The Fam
Director – Fred Baillif
(Switzerland)
Duration – 110′
A group of teenage girls have been placed in a residential care home with social workers. This forced “family” experience creates unexpected tensions and intimacies. An incident triggers a chain of overreactions. The fall-out reveals the weaknesses of the retrograde juvenile system, as well as the demons that haunt ‘La Mif’.
Her name was Jo
Director – Joe Duca
(USA)
Duration – 103′
Ten-year-old Jo spends her days along the Shenandoah River with her best friend Selma, fishing, scrapping for metal—surviving.
She gets her chance when Bill, her abusive junkie stepdad, OD’s on heroin. She dumps him in the river, and flees when the cops come looking for answers.
Selma in tow, she steals Bill’s beat-up Buick, hocks his tools and an old flatscreen for quick cash, and heads off bound for Los Angeles, in hopes of finding her biological father.
Stop-zemlia
Director – Kateryna Gornostai
(Ukraine)
Duration – 120′
The introverted high-school girl Masha sees herself as an outsider unless she hangs around with Yana and Senia who share her non-conformist status. While she is trying to navigate through an intense time of the pre-graduation year, Masha falls in love in a way that forces her out of her comfort zone.
Vacarme
Director – Neegan Trudel
(Canada)
Duration – 77′
Émilie, a thirteen-year-old, has been placed in a youth protection group home. Confronted by strict new rules and the authoritarian presence of her case worker, she chooses to flee her new reality even if this means denying her own needs. All she wants is to fill her need for love even if this means returning at any cost to her egocentric mother Karine. Worse, the young girl is subjected to the bad influence of sixteen-year-old Ariel, her roommate with whom she gets into a lot of trouble. But each meeting Émilie has with Renaud, who gives her guitar lessons, are for her glimmers of hope. In this way, adolescent Émilie learns the art of resilience, progressively building confidence in herself.