A misfit teenager, an anxious mother, and a recent widow see their day interrupted by a mysterious natural phenomenon. As their world descends into chaos, the three women struggle to find their place in life. This is the initial idea of ​​Ordinary Failures, an apocalyptic tale calling for human solidarity directed by Cristina Groșan.

Our journey through International cinema takes us now to Philippines. At the end of April we attended the Far East Film Festival in Udine where we had the chance to interview Filipino director Martika Ramirez Escobar about her feature debut “Leonor Will Never Die” alongside the protagonist of the film Sheila Francisco, a singer and veteran of the theater. Ramirez Escobar has created an exciting and strange film about a retired filmmaker who gets bonked on the head by a television accidentally thrown from a window. Leonor sinks into a coma, and from there the film cheekily takes us inside a writer’s head, entering into her own unfinished script for one of her action movies.

The former players of the Japanese women’s volleyball team used to be known as the ‘Witches of the Orient’ because of their seemingly supernatural powers on the courts. In the Julien Faraut’s film, the formation of the squad in the late 1950s as a worker’s team at a textile factory, right up until their triumph at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, their memories and stern discipline are evoked through modern-day sequences, archival footage, and cartoon images where fact and fable fly hand in hand.

With the distinguished director Sergei Loznitsa, we’ll discuss his new film “Mr. Landsbergis”, which premiered at the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. For the first time Mr. Loznitsa appears as the interviewer in conversation with Professor Vytautas Landsbergis about crucial events from 1987 till 1993. Winner of the top prize at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, this epic chronicle of the early collapse of the USSR is authoritative and detailed even by the exacting standards to which Mr. Loznitsa has accustomed us.

La Paz is the least western capital of the Americas. Located at more than 3600 metres above sea level, the city spreads like a sea of bricks, stones and concrete in the canyons that precede the “altiplano”. Bolivian director Kiro Russo recreates a symphony of the city in the heights with a tale of nightmare and redemption of the working class. El Gran Movimiento won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival Horizons strand in 2021.

In the seconde episode of HOBO we move to Georgia to meet Alexandre Koberidze, who found his second feature “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?" placed prominently within the main competition slate of the Berlinale’s online edition of this year, where it was met with considerable acclaim and the receipt of the FIPRESCI prize. In his film, no single moment is deemed more valuable than any other: the camera drifting gently to gaze at children playing in the park, dogs jauntily sauntering in the streets, a cafe owner hustling for better business, before looping back to develop the central story. In this interview, Koberidze discusses with us his major influences and his peculiar style.

The Chilean director Joaquin Cociña will reveal his sources of inspiration - including Ladislas Starevich, the Russian animator famous for his stop-motion movies with dead bugs - and discuss “Los Huesos”, a movie (co-directed con Cristóbal León) which tries to find an answer to the question: “What would have happened if Chile had been the birthplace of animated cinema?”.