Content from House on Fire

From our window one can see a set of the film The Green Years, directed by Paulo Rocha in 1963. This was our starting point: guided by Rocha's gaze, we look back at the places of that film. The successive geological, urbanistic and social strata of Lisbon, besieged by the pandemic that interrupted the shooting, are drawn out in front of our camera, like a contemporary jazz impro from a score written in 1963.

Aya, a young Ivorian woman in her early thirties, says no on her wedding day, to everyone’s astonishment. After emigrating to Asia, she works in a tea export shop with Cai, a 45-year-old Chinese man. Aya and Cai fall in love but can their affair survive the turmoil of their past and other people’s prejudices?

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

Wang Bing concludes his monumental Youth trilogy in expansive fashion, giving ever wider scope to the lives of migrant workers in Zhili’s textile factories as they plan to go to their remote hometowns to visit their families and celebrate the festivities for New Year’s break.

In a fast growing city of East China, migrants have been arriving and living for a dream of a better life. But what they find there is little opportunities and poor living conditions that push people, even couples, into violent and oppressive relations. Xiao Min, Ling Ling and Lao Yeh are some of the characters of this bitter chronicle of today China.

In this enveloping second part of the Youth trilogy, shot between 2015 and 2019, Wang Bing deepens his vérité portrait of a generation struggling to survive on meager wages amidst a nation’s economic expansion, emphasizing the distrustful, increasingly combative relationship between workers and management.

When the elderly caretaker of a remote morgue discovers the body of a young woman killed during a protest, he embarks on a magical odyssey to give her a proper burial before the militia returns.

A companion to the director's Le Dos Rouge/Portrait of the Artist. A famous filmmaker works on his next film, which will focus on monstrosity. He is obsessed by the idea of finding a painting that will be central to the film and will crystallize all the power and beauty of monsters.

Maria, 30, is impatient, restless and speaks 5 languages. In Taipei she meets Olivier. He is shy, slow and can speak 14 languages. They fall in love. Then suddenly the news explodes. It's their story, a true story.

Lianqing and Guo, who hail from Burma, flee their country and seek refuge in Thailand. Gho's feelings for Lianqing may just surpass her feelings for him.

On a summer day, a man, his daughter and his companion arrive at their country house to spend the weekend. The daughter has just moved in with her father, whose attention she desires. The man is tired of his life, and does not know where to find the strength to carry on living. The woman, a violinist, is confused in her priorities - music, love or career. Despite the fact that the man and the woman love each other, their tense relationship is on the brink of collapse.

In the dead of night, Renuka escapes from a Delhi brothel after stabbing a policeman to death. She takes refuge in a community of sex workers in northern India, where she meets Devika, a young girl condemned to a life of prostitution. Their bond develops into a forbidden romance. Together, they embark on a perilous journey to escape the law and forge their path to freedom.

In 2014, Tsai Ming-Liang was invited to make a film for the MarseilleFID, Marseille International Film Festival. Since he was not familiar with Marseille, he decided to make a film as tourist, capturing the beautiful Mediterranean sunshine in the late summer of that year. He also invited famous French actor, Denis Lavant, to appear alongside Lee Kang-Sheng playing Xuanzang. "Journey to the West" was invited to be the opening short film at the Berlin International Film Festival the same year.

Positano is an island of the Amalfi Coast that Neptune would have, according to legend, created for the love of a nymph. Perched on the rocks of the island, the house of Frédéric Pardo and Tina Aumont became in 1968 a meeting place for the underground community. Pierre Clémenti stays there for a while and makes images of dazzling sensuality. Beyond Pierre Clémenti's intimate love of these faces and bodies often naked in this Mediterranean landscape, the film reveals the moving beauty of a utopia where living together could still be achieved in a territory of sharing and permanent creation. Flow of perceptions of consciousness, visual impressions, physical impregnations, the work of Pierre Clémenti is an ode to sensuality and "life-cinema".

Free interpretation of the myth. Tsai Ming-liang propels a woman neglected by her lover in the mob of the bus station of Kuala Lumpur.

Scientist Anandi visits Hanuman Island to perform the last rites ritual for her father. She is immediately placed in quarantine in a remote hotel due to a pandemic caused by a machine-dominant world. When a mysterious star starts following her, she escapes and seeks refuge with a mother and her transgender daughter.

In the Shandong province, an old farmer woman falls. That is enough for her children to sign her up in a nursing home. Nevertheless, places are rare and the poor ill woman is forced to live at her unwelcoming children’s, waiting for a bed to be freed.

Although Dayao's farm is the only thing that matters to him - he lives there with his aging mother, Guei-Hua, and his wife - he travels to a nearby town with her every day to work. Pregnant, Tian-Tian insists on buying an apartment and raising their baby there, as the only way for them to escape poverty and for her to emancipate herself from men. When hundreds of tons of concrete fall on him at the construction site where he works, Dayao miraculously escapes... but loses his speech and his mind. He is now a five-year-old child.

Zhao Li manages a Sichuan Opera troupe that lives and performs together in a rundown theatre in the outskirts of Chengdu. When she receives an order of demolition, she hides the news, fearing that this could spell their end. Secretly, she wouldn’t mind stopping since their life has become harder over the years. But what else can she do? She also worries that her niece Dan Dan, their star, will leave them for a better future in the city. To keep her troupe “family” together, Zhao Li begins a search for a new theatre for them to both sing and live in. As she struggles with bureaucracy, the characters from the opera world that she uses to escape her troubles begin to seep into her real life…

In 2027 Brazil, civil servant Joana mainly deals with divorce cases. As a member of a branch of evangelical Christians known as the Divino Amor group, she uses her position to offer a kind of physical therapy to couples who want to separate. Although Joana and her husband Danilo regularly consummate their marriage, neither her constant prayers nor any other methods of assistance seem to be able to fulfill their desire for a child.