Apart We Grow

Everyone deserves a great love story, but for 17-year-old Simon Spier, it's a little more complicated. He hasn't told his family or friends that he's gay, and he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous classmate that he's fallen for online.

Alcopops, VHS tapes, cigarettes, boys, MSN Messenger, Placebo — this is 2003. Set on the Isle of Wight, fragments of the director's own teenage video diaries collide with the fictional story of 15-year-old Tommy in this short film about a boy's search for connection in the advent of the internet age. Infatuated with his best friend's boyfriend and unable to truly reveal himself to anyone, Tommy feels an overwhelming sense of isolation on the small chalk island he calls home. Desperate to be seen, he logs on to the family computer, clicks connect, and opens MSN.

On the eve of leaving his hometown—a departure he has dreamed of for far too long—Tommy reconnects with a friend, Arnaud, who has returned from a two-year trip to Western Canada.

Having slept together for the first time, two teenage boys must make sense of their evolving relationship.

Kati drives the VW bus of her parents even without a license quite fast. But what else should one do in the Bavarian province? Kati and her best friend Jo keep asking themselves this question when they philosophize about God and the world with the tip in one hand and the beer in the other hand. After all, Kati's swarm Mike has just come back from the Bundeswehr, but while she dreams of the great love, he seems to take the matter far less seriously. And there's only stress with her dad.

When a young boy makes a wish at a carnival machine to be big, he wakes up the following morning to find that it has been granted and his body has grown older overnight, but he is still the same 13-year-old boy inside. Now he must learn how to cope with the unfamiliar world of grown-ups, including getting a job and having his first romantic encounter with a woman.

A group of teenagers grow up in Okinawa amid the protests and resistance against the presence of the American base in the island.

Sabine vows to give up married lovers, and is determined to find a good husband. Her best friend Clarisse introduces her to her cousin Edmond, a busy lawyer from Paris. Sabine pursues Edmond, with the encouragement of Clarisse, but Edmond does not seem very interested.

The Ysbreeker family -- mother Jolien, father Frank, daughter Roos and son Teun -- are enjoying their annual holiday on a camping site in France. Teun is at the beginning of his puberty and can't quite control his hormones. Roos, a teen girl in the middle of her puberty, is more interested in her first camping love than in her own family. Teun notices that his sister is becoming a woman, in all different ways. How does he react? Does it have any influence on the brother-sister relationship?

A man is on the run, but who or what is he running away from?

In a seemingly easy theatre exercise, Rebeca, a young Roma woman, student at an elite acting school, is pushed to confront her biggest fear.

Set in the changing world of the late 1960s, Susanna Kaysen's prescribed "short rest" from a psychiatrist she had met only once becomes a strange, unknown journey into Alice's Wonderland, where she struggles with the thin line between normal and crazy. Susanna soon realizes how hard it is to get out once she has been committed, and she ultimately has to choose between the world of people who belong inside or the difficult world of reality outside.