Above and Beyond: The Craftsman

Composed of four stories, each part of 10 minutes, namely: "Rainbow and Zebra", "The Goddess of Victory and the Snail", "The Ant and Love Letter", and "His Royal Highness and the Sheep".

Crystal Lake is about a group of young girls who take over a skate park, forming an all-female force field on the half pipe. There on the reclaimed ramp, with no boys around, they are thriving and visible. This is an anthem for young feminists, which presents female friendship as a means to survive adolescence.

A woman with a lot of baggage falls in love with a man haunted by his past. Literally.

An elderly woman and a hormone-charged teenager arrive to a beach hut where, during her brief moments of clarity, she will persuade him to kill her.

Filmmaker-griot coming from the theater, it was with a camera, while the war in Vietnam occupied everyone's minds, that Sarah Maldoror gave visibility to the African wars of decolonization: Angola, Guinea Bissau, French Guinea, Cape Verde... Her short film Monangambée addresses the torture by the Portuguese army of a sympathizer of the Angolan resistance. At the end of editing, Sarah Maldoror approached the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago during a Parisian concert and offered to add sound to her film. The next day they watched the film, were convinced and recorded their first soundtrack for free as evidence of African-American solidarity. Shot in Algiers, Monangambée is a film about torture and, more broadly, about the incomprehension between the colonized and the colonizers. It is based on a novel by the Angolan writer Luandino Vieira, then imprisoned by the Portuguese colonial power.

IN THE SWITCH TOWER stars Walter Edwards (who also directed) as Bill Wharton, a middle-aged alcoholic who was once a leading engineer with a railroad. Wharton is estranged from his son Joel (Frank Borzage), who now works as an executive with the railroad, but Frank does send him money through Bill's longtime friend, Louis Hall (Robert Hall).

A date takes an unexpected turn in this meditation on race, politics, and history in Germany.

As daily airstrikes pound civilian targets in Syria, a group of indomitable first responders risk their lives to rescue victims from the rubble.

Daniel got lucky tonight: this time he is not going home alone again. But is that enough to pull him out of his reality?

The Male Gaze is a new series of releases from New Queer Visions that showcases short LGBTQ films from across the world. The first instalment, First Kiss, brings together five shorts that are based around men experiencing romantic and/or sexual interaction with other men for the first time. It takes in films from Sweden, Indonesia, USA, Australia and France giving a rounded look at how similar experiences are depicted across the world. The films are: Naked [Naken] (2013); Pria (2017); Walk With Me (2018), One Night Only (2018); Michel's Mouse [Tapette] (2016).

Now aged 17, Antoine Doinel works in a factory which makes records. At a music concert, he meets a girl his own age, Colette, and falls in love with her. Later, Antoine goes to extraordinary lengths to please his new girlfriend and her parents, but Colette still only regards him as a casual friend. First segment of “Love at Twenty” (1962).