Anahit Simonian

In a peripheral neighbourhood, where the rural and urban worlds meet, the houses of the first migrants who arrived after the post-war period coexist with the new blocks of the dormitory city, where the latest wave of migration is concentrated. This humble corner is now an authentic global village. Good Valley Stories is a sum of constructs, of social, generational and identity, urban and ecological conflicts, but it is also a calm and humanistic look at today’s world.

This film traces the unbelievable true story of the Calderón family, who built grand movie palaces in Mexico and the U.S., employing thousands to produce incomparable, hugely successful, and often reprehensible populist-genre films that were utterly and uniquely Mexican.

The filmmaker visits the house of his ancestors with the invocation of family photographs and the voice of his parents. A journey into memory through everyday objects and spaces which seem to remain untouched by the passage of time.

Based on Alexander Shirvanzade's 1885 novel of the same name, the film denounces the despotic rites and customs of Caucasian families. It is widely recognized as the first Armenian feature film.

Lluís Maria Xirinacs, a religious man, philosopher and political activist, leaves Barcelona on a Monday in August 2007 for the mountains. It was the day he turned seventy-five. Six days later, a mushroom picker finds him lying in a meadow, dead. Ten years later, Duna, a writer in a creative and personal crisis, searches for the ultimate meaning of this death.

A film made of objects, faces and texts; of lost cats, of found pictures, cut-outs, recreations; a poetic subversion in diary form, one that breaks the calendar into a novel, driving relentlessly as a journey to the end of the world.

The action takes place in Cantal in the 1950s. Le Bricou, an aging cowherd, lost two animals while summering on the Limon plateau. A banal, almost insignificant event and yet it is enough to hammer him into his head. His life is turned upside down. And if others laughed at him, and if he was no longer good for anything, and if his wife cheated on him, maybe he even got scabies...

How to film a word? How to hear a photograph? How to tell a lifetime of love in just 26 words? In searching out the sense of beauty, the border between the real world and that of reverie, fascinated by the dreamlike universe of the French photographer Guillaume Poussou -and who knows- maybe also by the photographer himself, Anahit Simonian takes up her camera for the very first time and begins to dance with her eyes closed. So is born “L'Abcdaire de l'amoureuse d'un photographe”, her first film.