Rana and Adineh, two women of very different backgrounds and social class are accidentally brought together to share a journey. Rana, inexperienced, religious and bound by traditions, is forced to drive a cab in order to survive f inancially. Adineh, wealthy yet rebellious, has escaped from her home. Along the way, Rana begins to understand that her passenger is a transsexual who is planning on having an operation. For Rana, comprehending and accepting such a reality is close to impossible and tantamount to abandoning everything she was raised to believe. (Description courtesy of the Montreal World 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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The Invisible Men tells the untold story of persecuted gay Palestinian who have run away from their families and are now hiding illegally in Tel Aviv. Their stories will be told through the f ilm’s heroes: Louie, 32 years old, a gay Palestinian who has been hiding in Tel Aviv for the past 8 years; Abdu, 24 years old, who was exposed as gay in Ramallah and then accused of espionage and tortured by Palestinian security forces; Faris, 23 years old, who escaped to Tel Aviv from the West Bank after his family tried to kill him. Their only chance for survival -- to seek asylum outside Israel and Palestine and leave their homelands forever behind.

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