Furious Desires

A filmmaker talks about his work and love life with an unseen friend behind the camera. We also watch four of his short films.

A drama set in the American South, where a precocious, troubled girl finds a safe haven in the music and movement of Elvis Presley.

Alex, an intersexed 15-year-old, is living as a girl, but she and her family begin to wonder whether she's emotionally a boy when another teenager's sexual advances bring the issue to a head. As Alex faces a final decision regarding her gender, she meets both hostility and compassion.

Fourteen-year-old Mo is a lonely, sensitive boy whose hunger for the rant and banter of buddies makes him prone to tread dangerous territories. He idolizes his handsome older brother, Rashid, a charismatic, well-respected member of a local gang, whose drug dealing enables “Rash” to provide for his family. Aching to be seen as a tough guy himself, Mo takes a job that unlocks a fateful turn of events and forces the brothers to confront their inner demons. It turns out that hate is easy. It is love and understanding that take real courage.

Eight short stories of seduction and illicit encounters between lovers, filled with humor and eroticism, which use a circular structure located in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a colonial city of Mexico.

After the suicide of his best friend and the fire of a local dance called Cromañón, including recitals, illegal parties in an abandoned warehouse and high school, a year passes by in the life of Zabo who writes everything he feels and lives in his blog, "Memories of a teenager".

Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.

In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.

More interested in partying and flirting with young musicians than work, veteran rock journalist Ellie Klug has one last chance to prove her value to her magazine’s editor: a no-stone-unturned search to discover what really happened to long lost rock god, Matt Smith, who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend. Teaming up with an eccentric amateur documentary filmmaker, Ellie hits the road in search of answers.

In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.

When a change of circumstances leaves Miriam unable to pay her college tuition, she makes a surprising decision: to start performing in adult films, using the pseudonym Belle Knox. Miriam lies to her family and her friends at school, keeping her double life a secret. But soon rumours spread and Miriam becomes the subject of vicious online attacks and unwanted attention. Miriam fights back: she talks to the media, saying her new line of work empowers her as a feminist. But her confident stand has unintended consequences. Miriam is shunned by her conservative family and her colleagues in the adult film world. One impulsive decision has quickly spiralled out of control - and Miriam's problems are just beginning.

A Brooklyn teenager juggles conflicting identities and risks friendship, heartbreak, and family in a desperate search for sexual expression.

Years after her son's suicide, a woman longs to confront both the past and a friend of his who took his business idea.

Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.

Three British teenage girls go on a rites-of-passage holiday—drinking, clubbing and hooking up, in what should be the best summer of their lives.

A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.

During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.

Agnes and her two sisters struggle through a day in a home overrun by gamblers, thieves, and johns.

Veneno, a rebellious young drifter, frequents roadside diners where he sleeps with truck drivers. Urgently needing a ride, he meets Muñeco, a hard-edged driver who keeps to himself. He convinces Muñeco to take him deep into the hyper-masculine world of long-haul trucking across the north of Mexico. As they travel together and an unexpected intimacy builds between them, shadows from Veneno’s past resurface, putting both their lives at risk.

When lapsed Jew and former cardiologist Harry suddenly decides to spend his retirement as a pig farmer in Nazareth, Israel, the move deeply shocks his family and his new neighbours. Back in New York, Harry’s ex-wife Monica is trying to manage the lives of their adult children, Annabelle and David, as well as her own.

A nurse takes care of a patient in her house. Maria do Céu has been a nurse for more than forty years, working at an old Hospital in Lisbon. She was sixteen, when she arrived to Lisbon, coming from a small village in Alentejo. At the Hospital, she reads the file of an old patient who was also her friend. The file is then closed. Maria do Céu returns to her village, where she sings at the people’s house choir.

A young British girl born and reared in India loses her neglectful parents in an earthquake. She is returned to England to live at her uncle's castle. Her uncle is very distant due to the loss of his wife ten years before. Neglected once again, she begins exploring the estate and discovers a garden that has been locked and forgotten. Aided by one of the servants' boys, she begins restoring the garden, and eventually discovers some other secrets of the manor.

A young Pakistani Briton manages a rundown laundrette with his lover while dealing with tension in his family, the local Pakistani community, and a persistent mob of skinheads.

A struggling young writer finds his life and work dominated by his unfaithful wife and his radical feminist mother, whose best-selling manifesto turns her into a cultural icon.

A love story of a 17 year old punk-rocker and a 15 year old runaway girl.

Irish Republican Army member Fergus forms an unexpected bond with Jody, a kidnapped British soldier in his custody, despite the warnings of fellow IRA members Jude and Maguire. Jody makes Fergus promise he'll visit his girlfriend, Dil, in London, and when Fergus flees to the city, he seeks her out. Hounded by his former IRA colleagues, he finds himself increasingly drawn to the enigmatic, and surprising, Dil.

Talented 20-year-old Lolita dreams of a singing career. But her self-esteem is low due to her weight problem and her narcissistic father, Étienne, a literary star with scant interest in his daughter's life. Lolita finds little comfort in the attentions of her vocal coach, suspecting the woman is using her to meet her influential father. Étienne's second wife proves to be Lolita's only trustworthy ally in her private battle to find a sense of worth.

"Quarantines" is a collective film made at the time of the first confinement of 2020. Ten international directors, ten perspectives that intersect in the same period, with their authentic and more atypical universes than each other. A work that unites in isolation and expresses the impalpable. This film is a challenge, a bet: that of creation which persists despite everything within the constraints of the health crisis.

When Ida, cheeks streaked by mascara tears, unexpectedly shows up at her sister's, the staid Alison bargains her way out of mom duty for the night and the two head off to an Eastside wine bar. There, they run into Will and the freshly divorced, sweatpants-attired Clark. After some slightly inebriated commiserating about mismanaged marriages and other adult concerns, the foursome head out into the night, careening from downtown lofts to pot dispensaries to midnight swims and back again, determined to prove they still have what it takes to have a good time.

Oscar Wilde is a married playwright who has occasionally indulged his weakness for male suitors. After much toil, Wilde debuts 'The Importance of Being Earnest' in London, and a chat at the theatre with Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas leads to a full-fledged romance. However, this affair leads to a legal dispute with Lord Alfred's oppressive father, the Marquess of Queensberry, and, given the local anti-gay laws, Wilde is jailed. Wilde's vast intellect helps him survive until he regains his freedom.

An aging thief hopes to retire and live off his ill-gotten wealth when a young kid convinces him into doing one last heist.

A young French Canadian, one of five boys in a conservative family in the 1960s and 1970s, struggles to reconcile his emerging identity with his father's values.

In early 19th century England, orphaned Becky Sharp defies her poverty-stricken background and ascends the social ladder alongside her best friend.

Two teenage girls in small-town Sweden. Elin is beautiful, popular, and bored with life. Agnes is friendless, sad, and secretly in love with Elin.

Cultural critic David Kepesh finds his life -- which he indicates is a state of "emancipated manhood" -- thrown into tragic disarray by Consuela Castillo, a well-mannered student who awakens a sense of sexual possessiveness in her teacher.

Through his frustrations, an obsessed novelist connects with a dimension where a walking girl encounters weird characters in a mysterious urban world, slowly driving to the peaceful nature of the desert. In this trip between light and shadow, hope for finding an inner mental peace will prevail. This movie is characterized for an experimental language, with purposed technical and performing imperfections, wrapped in an organic fantasy effect.

When the young republic of The Netherlands is attacked by England, France and Germany and faces its own civil war no less, only one man, Michael de Ruyter, can lead the county's strongest weapon, the Dutch fleet.

Teenage best friends Mila, Hanna and Kati play matchmaker to their teachers while helping each other through their own budding romances.

Jackie is a CCTV operator. One day, a man shows his face on her monitor, a man she hoped never to see again. Now she has no choice and is compelled to confront him.

Gypo is the story of a working class family in Margate, Kent, a town where immigrants have become the focus of most of the public's discontent. The film tells the story of the a couple of weeks in this family's life, beginning when a young Czech girl, Tash, comes to visit. The film is made in the Dogme95 tradition, so no costumes, no lighting, no props or sets, which gives the film a gritty texture appropriate to the story.