Official Selection of Feature Films

10/05 (Friday), 21:30 h.
Cinematheque of Macedonia
Feature film, Georgia/ Lithuania, 91 min., color
Director & Screenplay: Zaza Khalvashi

Ali’s family has inherited a mission – taking care of a local healing water and treating sick fellow villagers with it. Three sons are skeptical about the water, only the young daughter Namme stays as the guardian of family traditions. A hydropower plant is being constructed nearby, which might be a cause of environmental changes. One day the spring water starts to disappear and the father remembers the old tradition, according to which the water will not return unless a sacrifice is being made…
NAMME, Georgia’s bid for 2019 Oscars, treats the ties between the traditional and the modern with a certain mystical tension. Water is at the heart of many philosophical, religious and mythological belief systems, and in Khalvashi’s film it is at the core of this lyrical story. “NAMME is a hymn to the majestic mountain landscapes and pagan folk traditions of southwest Georgia (…) ” whose “rarefied beauty and transcendent tone should appeal to fans of the post-Tarkovsky school of meditative mysticism ” – says Stephen Dalton from the Hollywood reporter. The world premiere of the film was in the selection of the 30. Tokyo Film Festival, and the European premiere was on Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia.

11/05 (Sunday), 21:30 h.
Cinematheque of Macedonia
Feature film, Lithuania / Latvia / Croatia, 97 min., color
Director & Screenplay: Giedrė Beinoriūtė

Beinoriūtė states: “BREATHING INTO MARBLE is about an attempt to warm up stone. It may be impossible, but it’s worth trying.”
Izabelė and Liudas are a typical middle-class couple, living in their rural house with their son Gailius, who suffers from epilepsy. One day, Isabele talks her husband into adopting
six-year-old Ilja, a headstrong yet withdrawn little boy from a children’s home.("I cannot explain, I just feel," says Izabelė about her decision to adopt Ilja). But with the arrival of the new edition, family life starts to change drastically for all of them and it soon becomes clear that Ilja doesn’t fit into this new world. As their marriage starts crumbling, they make a decision which will affect both their lives in the years to come.
This psychological drama, Beinoriute’s feature debut, examines the relationships between the people, the invisible threads linking their lives, their responsibility for each other, guilt, as well as the attempt to forgive and to love. The film is based on the novel “Breathing Into marble” by Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2009 and had its international premiere on Karlovy Vary IFF, in the East of the West programme.

12/05 (Saturday), 21:30 h.
Cinematheque of Macedonia
Feature film, Austria, 136 min., B&W
Director & Screenplay: Peter Schreiner

Drifting always between the fictional and the documentary, and through an unconventional dramaturgy, GARDEN tells of a love triangle between Awad, Herman, and Julia. Julia finds out she is suffering from a life-threatening disease. Awad, the film director, was kidnapped by the militia, kept imprisoned and tortured. Herman, the stage designer, is plagued by nightmares. The whole plot of the film is taking place in an unidentified garden and undefined mental spaces, through an atmosphere of the peculiar unclarity of the dream, the nightmare, the state of uncertainty… A film in which a garden becomes a scene for all the protagonists, heaven and hell or, maybe even a purgatory. GARDEN is a contemplative film by Peter Schreiner whose work gives an echo of the atmosphere in the films of Bela Tarr, and whose previous film LAMPEDUSA was a part of the Official Selection of PFF 2017. The Film had its premiere on Rotterdam IFF, as part of the Deep Focus programme.

13/05 (Monday), 21:30 h.
Cinematheque of Macedonia
Feature film, Bulgaria, 85 min., color
Director: Theodore Ushev, Petar Valchanov, Kristina Grozeva, Vladimir Lyutskanov, Lyubomir Mladenov, Nadejda Koseva

An omnibus film based on short stories of the most translated contemporary Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, directed by 6 different directors in Bulgaria.
The minute you start watching this film, the sun may already have gone out, but you won’t know it yet. 8'19"- that’s all the time we have until the news about the death of the sun reaches you. After that, it’ll get dark...
The theme of the Apocalypse does not necessarily have to be expressed through a global cataclysm, angels of death, fire, and destruction. The end of the world can be something very personal, intimate and almost silent experience of men.
The narrative mosaic of 8 MINUTES AND 19 SECONDS will appoint the pillar points of this exceptional omnibus film: the feeling of mortality, the moments before the very end, our independent existence and the fear that comes from knowing all this.

14/05 (Thursday), 21:30 h.
Cinematheque of Macedonia
Feature film, Turkey, 82 min., color
Director: Osman Nail Doğan

16-year-old Mahmut’s life consists of feeding pigeons and making money from stealing others’ pigeons. His biggest dream is to have the best pigeons. One day, one of his pigeons escapes and does not return. When Mahmut finds a pigeon nesting on a roof, he meets Ismail, an 8-year-old living in that house. This meeting becomes one of the most important turning points that will affect both lives...
THE PIGEON THIEVES, the first feature film of the director which was part of the Official Selection of the 24. Sarajevo Film Festival is a film about growing, maturing and rising into life. A warm story about friendship and the passions of youth, seen through the specific prism of the culture of living in Anatolia. And as the director Doğan asks, speaking about the film, the dilemma is in front of us: “What is good, and what is bad? Can you be good behaving badly?“ Or, how can a person be good if life is ruthless and cruel, people are heartless and selfish, and the world is foreign and cold?

15/05 (Friday), 21:30 h.
Cinematheque of Macedonia
Feature film, Germany/ Austria, 94 min., color
Director: Wolfgang Fischer

Rike is a 30-year-old woman and a successful doctor in the ER. When she sails out with her boat towards Gibraltar, after a strong storm, she comes across a sinking ship of refugees. At the beginning, she tries to call for help following the maritime laws exercising her civic duty, but besides all cries for help, her calls are left unanswered. Rike is faced with a decision to make and see if she tries to act by herself and save whatever she could save...
An allegory of the cold and careless world, Wolfgang Fischer’s nautic thriller is a film about the survival and the deаth threats which migrants who travel towards Europe face. Depicting a society in which the benevolence of the individual has drowned in the cruelty of others, the film illustrates the moral dilemma between the world of the real and the world of the ideal and it puts on test the individual responsibility versus the collective responsibility. Adhering to strict minimalism in its aesthetics, STYX sends out an urgent call for awaking the world that is falling deeper and deeper into indifference and lack of empathy. The film opened the Panorama section of the 68. Berlin Film Festival and it was one of the tree LUX Prize finalists of the Europian Parlament in 2018.