MANTAGI

Record high oil prices, global warming, and an insatiable demand for energy: these issues define our generation. The film exposes shocking connections between the auto industry, the oil industry, and the government, while exploring alternative energies such as solar, wind, electricity, and non-food-based biofuels.

The wild and wanton Francisca, known as "The Tigress," is the eldest of three sisters, who are bosses of a farm in Ecuador. A medicine man tells Francisca and Juliana that their youngest sister Sara must remain a virgin to protect their land. A travelling salesman, engaged to Sara, tells the police that she is being kept locked up by her older sisters.

After a tragic event breaks her family apart, a teenage girl abandons her dreams of a music career and is thrown into the foster care system.

A woman who focused on being a mother feels that she no longer has any purpose now that her son has made his own life, until one lonely night after a storm, she finds a nest on the ground of her garden with a small egg that gives signs of life, and when she rescues him she puts aside her monotony to take care of him as if she were his mother.

Norman is not just an admirer of nature, he's a part of it. He survives the harshness of the climate and the wildlife by coexisting with it. With his wife Nebraska, they live almost entirely off the land, making money by selling their furs.

Clara (Karin Viard) is a stripper with a high-strung, jealous boyfriend with the curious name of Loockeed (Antoine Chappey). The couple are friends with the even-temperred, almost saintly Max (Gerald Laroche), an auto mechanic. The three of them set out from their home in the north to journey to the Alpine mountains near Switzerland and Italy, where they will help a fourth friend take care of his pleasure boat business at Lake Annecy while he is in military service. As the trio attempt to establish some sort of equilibrium in their new lives, Max must constantly deal with Loockeed's testy, jealous barbs. Despite this, the three of them remain friends.

Three friends, whose lives have been drifting apart, reunite for the funeral of a fourth childhood friend. When looking through their childhood belongings, they discover a trunk which contained details on a quest their friend was attempting. It revealed that he was hot on the trail of the $200,000 that went missing with airplane hijacker D.B. Cooper in 1971. They decide to continue his journey, but do not understand the dangers they will soon encounter.

With a keen sense of visual beauty, director Markku Lehmuskallio has created a thought-provoking, aesthetic film about a married couple and an old man living in a remote part of Finland. The young husband goes out hunting but only to support himself and his wife, not to kill off hordes of animals. He sets traps, and that gets him in trouble with the police who proceed to ticket him for using the devices. The forest cycles themselves are intimated when an old tree is shown falling to earth -- perhaps a reflection on the old man's passing years. In contrast to these few people living off the land and basically keeping the ecological balance intact, a highway construction crew is shown at work felling trees. Soon the antagonism grows between encroaching civilization and the quiet life of the young couple and elderly man.

An inventor spurns his city life and moves his family into the jungles of Central America to make a utopia.

Tender caresses and enveloping embraces are portals into the life of Mack, a Black woman in Mississippi. Winding through the anticipation, love, and heartbreak she experiences from childhood to adulthood, the expressionist journey is an ode to connection — with loved ones and with place.

Ludwig van Beethoven, absorbed in his world, composes in the forest under the snowstorm. In the solitude of this place, his temple, he feels happy, full, fertile. Johanna, his sister-in-law, widow of his brother Caspar, approaches him by surprise and chases him through the trees, trying to reach an agreement with him about the guardianship of his son Karl. In his will, Caspar left his brother Ludwig as the sole guardian of his son Karl. But Ludwig was away for a few hours on Caspar's last night and when he returned in the morning the will had changed... Between them there is more than a hard fight for the child. They are two untamed, wild, asocial beings, fighting for their freedom.

Juan Méndez Bernal leaves his house on the 9th of april of 1936 to fight in the imminent Spanish Civil War. 83 years later, his body is still one of the Grass Dwellers. The only thing that he leaves from those years on the front is a collection of 28 letters in his own writing.

In a struggling post-Soviet community, Lilya a teenage girl is abandoned when her mother moves to the United States with her boyfriend. Facing neglect and poverty, she meets Andrei, who offers her a job in Sweden, giving her hope for a better life — and a journey that will change everything.

Beautiful, sad story told from multiple perspectives. A man picks a dahlia before entering his home. His dog senses something is wrong. The housekeeper makes tea before seeing the tragedy. Slowly the elements slot into place.