Flora's Life is No Picnic

When a daughter becomes concerned about her mother's well-being in a retirement home, private investigator Romulo hires Sergio, an 83-year-old man who becomes a new resident—and a mole inside the home, who struggles to balance his assignment with becoming increasingly involved in the lives of several residents.

Claes is a pensioner whose greatest wish is to finally make it to the nearby cinema. What if it rains? What if his sweater doesn’t match the shirt he is wearing? It's probably better to stay in the safety of his own home and switch on the television. In the total isolation of his solitary life, and out of an entirely unfounded fear of stepping outside his flat, Claes has turned his tidy home into a prison. This is a film that demonstrates what loneliness can do to a person.

This sparkling, irreverent, and deeply emotional piece of creative nonfiction announces the arrival of a standout filmmaking partnership. When their father is hauled away, a colorful trio of brothers — a sibling team to rival Moe, Larry, and Curly — step up to take care of América, their grandmother, in Colima, Mexico. Rodrigo, Diego, and Bruno are stilt-walkers and acrobats and Elvis impersonators and unicycle riders — when not running the family's agriculture warehouse. With a loose, offhanded charm, Stoll and Whiteside capture the family’s natural performative streak in a way that makes even the most explosive, dramatic moments feel organic. The endearing, genuine scenes between Diego and his grandmother celebrate the possibility of multigenerational connection.

"...a charming depiction of life as I knew it with my grandparents in my own village..." Clara Caleo Green, Cinema Italia UK "The sum of the individual fates and life choices paints a picture, the validity of which extends far beyond this village." Joachim Manzin, Black Box This documentary records the thoughtful and emotional confrontation with time, change, loss and hope related by the members of a small community in the idyllic Ligurian countryside who are dealing with a rapidly changing agricultural industry, transformed by globalisation and technological advances and an increasing number of foreigners buying the empty houses in their village. Forgoing the use of music and voice over, the film lets Aracà's inhabitants tell their own stories and allows the audience to dive into the rich soundscape of the ligurian alpine countryside.

Herbert Fingarette once argued that there was no reason to fear death. At 97, his own mortality began to haunt him, and he had to rethink everything.

For the past 40 years, Bruce Beach has been preparing for a nuclear disaster. A bunker of 42 school buses is buried on his property, designed to save humanity. Curious onlookers and interested preppers regularly visit the site named Ark Two, but it's clear that the creator of this decaying shelter is the only one truly convinced of its practicality in the event of an apocalypse. Now that Bruce is in his 80s, he and his wife Jean need to spend more time taking care of their immediate needs than worrying about the future. What could easily be dismissed as evangelical paranoia becomes a tragic yet uplifting story about a risk-taking inventor who has lived without regrets. Sometimes outside-the-box thinkers become millionaires and are recognized for their genius ability to guide us into the future, while others are pushed to the margins. There’s a lot to be learned from both

“In Search of Unreturned Soldiers was about former soldiers of the Japanese army who chose not to return to Japan after the war. I found several of them who had remained in Thailand. Two years later, I invited one of them to make his first return visit to Japan and documented it in Outlaw-Matsu Returns Home. During the filming, my subject Fujita asked me to buy him a cleaver so that he could kill his ‘vicious brother.’ I was shocked, and asked him to wait a day so that I could plan how to film the scene. By the next morning, to my relief, Fujita had calmed down and changed his mind about killing his brother. But I couldn’t have had a sharper insight into the ethical questions provoked by this kind of documentary filmmaking.” —Shôhei Imamura

For 63 years, Tom Rose and his wife, Mary, built a life together on his family farm on Canaanville Road. Then last year Mary passed away, leaving Rose to face the future alone, surrounded by a lifetime of memories.

This Academy Award-nominated film takes a moving personal story, illuminates it with insight and humor, and makes it universal. In recounting her attempts to come to terms with her mother's advancing Alzheimer's disease, Deborah Hoffmann explores the relationship between mother and daughter, parent and child, and the tenacity of love.

A documentary portrait of elderly women living in a Kraków nursing home, observing daily rituals, illness, and waiting, shaped by recurring symbolic images of time and decline.