PLASTIC GUNS by Jean-Christophe Meurisse
Closing film 🔷 World Premiere 🔷 #Quinzaine2024

Inspired by one of the most shocking French news stories of recent years, Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s Plastic Guns is a side-splitting comedy driven by an excellent cast of wildly enthusiastic actors. In this little theatre of cruelty, a man kills his entire family and then disappears into thin air. Any resemblance to an alleged murderer is not necessarily coincidental.

SISTER MIDNIGHT by Karan Kandhari
World Première 🔷 #Quinzaine2024

A fantastical punk comedy, a feminist revenge film, and a revamped vampire movie rolled into one, Sister Midnight is an original, funny and macabre tale centred on a rebellious, misanthropic character. We follow the trials and tribulations of Uma – a young, newly-married woman – who discovers the realities of married life in a Mumbai slum, and whose thirst for vengeance will not be abated.

SAVANNA AND THE MOUNTAIN by Paulo Carneiro
World Première 🔷 #Quinzaine2024

Once upon a time, there was a revolution in a small Portuguese village. Savanna and the Mountain is a hybrid documentary in which villagers stage their own struggle – which is still ongoing – against a government-led plan of lithium extraction that threatens their land. This is a generous and funny film of resistance, a ballad in song, a rural western reminiscent of the films of Moullet and Guiraudie.

VISITING HOURS by Patricia Mazuy
World Première 🔷 #Quinzaine2024

A counterpoint to her last feature, Saturn Bowling, Patricia Mazuy has created a film about female emancipation and sisterhood against a backdrop of class relations. In the lead roles, Isabelle Huppert and Hafsia Herzi forge an effective and affecting bond, built on a shared desire to put the past behind them and liberate themselves from male domination. No manicheism, no half-heartedness.

DESERT OF NAMIBIA by Yôko Yamanaka
World Première 🔷 #Quinzaine2024

For her second feature, director Yôko Yamanaka has pulled out all the stops. Desert of Namibia follows a young woman with bipolar who burns the candle at both ends. A surprising, unidealised portrait of Gen-Z Tokyo: striking for its incredible energy and irreverence. The film’s highly physical direction is carried off by an extraordinary actress. With hints of Nobuhiro Suwa’s early films.

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE by Matthew Rankin
World Première 🔷 #Quinzaine2024

A man returns to his native Winnipeg to visit his sick mother. Two Iranian children look for a way to excavate a banknote that has become frozen in the ice. A strange guide leads tourists around a series of historical monuments. Space and time are turned upside down in this absurdist, deadpan comedy, with its brutalist architecture, geometric shot composition and melancholic humour. Universal Language is a colourful blend of Winnipeg’s surrealist cinema and the Iranian films of the Studio Kanoon.

World Première 🔷 #Quinzaine2024

The first fiction film by a Palestinian filmmaker who is established in the world of documentary, the film tells the story of the desperate attempts of two illegal Palestinian cousins stranded in Athens to find a way to reach Germany. Inspired by American cinema from New York (Midnight Cowboy, etc.), To A Land Unknown is a compelling, uncompromising and nuanced thriller.

World Première 🔷 #Quinzaine2024

Based on the cult book The Falling Sky, by Davi Kopenawa, a famous shaman and symbol of the Amazonian people’s struggle against gold mining and forest exploitation, this documentary places us, without ethnological distance, in the heart of the rituals of the Yanomami people and their relationship with the sacred. The beauty of the film lies in the way the filmmakers are able to vary distances without any naïve optimism.