We are pleased close the 28th Annual Film Festival with the area premiere of director/producer Richard LeMay's (2010 festival closer Children of God, 200 American) stunning family drama Naked As We Came. Shot entirely in Massachusetts and staring a stunning ensemble including Ryan Vigilant of Gossip Girl and Karmine Alers, (Mimi in Rent), Naked As We Came is a story about letting go of the past and recreating family relationships. After an unexpected phone call, Laura and her brother Elliot rush to their family's country estate to find their mother, Lilly, gravely ill and living with a handsome young stranger named Ted. Their mother's condition sets Laura and Elliot on a path to realizing where their own lives have gone wrong. Love, loss and hope are all explored in this powerful drama, which asks the question: What is your dream?

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Look at Me Again is a road movie that whisks us away to the wild, semi-arid expanse of north-eastern Brazil. Our tough, cool travelling companion is Silvyo Luccio (‘… I was born a woman, became a lesbian and am now a man’), a thinker in the throes of transition and transformation who finds himself on a journey back into his religious-fundamentalist, deeply prejudiced, traditionalist past. At the heart of old wounds, humiliation and trauma lies an anxiously awaited encounter with a daughter and the hope of familial reconciliation. Look at Me Again portrays a vibrant human being full of resilience, who has broken free of the sexual catechism’s stale trinity of hetero-homo-bisexuality in order to set off on a different path in search of new horizons. Before him lies a baking hot road through regions marked by grinding poverty, ardent religious faith, superstition and bloated machismo, as well as several encounters with some extraordinary people. (Description courtesy of the Berlinale: The Berlin International Film Festival.)

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Carlos is spending the summer in the country with his family in order to help out with things. Perhaps he won’t even be returning to the capital, as economic prospects are hardly rosy there either. Extremadura on the other hand, sparsely populated and for a long time one of the most neglected regions in Europe, is experiencing a tentative upturn. Tourism and modernisation rub shoulders with almost archaic customs and a conservative, mostly elderly population here. Sleepless Knights depicts all this in casual, unobtrusive fashion, in images that have at times a truly otherworldly beauty. The central theme is the love story between the newly returned Carlos and the young policeman Juan. “You don’t look like you’re from here,” remarks Juan when they meet. “I’m not from here,“ replies Carlos, “I live in Madrid.” Whether to be from here or elsewhere is a decision that many here have to make. Extremadura, Madrid, maybe even Munich? This uncertainty suffuses their love story with a peculiar sense of tension before the backdrop of a seemingly relaxed, uneventful summer. It is only the old men striding through the austere landscape in their strange knight costumes who remain blissfully untroubled.

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