Dag Ma

Alma Anciana

October 2024 •Portuguese

Three juxtaposing stories taking place in Portugal, Austria and Cuba create an intimate and poetic portrait of the daily lives and struggles of the elderly in an unstable world, seen through the eyes of their grandchildren.

The Metal Detector

November 2023 •English

Georg is an Austrian retiree whose mother witnessed the crash of an Allied B-17 near their home during World War II. When he takes up metal detecting to find the wreckage, a growing fascination leads him to embark on a heartfelt mission, not only to research the backgrounds of the American crewmembers who parachuted off the plane into enemy territory, but to locate their descendants, to bring them to his Austrian town on the 75th anniversary of the crash, to introduce them to the townspeople who helped their fathers, and to unite his town in remembrance. It’s a story of empathy, resilience, and the enduring power of human connection.

While Waiting

March 2017 •Spanish

Lola lives in a public nursing home where everything is shared: the clothes, the showers, the only coffin and the endings. Her only personal belonging is the memory of her two great loves: her mother and husband. Thanks to them Lola has something to do every day, going to the main door’s window to check on her husband who lives across the street and to the phone, where she tries to call her mother. Both died long ago, but they are Lola’s only strength to reach her end in a world that, otherwise, is very impersonal for her.

Love 404

February 2019 •Polish

Rena is on the threshold of adulthood. For her and her mother, the Internet is a form of escape from their humdrum everyday lives. In the world of talent shows, Facebook and YouTube, the keyboard seems to be a gateway to fame and love. Yet the border between fantasy and reality is quickly obliterated.

Mommy Dead and Dearest

March 2017 •English

Child abuse, mental illness, and forbidden love converge in this mystery involving a mother and daughter who were thought to be living a fairy tale life that turned out to be a living nightmare.

Resurrecting Hassan

September 2017 •English

Traces the lives of the Hartings, a blind Montreal family of three who make their living singing in the city's subway stations. The Hartings lost their only sighted child Hassan in a tragic drowning accident, and have since turned to the teachings of Russian mystic Grigori Grabovoi, hoping to resurrect their son. Resurrecting Hassan is an exploration of this family's legacy of grief, tragedy and abuse; the film will follow them on their path to redemption.

COMPLEXion

March 2023 •English

"COMPLEXion is a documentary that aims to unpack the hegemony of skin color globally and challenge the archaic notions that exist surrounding it. Our mission is to defy toxic beauty standards through raw human stories."

Pajarito

August 2022 •Spanish

Manuel Andrade, after designing the Pumas logo, was forgotten in the history of the club. Today in the midst of poverty and his health problems, he decides to question the meaning of life.

Golden Road: Today's Senior Drivers

January 2004 •English

Does your parent's car have new dents or nicks? Does mentally reviewing the trip ahead of time help you when driving? When should a senior relinquish the keys or when should someone step in and remove them? The Golden Road: Today's Senior Drivers provides the tools you need in order to recognize, understand and confront these issues with deliberation and care.

Atentamente

December 2016 •Spanish

ATENTAMENTE is a film that, through the sensation of the time passing by and the presence of the death that wanders into a nursing home, allows us to feel the life through the illusion that love brings along. Libardo and Alba, a couple of elders who met each other at the nursing home where they live, they fall for, they become boyfriends and start to struggle in order to find fifty thousand pesos to rent a room for one night at a hotel so they can have a privacy moment, since at the nursing home where they live is not possible to have that. While struggling they must face each other, face their fears, their limitations, their pains, their time as well as their fragility so they can construct that moment in which they meet love. A struggle that seems to be easy, but for them is an odyssey against time, against their limitations and their own ghosts.

Grey Gardens

February 1976 •English

Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edith, two aging, eccentric relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, are the sole inhabitants of a Long Island estate. The women reveal themselves to be misfits with outsized, engaging personalities. Much of the conversation is centered on their pasts, as mother and daughter now rarely leave home.

Retirement Home

December 2017 •Portuguese

A group of elders spends their weekdays in a retirement home in Sandim, in the north of Portugal, where they talk, do arts and crafts, practice yoga and pray. We follow them between October 2012 and March 2013, when an economic crisis overshadowed Portuguese society and unemployment rates reached record levels. Meanwhile, arrangements are made for the Carnival ball. Will they bring the first place home this time?

Waiting for the Sun

March 2017 •English

In China more people are on death row than the rest of the world combined. The children of the convicts are often left alone, stigmatized and living in the streets. Grandma Zhang, as the kids call her, is a former prison guard who has founded an orphanage in Nanzhao.

La dernière maison

June 2021 •French

Blood Amber

August 2017 •Burmese

Somewhere in Myanmar is a forest rich in amber and controlled by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). Most of its inhabitants work in a mine, digging the earth night and days in the hope of finding the precious ore that will get them out of poverty. But on top of the excruciating hardship of the work, they also have to fear an attack from the army.

Spotlight on Merna

November 2016 •English

Taking part in The Voice Kids is already quite something, but for 11-year-old Merna it’s really something special. Her parents had to flee Iraq because they are part of the Christian minority, and IS was threatening to kidnap Merna. They now live in Lebanon, where one in three people is a refugee. The family has been waiting for two years for permission to move on. FaceTiming with her older sister, who stayed behind in Iraq, and cooking her favorite dishes with her mother make the situation more bearable. But what also really helps is singing – this calms Merna and makes her less afraid. She used to sing only in church, but since The Voice her beautiful, melancholy voice touches everyone. Because of her status as a refugee, Merna isn’t allowed to attend the foreign performances with the other finalists, but she’s now a national celebrity in Lebanon.

Peace

January 2010 •Japanese

What is peace? What is coexistence? And what are the basis for them? PEACE is a visual-essay-like observational documentary, which contemplates these questions by observing the daily lives of people and cats in Okayama city, Japan, where life and death, acceptance and rejection are intermingled.

Von heute auf morgen

January 2013 •German

'From One Day To The Next' follows four elderly people through their everyday lives, observing how they cope with a gradual loss of autonomy.

Pucundrìa

October 2019 •Italian

In a retirement home in a small town surrounded by mountains, the daily lives of the people who live there alternate. Them inside, the world outside. An imbalance that manifests itself in "Pucundrìa", an indefinable feeling of melancholy, boredom and perennial dissatisfaction, which leads to an unconscious resignation for what has not been, is not and can never be.

Pretty Old

January 2012 •English

When 30 women aged 67 - 84 from across America and around the world descend on Fall River, Massachusetts to compete in the 30th anniversary Ms. Senior Sweetheart Pageant, hilarity and heartbreak ensue.