Program ARTA Cinema

From besieged Aleppo to the confines of a London newsroom, Lebanese journalist Janay Boulos and Syrian activist and cameraman Abd Alkader Habak retrace their love story, using their vast personal archives stretching over 13 years of revolutions, war and exile. Can their love survive distance, danger, and differences?

In the early 1930s, painter Leonora Carrington, a rebel against social expectations, joins the surrealist movement and its iconic figures like André Breton and Salvador Dalí in Paris. A whirlwind love affair with artist Max Ernst confronts her with her inner demons. During the war, Leonora flees to Mexico and finally empowers herself....See more details

Jung-hwan, a professional wild animal trainer, spends his days bickering and playing with his teenage daughter, Soo-ah, who is passionate about dancing. Then one day, Soo-ah gets infected by a zombie virus that sweeps across the world. To protect her, Jung-hwan takes Soo-ah to a seaside village where his mother lives....See more details

Paula and La Maestra are sixteen and inseparable. They train together over the summer to represent Mexico at the Junior Pan American Swimming Championship and are the strongest swimmers on their team. One night, at a party, Paula ends up alone with Daniel, a good friend and her longtime crush. Soon after, La Maestra senses that something has changed....See more details

Bouchra (35), a Moroccan filmmaker in New York, is paralyzed by the fear of the blank page. A phone call with her mother in Casablanca will have memories resurfacing. Their tender yet complex exchange sparks a creative breakthrough, opening a journey through family bonds, daughterhood, and the thrill of love.

An elderly goat herder in the mountains of Namaqualand, South Africa, falls victim to a scam promising long-overdue reparations for her father’s WWII service. As she waits for money that will never come, the disruptions of her 80th birthday threaten to strip away the last of her independence. Structured as a series of recurring visual ‘variations’, the film transforms repetition into revelation to frame a portrait of waiting, endurance, and loss.

Antonia is fuming. She is pregnant and the man who slept with her is getting married in a few hours to another woman. Antonia decides to search out her rival and confront her... A film made in a single shot, exactly as its Double Takes partner, Romanian production 3 Days in September!

This deeply personal documentary captures several years in the lives of four family members. Pepa, the director, records on an iPhone and tries to understand why their beloved older brother and cousins live unhoused and experience substance addiction. Unsentimentally, the film traces the causes and fallout of addiction, asking where love ends, control begins, and what respect truly demands: to save, or to let go.

Roy Cohen, an Israeli filmmaker of Arab-Jewish descent, addresses his Palestinian friend Aseel Asleh, killed by Israeli police in their youth, through an intimate cinematic dialogue across time. Revisiting their shared past at a peace camp in Maine, he confronts memory, friendship and the ongoing violence shaping the present, using letters, archives and conversations to explore loss, moral responsibility and the collapse of a once-possible future of coexistence.

On December 3rd, 2024, in Seoul, the President declares martial law in an attempt to overcome a political crisis. As troops advance toward the National Assembly, citizens rush to block them while lawmakers break through police barricades to vote against the decree. The confrontation unfolds into a powerful civic resistance against military control, echoing the Gwangju Democratic Uprising 45 years earlier, one of the deepest traumas in South Korea’s history.