Content from Films de Force Majeure

Frank spends his summer days hopelessly searching for companionship at a popular cruising spot on the shores of a lake in rural France. One day, he meets Michel, an attractive yet darkly mysterious man and falls blindly in love.

After the mysterious disappearance of their baby daughter, a young couple receives strange videos and realizes someone has been filming their daily life — even in their most intimate moments. The police set up surveillance around their home to catch the voyeur but the family starts to crumble as secrets unravel under the scrutiny of eyes watching them from all sides.

As if directing a science-fiction film, Johana Ožvold dissects the story of electronic music. From the pioneer sound engineers working behind the Iron Curtain, through the French avant-garde composers, up to the post-modern creators of digital sonic artefacts, the first-time filmmaker summons an abstract landscape that is haunting and yet achingly beautiful. A voice appears from old television screens forgotten in the maze of some futuristic archive where past and future seem to coexist in a complex and multi-layered way.

A cop in Singapore investigates the disappearance of a Chinese migrant construction worker who spent sleepless nights playing a mysterious video game.

In 2006, as Israeli shells relentlessly rain down on Beirut, Sariah (13), her older sister Nayla, and their mother take refuge in the mountains, making sure not to mention the war raging in Lebanon. Sharp tensions between the three women soon resurface, and the rivalry between the two sisters escalates when Nayla's boyfriend pays her a visit.

In Almaty, Kazakhstan, 17-year-old Mila escapes her unstable home life by joining an elite swimming team led by Vlad. Amid intense training and suspicions of doping, Mila faces a complex attraction to Vlad, while traumatic memories and moral dilemmas threaten to undermine her new-found independence.

Lavinia, a single mother trying to make a better life on her own terms for herself and her 13-year-old son, live in a poor Romanian village. She is impulsive, prone to misreading situations, and not sure how to love. But her son, on the threshold between childhood and adolescence, needs his mother more than ever, and over the course of four seasons their relationship is put to the test.

At first, there are a wrecked father and a daughter who wants to fix him. A cat falls from the 8th floor and becomes paraplegic. A medical experiment gathering 12 paralyzed people in China. A car accident in Italy. And then, La Mécanique des choses gathered everything in a journey, to fix the irreparable.

During the Syrian civil war, the district of Yarmouk, home to thousands of Palestinians, became the scene of dramatic and ferocious fighting. Little Palestine (Diary of a Siege) is a film that follows the destiny of civilians during the brutal sieges, imposed by the Syrian regime, that took place in the wake of the battles. With his camera, Abdallah Al-Khatib composes a love song to a place that proudly resists the atrocities of war.

20-year-old Kamel has a project for his low-income neighborhood in the South of France. Committed and idealist, he is invited to pitch it to the Minister of urban planning, in person. Together with his sidekicks Hichem and Youssoufa, Kamel finds himself in over his head, caught up in a political game.

The film opens on a tale with animated figurines in miniature settings reconstructing Fida’s childhood during the war. It then shifts to a documentary style with a series of real confrontations between Fida and ex-militiamen manipulating the small figurines. The miniature material becomes a bridge between different subjective stories, infusing the collective history with individual details. The experience of this confrontational space turns out to be cathartic. The narrative moves around between realities and temporalities.

In his tower-block apartment in New Lodge, Joe reenacts memories from his childhood amidst the “Troubles”. In this Catholic area of Belfast, the number of deaths was tragically significant. Joe is joined by neighbours Jolene, Sean, Angie, and others, all willingly participating in this process of revisiting the collective memories that shaped their lives and the district they live in.

A playful and personal journey through Lebanon’s audiovisual memory, composed entirely of archival footage. It is a love letter to Beirut, spanning 70 years of film, TV, home videos, and photography, exploring the Lebanese collective psyche – marked by joy and intimacy, destruction and loss. Through the eyes of citizens, filmmakers and artists, the film reconstructs a fragmented history in a country without a national archive, celebrating creative expression as both resistance, renewal and a way to preserve memory.

1992, South of France. Charlotte and Liza, both 17, are inseparable. Together, they dream of music and imagine themselves performing on Parisian stages. But a tragedy tears them apart, leaving Charlotte alone, with dreams meant for two.

Kentucky. For decades, Brian Ritchie's family has been living in the heart of the Appalachians. But the mines have been shut down, with nothing to replace them. Caught between a mythical past and an indiscernible future, Brian is one of the last witnesses of a vanishing world, that inspires his poetry.

The director gets a phone call from his aged mother. A stubborn woman, she worries about the future of the rest of the family. The father is a gambling addict in poor health; the brother is penniless yet sure of his talent as a medium. Looking back at the reasons he left 20 years earlier, Elvis A-Liang Lu creates a wonderful family portrait, touching and full of light.

Game Girls follows Teri and her girlfriend Tiahna as they navigate their relationship through the chaotic world of Los Angeles’ Skid Row, aka the “homeless capital of the U.S.”

About roughly 130 men are imprisoned in the Detention Center of Casabianda, Corsica. Most of them were convicted of child abuse. The inmates spend their last few years of imprisonment working the fields of this wide agricultural domain.

Inside a museum, nowadays. A diorama represents two young soldiers in the trenches. All of a sudden, we are thrown into the diorama: the immobile soldiers come to life, there is terror on their faces – the camera dances around them – explosions, chaos, fog: everything flies about in the air. With every gunshot, they shudder and curl up

Saeed is a young cinephile trying to teach film rules to other young people in Eastern Ghouta, Syria, but the reality they face is too harsh to respect any rules. Saeed’s friend, Milad, is on the other side of the fence; in Damascus, a city under the control of the Assad regime, finishing his studies in Fine Arts. At one point, Milad decides to leave the capital and joins Saeed in a Douma under siege, where they set up a local radio station and a recording studio. They hold the camera to film everything, until one day it is the camera that films them.