Mirka Duijn

Does Shangri-La really exist? Mirka Duijn goes in search of the answer in this travelogue-cum-investigation. She travels to the mountains of Tibetan China and digs into the archives to unravel the history of this mythical place. At first sight, the answer is obvious: British author James Hilton invented Shangri-La for his 1933 novel Lost Horizon, in which four characters crash land in the Kunlun Mountains and later find a magnificent monastery—a paradise on earth.

Jordy is an eleven year old boy who's family has not been functioning after his homesick mother went back to her home-country Russia. Jordy devises a master plan to get her back. He builds a Russian house, a datcha, in the backyard of their house. He is convinced this will make his mother feel at home again. Eventually his mother doesn't come back, but Jordy's actions do get his family back on track.

After his retired father, Franco, nearly dies from a heart attack, Francesco decides to make a film about him. Francesco’s ruthless directing methods, as well as Franco's dubious acting efforts, generate both absurd and intimate dialogues which mostly occur between the takes. Edited as the “making of” for a film that was never finished, '13 attempts to shoot my father' follows the tragicomic journey of the director-son and his actor-father attempts at overcoming, with the help of a camera, their inability to communicate