days, only one holdover remains — a trouble-making 15-year-old named Angus (Dominic Sessa), a good student whose bad behavior threatens to get him expelled. Joining Paul and Angus is head cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), an African-American woman whose son was recently lost in Vietnam.

In his latest film, Alexander Payne, the Oscar-winning writer-director of The Descendants and Sideways, goes back to the ’70s of his youth, telling a nostalgic and comedic story of three very different shipwrecked people who together learn they are not beholden to their past, but can choose their own futures.