Can 9-yr-old Benni’s newly-appointed anger-management coach succeed where others have consistently failed?

A deeply-felt drama in which issues of race and class threaten the lifelong best-friendship of two girls growing up in a Quebec Innu community.

Based on an acclaimed novel by Jocelyne Saucier, And the Birds Rained Down is an unsentimental portrayal of what it means to have lived a long life, rich with experiences and secrets, and what one should do with that as the years close in. The film is meditative, beautifully filmed and engrossing – rarely in the movies are the lives of older people treated with such respect or examined with such sincere interest. And the Birds Rained Down won the 2020 Canadian Screen Award for Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Rémy Girard), the Festival Prize for Best Canadian Feature at the 2020 Victoria Film Festival and director Louise Archambault took the Dragon Award in the International Competition at the 2020 Göteborg Film Festival.

Following a hit & run accident, a quiet country lane on a sunny day becomes the stage for a searing drama. Unfolding in real time and set entirely in one location, a wandering, enquiring camera watches as bystanders, police, relatives, emergency services and, eventually, the driver of the car arrive on the scene. Tension soars, connections are exposed, mob mentality ensues. It’s a remarkable achievement from first time writer/ director Bartosz Kruhlik. An incisive script, ferocious performances, relentless pacing and stabs of black humour, coalesce into an edge-of-your-seat experience that will leave you gasping for breath. Supernova won the Dublin Film Critics’ Award for Best Film at the 2019 Dublin International Film Festival, and the Best Debut Director, Feature Film at the 2019 Polish Film Festival.

Asunder tells the story of what happened to an English town during the First World War, with almost all of its men abroad fighting, and its women and children left behind. The North East was in the front line, thanks to its shipyards and munitions factories. Using archive and contemporary footage and audio, Asunder collages the stories of people from Tyneside and Wearside to uncover what life was like on the home front, with bombs falling on Britain for the first time, conscientious objectors sentenced to death, and women working as doctors, tram conductors and footballers. The narrative moves from an Edwardian golden era, in which sport grew in popularity and aircraft and cars pointed to a bright new future, to a war that horrifically reversed this progress.  The soundtrack is composed by Sunderland’s Mercury-nominated Field Music and Newcastle’s Warm Digits, performed with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and The Cornshed Sisters. The narration for the film is voiced by journalist Kate Adie, with the actor Alun Armstrong as the voice of The Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette.

The director of much-loved world cinema classics The Story of the Weeping Camel and The Cave of the Yellow Dog transports us once again to the spectacular beauty of the Mongolian steppe, this time looking at the encroachment of modernity and its effect on nomadic lifestyles that have changed little in hundreds of years. Following the sudden death of the leader of a campaign against mining companies who are destroying the habitat on which they depend, his eleven-year-old son steps up to carry on his David vs Goliath fight, an old Mongolian folk tale being both his inspiration and his secret weapon. Veins of the World is available to view from 13th April.

The breaking of her waters at a family gathering mean that 20-yr-old Sofia, daughter of a well-to-do Casablanca family, can no longer deny, to herself or anyone else, that she is pregnant. This will usher in serious consequences in a country - Morocco - where sex out of wedlock is an imprisonable offence. Whisked away from the party by her cousin, she gives birth in a hospital which admits her on condition that she produce her husband within 24 hours or face the consequences. At this point you might anticipate a heartfelt, Western-Liberal denunciation of narrow-minded laws and expectations, but this is a far more nuanced and ambitious film than that, as the sullen, apparently meek Sofia transcends, in a most unexpected manner, the victimhood that seems to be her lot. The central critique of the subjugation of women and of class is still there - the film is eye-opening in its exploration of class politics, women’s issues, social pressures and bureaucracy in modern Morocco - but it’s the subtleties of character and the interactions of the marvellous ensemble cast that make Sofia , the debut feature of director Meryem Benm’Barek-Aloïsi, such a gripping watch. Sofia is the winner of numerous festival awards, most notably the Un Certain Regard Screenplay Prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Sofia also took the FIPRESCI Prize, International Competition at the 2018 Thessaloniki Film Festival and the Best Director award for Meryem Benm’Barek-Aloïsi at the 2018 Bratislava International Film Festival. Sofia is available to view from 23rd April.