Official Selection of Feature Films

Cinematheque of N Macedonia
28 May (Friday), 19:00 h.
dir. Valentin Vasyanovych (UA), 108’

Eastern Ukraine, in the nearest future. A desert unsuitable for human habitation. Sergiy, a former soldier suffering from PTSD, is having trouble adapting to his new reality: a life in pieces, a land in ruins. When the smelter he works at finally shuts down, he finds an unexpected way to cope joining the volunteer Black Tulip mission dedicated to exhuming war corpses. By working alongside Katya, he understands that a better future is possible. Will he learn to live without war and accept himself as he is?

Cinematheque of N Macedonia
29 May (Saturday)), 17:00 h.
dir. Bartosz Grudziecki (PL/DE), 106’

Small town girl Anna meets Andrzej and Joanna, a rich couple from Warsaw. Driven by the desire to live a different life, Anna agrees to help the couple to find a ruin the two have been searching for. On their journey, the poor girl soon turns out to be a "better" version of Joanna. Instinctively, Anna more and more fills the role of Joanna and becomes an existential threat to her.

WALL is a thriller about rich and poor - and the self-destructive pursuit for freedom

Cinematheque of N Macedonia
29 May (Saturday), 19:00 h.
dir. Boaz Yakin, choreographer: Bobbi Jene Smith (US/FR), 119’

Aviva is a young Parisian who develops an online romance with Eden, a New Yorker. After a long courtship, they meet in person and fall in love, settling into an intimate relationship that leads to marriage. But their lives are not without struggle - for inside both young lovers exist warring factions of masculine and feminine energies battling for primacy inside and out of the bodies it contain them. Incorporating exultant dance sequences, and featuring a pair of principal characters played by four different actors externally expressing their masculine and feminine sides, Aviva captures a restless, frenzied and very fluid moment in time - right now - where the male-female dynamic is demystified and laid bare like never before.

Cinematheque of N Macedonia
30 May (Sunday), 19:00 h.
dir. Илум Јакоби / Illum Jacobi, (DK), 94’

online interview with the Directorr

The year 1769. The philosopher Edmund Burke has fled London, debt collectors and a ramping midlife crisis to go on a grandtour of the Alps to rewrite his book on the Sublime in this 18. century roadmovie.

Stakes are high - Burke has lost everything in risky colonial investments and his future depends on the success of the new edition of his youth masterpiece and his bold face-to-face meeting with nature. Having lost his staff he is traveling only with a native servant on loan from his brother’s plantation in the west indies. The trip is a disaster - Burke has never been outside the city and finds himself lost in Provence struggling to even find the Alps. Furthermore, he discovers that he hates nature - it stings, itches and fails to give him any enlightenment. Meanwhile his servant is deeply involved with everything around her and Burke grows bitter and jealous of her easy connection to the wild elements. Burke’s increasingly desperate and pathetic attempt to unlock the mysteries of the sublime, turns suicidal when he discovers a glacier of sparkling ice that leads up to a divine snow covered peak that he begins to climb thinking he can prove himself the master of nature and revenge the discomforts it has bestowed upon him.

In THE TROUBLE WITH NATURE one man’s failure to comprehend nature mirrors our own. It is a highly fictional and absurd allegory of our human relation to the natural world starring one of the principal architects of modern capitalist thinking - Edmund Burke (1729 -1797)