- Sibiu International Film Festival 2020
- +40751166516
- aff@astrafilm.ro
Showing 1–20 of 38 results
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All the Rivers Flow into the Sea and the Sea Never Fills Up
Claudiu Mitcu • Romania • 2020 • 50′
An anthropological study on a small community in Sfântu Gheorghe, where choir singing is a tradition. We follow the women’s choir and we see how music becomes a red thread in the life of the community, present in times of happiness or sadness, from weddings and births to times of war.
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As long as you still have arms
Luisa Bäde • Germany • 2020 • 93′
In a studio room filled with puppets, we meet Frank Karbstein. He remembers the 1980s in the German Democratic Republic, when Frank’s puppeteer group is arrested for distributing pacifist leaflets. After being sentenced to imprisonment, the defendants are offered the opportunity to go to the West through a secret buy-out of political prisoners. Frank remains. As does the question of who betrayed them? And why?ROMANIAN PREMIEREWatch Online
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August 23, 1944/2019
Andra Tarara, David Schwartz, Roland Ibold • Romania • 2020 • 80′
On August 23rd, 1944, the fascist regime was taken down and Romania changed sides in World War II. 75 years later, inside a Jewish Retirement Home, four of the last survivors of racial persecutions reflect upon the personal and political significance of the event. The different attitudes of the protagonists, their passionate debates and irresolvable conflicts reflect the diversity of the Jewish survivors’ experiences, the cleavages in the community and the Romanian society as a whole, as well as the importance and controversy of the events in 1944.Watch Online
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Come Find Me
Diana Nicolae, Noriflorentina Vito • Romania • 2019 • 80′
After the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, the world discovered more than 100,000 children living in Romanian orphanages. Many were not orphans, but the result of the country’s ban on abortion and contraceptives. These children often became victims of child trafficking or were neglected and abused in orphanages. Come Find Me tells the story of one of those children, Nori, as she travels from her adopted American home to find the family she lost almost 30 years prior.ROMANIAN PREMIEREWatch Online
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Eggs for Later
Marieke Schellart • Netherlands • 2011 • 50′
In this intimate documentary director Marieke Schellart reveals how she struggles with the biological clock. She would like to have children, but the right guy has not arrived yet. To give herself a bit more time she wants to extend fertility by freezing her eggs. However in the Netherlands this is not allowed. She talks frankly with her friends and parents about her plans and doubts, meeting support and resistance along the way. For Marieke a long journey has started which even takes her abroad, trying to find a solution to a problem that concerns many women today.Watch Online
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Eu Geniu Cioclea
Gorgos Violeta • Moldavia • 2020 • 70′
Without him, Romanian poetry would be like a piano missing some keys, this is how Eugen Cioclea was introduced at some point. The son of country teachers, he managed, in fortunate circumstances, to study mathematics at the prestigious Mikhail Lomonosov University in Moscow. Marrying the daughter of a senior secretary of the Communist Party will open many doors for him, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union he decides to return to Kishinev, where he becomes the most colorful name of the local community of writers. Here is his story.Watch Online
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Every Good Marriage Begins with Tears
Simon Chambers • UK • 2006 • 62′
Migration is usually analysed from the point of view of immediate material problems. The issue of the immigrants’ children is the object of recent discussions. What culture do children of the 1950-1970 immigrants belong to? Do they fit into the Western European culture, or are they still part of the culture of their parents? The film makes a statement about what we call “culture clash” in the contemporary world.Watch Online
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Forever Yours
Monica Csango • Norway • 2005 • 52′
Our grandparents’ lives are coloured in sepia. They fascinate us because they are related to events we have read about in history books or seen in old newsreels. Forever Yours bears the charming perfume of the good old times before WW2, but it is much more than that. The author of the film discovers a photograph taken in Mumbai, which could be a proof that her grandfather, whom her grandmother never ceased to love and to mourn, could still be alive. The charismatic figure of the grandmother together with romantic pre-WW2 footage complete this emotional and disturbing journey in seek of the truth.Watch Online
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Forget Me Not
Sun Hee Engelstoft • Denmark • 2019 • 86′
What makes a mother give away her baby? This is the big question in Sun Hee Engelstoft’s heartbreaking film about three Korean women who have become pregnant outside of marriage and are now hiding from the outside world until they give birth. They live in a shelter for unwed mothers on a South Korean island, where beautiful landscapes are in sharp contrast to the fierce dilemma that women go through: should they keep their children or give them up for adoption?
ROMANIAN PREMIERE
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Gangster of Love
Nebojsa Slijepcevic • Croatia, Romania, Germany • 2013 • 80′
Matchmaker Nediljko Babic, a.k.a the “Ganster”, tries to help a single mother from Bulgaria to find a husband in Croatia. Throughout the searches, the woman meets several possible matches, but without any results. Croatian men are rigid and conservatory, and they cannot imagine marrying a foreigner who also has a child on top of everything. Nediljko Babic is a captivating character in the role of a marriage broker, and the film deals very earnestly with the issue of rudimentary mentalities and social aspects of the rural areas in spite of the humorous and casual approach.Watch Online
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Garage People
Natalija Yefimkina • Germany • 2020 • 93′
In post-Soviet Russia there is a phenomenon beyond ice fishing, matryoshkas and vodka: the garage settlement. Seemingly inhospitable tin sheds from the outside, they offer a refuge to a large number of Russians – most of them men. Here they create alternative living spaces within a few square metres… Behind the Arctic Circle, in a rough area dominated by the local mining company as the only employer, the garage remains the last chance for self-fulfillment.ROMANIAN PREMIEREWatch Online
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Glorious Exit
Kevin Merz • Switzerland • 2008 • 75′
Jarreth Merz is an actor of Swiss and Nigerian origins who lives in Los Angeles. He is confronted with his African roots when he is informed that his father has died. Nigerian tradition requires that he as the first born must take the responsibility for the father’s family and his funeral. Jarreth begins a journey of discovery of a country and a culture that are part of him but to whom he doesn’t belong. From Los Angeles to Nigeria, Jarreth embarks on this important chapter in his life.Watch Online
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Half Elf
Jón Bjarki Magnússon • Iceland • 2020 • 62′
A lighthouse keeper prepares his earthly funeral while trying to reconnect with the elf within. Hulda and Trausti have shared a roof on Icelandic shores for over seventy years. Now, as his one hundredth birthday nears and Trausti senses the hand of death upon him he is on a quest to find the coffin that can carry this elf back to the mysteries beyond…. Meanwhile, Hulda retreats into a world of poetry with the help of an electric magnifying glass. Half Elf is a modern Icelandic fairy-tale, where life is celebrated – despite everything, despite ourselves and despite the reality that awaits us all in the end.ROMANIAN PREMIEREWatch Online
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Holy Father
Andrei Dăscălescu • Romania • 2020 • 85′
The filmmaker, Andrei, and his girlfriend, Paula, face the news of becoming parents. While the future mother is struggling with no worthy role models in her broken family, the soon-to-be father must come to terms with his own, long-lost father, now a monk on Mount Athos. Andrei’s visits to the monastery seek to solve the mystery of his father’s leaving the family when Andrei was only six. Could this be the key to learning how to become the father he never had?ROMANIAN PREMIEREQ&A Live with the film crew!Sunday, 25th of octomber, 19:30, you can participate in an online discussion with the director Andrei Dascalescu and protagonist Paula Niculescu.Link Zoom: https://bit.ly/3kdq34JLink Google Meet: https://bit.ly/3m6EnMNThe discussion will be live on the film’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/HolyFatherFilm/Watch Online
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Immortal
Ksenia Okhapkina • Estonia • 2019 • 61′
A documentary essay that examines the strict structures that dictate the behaviour of people in a small industrial Russian town. With an eye for visual composition, Ksenia Okhapkina’s film constructs a discourse on state propaganda through the subtle observations of innocuous, everyday situations, for example scenes of young girls learning about discipline at a ballet school or young boys training for the army shown in juxtaposition with snowy landscapes and the rigorous coordination of operations at the local factory. By being omnipresent and at the same time inconspicuous in people’s lives, from an early age, ideology becomes dangerous. Forgoing narration Okhapkina manages to construct a potent observation of the precariousness of free will in the face of state propaganda.Watch Online
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It Takes A Family
Susanne Kovács • Denmark • 2019 • 60′
Susanne Kovács is the grandchild of Jewish Holocaust survivors. Susanne’s German mother and her Danish Jewish father got married believing that the war was a closed chapter and that their different backgrounds would not affect their future together. But they were wrong. When Susanne is born, in the eyes of her Jewish grandparents she is a child of the enemy – a constant reminder of a painful past never reconciled within the family. Now, Susanne wants to break the silence. Is she at all allowed to dig into a family history that holds so many ghosts from the past? And maybe there is more than one truth?ROMANIAN PREMIEREWatch Online
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Josefin & Florin
Ellen Fiske, Joanna Karlberg • Sweden • 2019 • 77′
Romanian beggar Florin and Swedish single mother Josefin fall in love after meeting outside the local grocery store. After eight months together, they marry and start a new life together in a small Swedish town. Florin studies Swedish and looks for work, but as the pressure from his family to send home money mounts, the dream of a better life is put to the test.
ROMANIAN PREMIERE
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Long Live Love
Sine Skibsholt • Denmark • 2020 • 75′
Young Rosemarie has been diagnosed with cancer, and although the doctors say she will survive, the long treatment leaves a mark on her young life. Not least with regards to her relationship with her mother, whose affection and attention suffocates her. The film follows Rosemarie’s struggle to move forward with her life – with school and friends – but also to get the rest of her family to move on with theirs.ROMANIAN PREMIEREWatch Online
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Matthew’s Laws
Marc Schmidt • Netherlands • 2012 • 72′
Director Marc Schmidt films his childhood buddy, Matthew, who suffers from autism and desperately tries to create order in the chaos around him. Followed closely in his privacy, Matthew’s explosive confrontations with the outside world are alternated with stylized observations and personal confessions. Little by little, the film unravels the complex way of Matthew’s thinking and shows the catastrophic consequences his disorder may eventually have for him.Watch Online
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Oeconomia
Carmen Losmann • Germany • 2020 • 89′
Our economic system has made itself invisible and eludes understanding. In recent years, we have often had little more than a diffuse and unsatisfactory feeling that something is going wrong. But what? The documentary reveals the rules of the game of capitalism and shows that paradoxically the economy only grows when we are in debt, that profits are only possible when we are in debt. But what if this a dangerous game that is played to the point of total exhaustion? What if the game is actually nearing its end?ROMANIAN PREMIEREWatch Online
