A reclusive photojournalist lives quietly in a New York penthouse, until a smooth but sadistic criminal looking for a hidden fortune enters her life.

Follows seemingly unrelated people as their lives begin to intertwine while they fall in – and out – of love. Affections languish and develop as Christmas draws near.

Annabel is a successful businesswoman with a wealthy husband. At a reception in her villa she meets a woman, a member of the catering staff who has been hired for the evening. This woman is none other than her own daughter Chiara, whom she had left over thirty years ago. Chiara was just eight years old at the time. She now approaches her mother with an unusual request: to spend ten days together with her.

The ostensibly simple story of a sympathetic veteran teacher giving Italian lessons to a weekly class of diverse immigrants is given infinitely more depth and complexity by the manner in which director Daniele Gaglianone renders his story. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, truth and artifice, and between documentary and drama, Gaglianone has created a film within a film. You see the apparent artifice of Gaglianone’s crew using professionals, including the noted film actor Valerio Mastandrea as the teacher, interlinked with ‘real’ immigrant protagonists, studying the language to improve their chances of employment and of gaining a permanent residence permit. Thus in the course of the lessons there is simultaneously the painful and upsetting relation of the students’ personal stories but also humour, as they interact and share their humanity, bridging cultural differences, united in their striving to make a better life for themselves. (Source: LFF programme)

During World War II in the freezing Netherlands winter of 1944/1945 the western Netherlands are in the grip of a famine. Many people move east to provide for their families. Fourteen year old Michiel can’t wait to join the Dutch resistance, to the dismay of his father, who, as mayor, works to prevent escalations in the village.

Michael and Ellie break into a military junkyard to find a science project for Michael’s class, and discover a strange glowing orb which absorbs electricity. When the orb begins to blend past, present, and future, its up to Michael and Ellie to stop the orb and save mankind.

A rebellious youth, sentenced to a boy’s reformatory for robbing a bakery, rises through the ranks of the institution through his prowess as a long distance runner. During his solitary runs, reveries of his life and times before his incarceration lead him to re-evaluate his privileged status as the Governor’s prize runner.

Telmo is a retired theater director that realizes he doesn’t remember the time he spent kept in jail during the military dictatorship in Brazil. He decides to stage a play and, with threads of memory, he improvises the lines with his young cast. Telmo dives into his own history and ends up revealing for himself what, being so painful, he’d rather forget.

Robin Hood is an old man when he returns with his best friend Little John to England after the Crusades. Maid Marian has entered a nunnery, King Richard is a raving lunatic, his Brother John a moron, and the age of great adventure has seemed to have passed Robin by. But when The Sheriff of Nottingham once again threatens Sherwood, Robin gathers his faithful men, and band of peasants to fight oppression in this high-spirited adventure in which Robin Hood and Maid Marian rediscover their love…

A story set in the Prohibition Era and centered around a group of individuals and their dealings in the world of organized crime.

A private investigator helps a former flame solve the murder of her wealthy grandfather, who lived in a sprawling estate surrounded by his idiosyncratic family.

A lonely, chain-smoking office lady in Tokyo falls for her teacher when she decides to take English lessons. When her teacher disappears, she sets out on a journey to find him.