Alexander Ris

Our River... Our Sky

In a typically mixed Baghdadi neighbourhood in 2006, a community of ordinary people try to live their everyday lives amidst the threat of unpredictable violence. At the heart of these intersecting stories we find Sara, a single mother and novelist, who regains her will to write after witnessing the forced exile of her Christian neighbour and best friend Sabiha. With the news of Saddam Hussein's sudden execution shortly before the New Year, Sara and her neighbours brace themselves for an uncertain future. Yet, like a miracle, each is able to sustain a fragile sense of hope.

Father

Nikola’s children are taken away from him after social services decide that he is too poor to provide them with a decent living environment. He sets off on foot to lodge a complaint in Belgrade.

The Children's Republic

In a war-torn African country, a small group of young people, led by Mão-de-Ferro, a traumatized and violent war child, arrive in a mysterious city where children, abandoned by adults, have created their own utopian republic.

The Woman with a Broken Nose

The act of a woman with a broken nose, who suddenly jumps out of a taxi and throws herself off the bridge in Belgrade, connects the lives of three witnesses.

On Tour

After leaving France in search of a better life in America, a television producer returns with a group of burlesque dancers to take the Paris club scene by storm.

Summer

Shaun and Daz are vibrant kids, wasted by their experience of education. All they have is friendship and Shaun's first love Katy. From the moment Shaun steps into our world he is bound to lose. Labeled as a violent bully he destroys himself and Daz with him. Shaun has twelve years to reflect on an intense summer of love, sex and loyalty. But Daz's imminent death forces Shaun to confront his past.

The Trap

Mladen and Marija are an ordinary and happy married couple of the "middle class" of the society in which they live as tenants. Mladen works as a civil engineer in a state company, and Marija is an English teacher in primary school. The couple finds joy in their only son, Nemanja. They discover that Nemanja has a rare heart disease and healing is possible with an operation in a foreign medical center, which costs €26,000.

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

Dark fairytale about a demonic doctor who abducts a beautiful opera singer with designs on transforming her into a mechanical nightingale.

Perfect Sight

10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the "Perfect Sight" campsite, located on the Island of Rügen on the German Baltic Sea coast: the former state property has been taken over by an ex-officer of the German army. Now the new moved in West German rules the site. Anyone who opposes him is banned. With a little imagination and a few tricks, he wanted to make the deal of a lifetime. But he has miscalculated and run the property into the ground, bankruptcy is imminent. His employee, the Vietnamese German Pit Sun, somehow keeps the place together and has a child with the owner's daughter. But since he hasn't received any money for a long time, he wants to run away to Vietnam. The tradition-conscious East German campers are also not happy with the bad-tempered campsite operator. It's just as well that Claus Oehlke has robbed a bank and is only throwing the money around to impress his wife. But she only has eyes for the former GDR crooner Michi Fanselow, the dream of her youth.

Nightfall

A largely plotless, fado-scored journey through the gloomy cobblestone streets, zombie bars, and fetid basements of a sordid harbor town populated by German-speaking sots and Portuguese guest workers. An unhappy young couple, Leni and Anton, quarrel and split separately into the rat’s ass of the evening. Everyone is looking for love, but no one finds any—although Leni does pick up a trick.