Daha
Onur Saylak
Turkey.  115 min.  2017

A film about a 14-year-old boy helping out his father at work in a rural outpost on the sea would probably feature gorgeous landscapes but wouldn’t necessarily make for an interesting story. But Gaza, the protagonist of the hard-hitting Turkish drama More (Daha), isn’t just any teen, and his father, involved in smuggling people from the war-torn Middle East into nearby Greece, doesn’t just have any old job. Turkish actor Onur Saylak  makes an auspicious debut as a director here, turning Hakan Gunday’s ink-black novel of despair into a film that’s a hard sit but that suggests an awful lot — awful being the operative word — about the world we live in today.

Ahad  is a heavy-set man with an equally heavy brow who exploits opportunities wherever he sees them and who expects unquestioned loyalty from the handful of people he works with, including his most loyal aid, Gaza, his teenage boy. The adolescent, with vivid and alert eyes and a can-do attitude that is probably more rooted in his relative innocence than in his character, is curious about the world and a good student. He’s been secretly testing for a good school in faraway Istanbul, though Dad isn’t very interested in his academic results.

ONUR  SAYLAK

Arif Onur Saylak was born in Ankara but raised in Kusadasi (Aydin), Turkey.  One day, he saw the poster of the university theatre club and stepped into amatuer acting life.

His desire for acting led him quit the university and win the entry exams of the theatre department of Bilkent University. During his study, he took part in several theatre plays, i.e. Nazim Hikmet’s “Her Seye Ragmen”, and graduated from the university in 2006.

Daha is his first feature film.

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Heretic Outreach :  christina@heretic.gr

Orange Days
Arash  Lahooti
Iran. 102 min.  2018

Swiftly, Alban is walking through a lush green plantation, inspecting her workers as they bring in the harvest. The assertive forty-something woman has been involved in the male-dominated orange business for years. She employs a group of seasonal female workers to harvest orange trees in northern Iran. This year she has received the largest order in the region – a fact that is not readily accepted by her male competitors. As soon as the harvesting begins, so does the sabotage on Alban’s work and she is forced to deal with the numerous consequences: harvesting is running slow, money is running out and her worker’s motivation is dwindling. To top it all off, her husband Majid packs his bags and leaves her. Director Arash Lahooti stages the battle of a courageous woman in beautiful, richly coloured images and shows a side of Iran that is rarely portrayed in western media.

ARASH  LAHOOTI

Born in Tehran in 1982, Arash Lahooti is a filmmaking and editing graduate. He is a director, producer, and editor of documentary films and a member of the Iranian Union of the Documentary Filmmakers. His first feature documentary is Trucker and the Fox which has been screened in over 45 festivals and received 9 awards.

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Distributor :    info@iranianindependents.com

Appendix
Hosein Namazi
Iran. 84 min.  2017

Due to severe abdominal pain, Zari and her husband, Reza, go to the hospital. However, Zaris insurance ID has expired and they are forced to borrow her friend Leila Attarod’s ID. Eventually, she undergoes appendectomy using Leila’s ID and the staff at the hospital suspect about this matter. Due to this, they are forced to switch roles to convenience hospital staff that the ID belongs to Zari. However, many unfortunate events take place in the process…

HOSEIN  NAMAZI

Born in 1981, Hossein Namazi is a scriptwriter and director. He has studied Cinema and has written and directed a number of short films. APPENDIX is his debut feature film.

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CONTACT

FCF :    fcf1@dpi.net.ir

Kedara (Armchair)
Indraadip Dasgupta
India. 110 min.  2018

Kedara tells the story of a middle-aged man with the innocence of a child for whom life is about mischief, building a world of fantasies, and finding joy in certain discoveries about one’s own.

Dasgupta has chosen an exceptional subject and tells his story with surreal execution. Ventriloquist Narasingha (Kaushik Ganguly) lives alone in a weary house full of old mementoes, masks and antiques. That he is a ventriloquist is revealed in most unexpected fashion. Narasingha does not only mimic sounds or voices; voices have their own entities for him and they live with him — they are his family.

The loafers of the locality make fun of Narasingha’s profession and his apparently abnormal nature. His maid doesn’t lose an opportunity to taunt him. One of his neighbours pays him visits only to remind him that he is a failure.

Narasingha bears everything in silence. He sometimes blames his joblessness. There is a locked room in his house that no one else is allowed to open. The locked room almost proves to be the protector of his lifeline — the core of all his fantasies.

INDRAADIP  DASGUPTA

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Producer :     indraadipdasguptaproductions@gmail.com

Kaamyaab
Hardik Mehta
India. 105 min.  2018

The drama is based on a seasoned character actor who decides to come out of retirement and begins a quest for a record of some sorts, that elusive 500th role, the one for which he shall be remembered forever.

HARDIK  MEHTA

Hardik Mehta is an Indian screenwriter and director, who has worked on Hindi feature films like Queen (2014) and Lootera (2013). His Gujarati-language documentary, Amdavad Ma Famous (2015), won the Swarna Kamal (Golden Lotus) at the 63rd National Film Awards for Best Non-Feature Film.

He has also co-written the screenplay for Vikramaditya Motwane’s most recent survival-thriller, Trapped (2017), alongside Amit Joshi.

He has written and directed his debut feature film Kaamyaab (2018) which premiered at the Busan Film Festival.

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CONTACT

Ritika Bhatia :    ritika@drishyamfilms.com

Kia and Cosmos
Sudipto Roy
India. 123 min.  2018

Kia is a 15-years old girl diagnosed with autism and who lives with her mother Diya, in South Kolkata, since her father passed away a couple of years back succumbing to a massive heart attack. One day, Cosmos, a neighbourhood cat, suddenly dies awakening Kia’s curiosity of investigating the cause. Diya coaxes unsuccessfully her daughter to forget the death of Cosmos. In one of the investigative ventures in her own house, she chances upon a few letters with her name written on them. They were from her father and Diya had concealed the truth from her daughter for all these years. Her father was alive and Kia was decided to look for him. Kia tackles every hurdle to find her way to her father. A postal address was all that she had. Why did her father leave them? Will she reach her father?

SUDIPTO  ROY

Sudipto Roy is an Indian writer and director. Having worked as an International Travel Journalist, with a career that spans across a decade and the world’s most celebrated and quaint cities turning muse his heart lies in story-telling and films. With the keen ear of a guitarist, two very well received short films under his belt and an enviable experience in working with veterans of Indian Cinema, “Kia & Cosmos” is his first feature film.

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Sudipto Roy :    sudiptoroy.dgp@gmail.com

3 Storeys
Arjun Mukherjee
India. 100 min. 2018

In Arjun Mukherjee’s “3 Storeys”, a portmanteau film set in a Mumbai chawl, the lives of residents intersect and clash in several unexpected ways.

Mayanagar is three Storey Chawl in Mumbai. Flory Mendonca, a Catholic widow, wants to give away a part of her house but doesn’t have buyers due to its high price. Finally Vilas, who is eager to take a house near station, buys it. Whereas in the same building, Varsha is facing daily abuse from her unemployed and alcoholic husband. On the other hand she still has feelings for her past lover, Shankar, and bonds well with her neighbor and tends her little son. Suahil and Malini falls in love being from different faiths much chagrin to their parents.On the ground floor lives glamours Leela, who sends seductive vibes towards man around.The lives of people living in Mayanagar don’t seem to be what it is as there are hidden secrets.

In all three stories, director Mukherjee makes sure there is some twist at the end, some curveball that he throws at the audience that, more often than not, fails to stick. The acting is uneven, which is perhaps to be expected in a film with an ensemble cast. Most of the actors, including Makhija and newcomers Ankit Rathi and Aisha Ahmed, look like they’ve walked in from the posh bylanes of Bandra into the chawl and its squalid surroundings.

ARJUN  MUKHERJEE

While pursuing a degree in Philosophy and Economics, Arjun Mukerjee was inspired by a few films he chanced upon, and decided to dive off the deep-end to become a film-maker.  His film school was an advertising film production house in Bombay which he joined in 1994.

He started directing commercials in 1999, and has since directed almost a hundred commercials for brands like Pepsico, ING, Suzuki, Reliance telecom, Colgate Palmolive and Procter and Gamble. One of his films, a CSR for water conservation, won a World Silver Medal at the New York A.M.E film festival.

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CONTACT

Priya :        priya@openairfilms.com

In The Shadows
Dipesh Jain
India.  117 min. 2017

A reclusive shopkeeper spends his life isolated from the outside world, interacting with his home of Old Delhi solely through hidden closed-circuit cameras. Meanwhile, a boy struggles to protect his mother and younger brother from the harsh sting of his father’s hands. When the shopkeeper overhears this abuse he must break free from his self-imposed prison in order to help the boy, discovering a shocking truth along the way.

DIPESH  JAIN

Dipesh Jain – Director, Screenwriter, Producer Director’s Guild Of America (DGA) Student Award recipient, Dipesh Jain is a graduate of University of Southern California Film School. He has written, directed and produced award-winning films, documentaries and stage plays in India, Prague and US. Before USC he studied at Prague Film School and also has Chartered Accountancy and CPA. 11 WEEKS, his thesis film at USC, was shot in terrorist areas of Kashmir with local people and real army. The film has screened at numerous film festivals such as Chicago, Mexico, Melbourne, Heartland and USA FF and won awards including Alfred P. Sloan, Carole Fielding, Best Short at 35th Cleveland Intl FF, Finalist at USA FF. His other films, including 5 QUESTIONS 5 CHANCES, have played festivals in Asia and Europe. A recipient of Panavision Young Filmmaker Award, Dipesh has been selected for the Talents Lab at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival and the Producer’s Lab at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). Dipesh wants to make strong character driven films for the international audience and has several feature screenplays set in US, UK and India at various stages of development. His screenplay A STONE’S THROW AWAY, a political drama set in Kashmir, was placed semi-finalist in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab, and quarter- finalist in the American Zoetrope Screenplay Competition.

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MPM Films :    festival@mpmfilm.com

Identity
Samuel Thivierge
Canada. 93 min.  2018

Caught between vice, lust and love, Christopher Begin begins to make his way through adulthood, living in the fast lane fraught with lies and trickery. Driven by his desire to protect his mother, Chris meets his mentor Roger, a masterful conman who will guide his protégé towards the darkest corners of human nature, until the day Chris’ path crosses that of Roger. Suddenly, the consequences of the choices made by Chris can be felt by those he treasures most. Inspired by a true story, uncover the destiny of a young man from a good family who becomes an effective and seductive con artist, crushing the dreams of innocent people in his wake.

SAMUEL  THIVIERGE

Samuel Thivierge graduated from Vancouver Film School. He made his directorial debut in the dramatic short Love Lost (2011) and wrote, produced and starred in crime thriller Dead Simple (2012). In the same year while building up his acting resume, Thivierge was quietly working on his first feature film, La fille du Martin (2013) which he ended up directing, producing and starring in. Thivierge premiered the film at the Montreal World Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Zenith award.

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The Delegation
Bujar Alimani
Albania.  77 min.  2018

In 1990, in a remote area of Albania, a political prisoner is transferred overnight without knowing where or why. The car transporting him breaks down in the heart of the mountains. The prisoner gets acquainted with his two guards, officials devoted to the Albanian Communist Party. Their personal stories intertwine, tensions burst, just like the history of a country in turmoil.

October 1990. Inmates in a remote political prison in Albania are watching the TV evening news in the cafeteria. They follow with great interest the arrival, in Tirana, the capital city, of a European Delegation that will monitor the government’s implementation of the reforms it has promised – a major prerequisite for the country to be admitted into the OSCE. They have high hopes that the time for them to be released has come. Pressure from international stakeholders on the Albanian government to push for further reform remains high, especially in human rights, which are seen as a litmus test for Albania’s membership.

BUJAR  ALIMANI

Bujar Alimani is one of the most prolific and important writer/director of the New Albanian Cinema.

Since his start as a filmmaker with an extraordinary series of avant-garde short films, KATOI (The Kennel), GAS, BUSULLA (The Compass) and NJE HISTORY DASHURIE (A Love Story), Bujar’s work has been garlanded with praise for its wild imagination mixed with gritty realism. Nominated for the Oscars twice, Bujar’s work has been featured at every major film festival worldwide including Sundance and Berlin, he’s received countless international film festival awards for critically acclaimed shorts and feature films worldwide, and his work’s been presented at some of the most prestigious institutions internationally including MoMa in NYC, proving him as a significant art house hit.

Bujar began his foray into features films by writing and directing AMNISTIA (Amnesty), his first full-length feature film recognized by the critics as a masterpiece. He won the CICAE award at The Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival) and participated in 80 additional film festivals around the globe of which he won 13 additional awards. This success culminated in 2012, when AMNISTIA was officially selected to represent Albania at the Oscars, which led it to be honored at MoMA (Museum of Modern Arts) in New York City.

Following the success of AMNISTIA, Bujar’s second feature film KROM (Chromium) premiered at Karlovy Vary film festival (Czech Republic) and then went on to participate in 18 international festivals worldwide, once again winning several awards. Just as AMNISTIA, KROM then also went on to represent Albania in the foreign language category at the Academy Awards 2016.

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CONTACT

Producer :    blerim.gjinovci @gmail.com