Program Coordinator Tomas Hudak draws attention to these five films from the program

Tomas Hudak picking his top five

The Souvenir / dir. Joanna Hogg

A young ambitious film student begins her first serious acquaintance with a charismatic and mysterious man. As she indulges in this relationship, she is trying to separate reality from fiction. But this relationship is dangerously close to destroy her dreams.

Zombi Child / dir. Bertrand Bonello

Haiti in 1962. A man is raised from the dead just to be sent to the hell of sugar cane plantations. 55 years later in Paris, a Haitian girl reveals a family secret to a group of new friends, but she never imagined that this extraordinary story would convince her classmate with a broken heart to do the unimaginable.

The Last Time I Saw Macao / dir. João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata

João Rui spent his childhood in Macao, but did not return to the city for thirty years. João Pedro knows the Orient only through films, literature and paintings. Together they set out on a journey to help João Rui ‘s old friend, on a journey through an urban maze, in which personal memories and fiction are getting mixed. The result is both, an emotional geography and a film noir in one.

Bisbee ‘17 / dir. Robert Greene

A hundred years after the events in Bisbee, when inhabitants violently surrounded about 1200 striking miners – mostly immigrants – and dragged them to the desert of New Mexico, a major reconstruction of this tragedy is being prepared. A documentary western on the edge of performance and activism monitors the ability of locals to cope with the dark past. Personal stories twist with high politics, the attempt to justify a mass kidnapping crashes with traumas of loved ones, and the presence may be menacingly similar to the past.

MS Slavic 7 / r. Sofia Bohdanowicz, Deragh Campbell

A fascinating film from the archive environment, which mixes family history with fiction, follows a young woman named Audrey and her attempt to understand the poems of her great-grandmother, Zofia Bohdanowicz. She discovers letters her great-grandmother exchanged with another exile poet, Jozef Wittlin, and delves into their intimate past while faced with existential problems. Combining silent scenes of reading letters in the archive with discursive monologues in which Audrey articulates her findings, the film follows the emotional journey of research.