Seven year old Sasha practices violin every day to satisfy the ambition of his parents. Already withdrawn as a result of his routines, Sasha quickly regains confidence when he accidentally meets and befriends worker Sergei, who works on a steamroller in their upscale Moscow neighborhood.

Kemel, a young recent school graduate, travels into an isolated part of the steppes to work in a small communal farm camp.

Symbols and political analogies abound in this dramatically frustrating first work by a recent film-school graduate. In the story, Vojtech has survived World War II in a Czech prison following an unjust sentence. Now he is free, and the world is full of possibilities.

As an awkward idealistic high school teacher begins her first job in the city, things turn out to be much tougher than she had imagined.

Karel Vachek’s graduate film offers us a documentary essay which is both a light-hearted and aggressive little piece and also a parody of investigative film journalism. The Strážnice folk festival, backed by the cultural Party apparatus of the time, for years had little to commend itself to authentic folklore. In the film the event assumes the form of a bizarre stage spectacle with almost surrealistic elements that Vachek reinforces with unconventional approaches (commentary appearing as titles on screen, singing, declamations into the camera, feature etudes, the fusion of news coverage and fiction). The result is a stirring film collage depicting various characters, from crowd-pleasers, Easter egg decorators, kitsch artists and peddlers, to museologists and local residents, all of whom come up against the eccentric "identical” twin reporters Karel and Jan Saudek and a bored actress who appears as an extra. Using their special blend of irony and wit, they present us with the sad truth.

A white bisexual vampire, Lillia, is trapped in a monotonous cycle with her thoughtless, misogynist vampire partner, Luke (who, while also being a bisexual, prefers to devour women prey). Her encounter with Black lesbian Zena, who is reading about goddesses across religions and cultures and thinking about the horror film genre, pulls Lillia out of a state of bad faith into an enlightened state of knowledge and play. 'The Mark of Lilith' was the graduation film of Bruna Fionda, Polly Gladwin, Zach Mack-Nataf’s from The London College of Printing, under the tutorship of Laura Mulvey. The film was shot in Brixton and made with a cast and crew of local filmmakers, artists and activists. The Mark of Lilith was digitally restored from the 16mm print by the BFI in 2021.

The young Marta has made a break in her medical education to fully invest in her career as a model. We follow her for a day in her life, almost completely without hearing her voice. It is seldom that Marta gets the space to speak, instead she is mostly subject to the voice of others.

Young Eugene from the provinces travels to Prague in search of fame. Once there he gets an offer to write engagé lyrics for pop songs...

A girl's everyday life at the end of her school days, trying to find a way into society and her own life.

On New Year's Day, two boys wind up in the apartment of Katerina, a teacher from their school, along with her friends, Stepan and David. As the older trio bickers, drinks and flirts, the boys gain eye-opening insight into the adult world.

An animated city symphony celebrates the hidden world of background noise.

"A post punk piece of pagan sensibility, complete with beastiality buggery and boundless energy. Maniacal filmmaking at its best. He takes his horse with him everywhere." Andrew Kötting

The story of two women, one French and the other German, who fight for a child who has been mistakenly taken by the Germans after a bomb raid.

Slavek is an elderly caretaker of a public lavatory and is proud of his job. He becomes anxious to see more and more automatic toilets installed in town. Then something changes. He falls in love with a woman toilet caretaker who is working on the other side of the street.

Lena is seventeen years old and is on the threshold of entering adult life, but her growing up is brutally interrupted by a horrific event. Devastated, she goes into her shell and is scared to share her experience with others.

Finally, after an endless search to find other survivors in a lifeless post-apocalyptic world, Key has found a fragmented human voice in his radio receiver. Tired, but with a new string of hope, he follows the signal and soon he discovers a deserted ghost town, dead and abandoned. Tortured by traumas and the lack of interaction he starts searching for the radio source and other signs of life, but with his crocked body and crumbling mind his time is about to run out.

Böttcher made his graduation film about young people who had become delinquent in a youth work yard in Thuringia. Already here a striking feature of his later films becomes apparent: Jürgen Böttcher gives his protagonists a lot of space; he approaches them without prejudice, empathetically and carefully. In addition, his curiosity can be felt in the life situations and stories of his characters.

Ibrahim Shaddad’s graduation film Jagdpartie (1964), which he shot at the Deutsche Hochschule für Filmkunst Potsdam-Babelsberg (now: Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF), is a treatise on racism. Shot in a forest in Brandenburg, it uses a Western look to portray the hunt for a Black man.

The desperate attempt of a father to connect to his autistic son.

When 8 year old Kati from Afghanistan stows away in her father's truck, Faruk must juggle his responsibilities as a single dad while holding down his first job in a new country.

A couple wakes up one sunny morning on the 15th of May. Apparently, they had the same nightmare and the day unfolds strangely. The next day, we are still on the 15th of May. Graduation work from La Fémis.

The process of being encroached by the persona.