Compétition internationale :

- America, João Nuno Pinto, Spain-Brazil-Portugal-Russia, 2010, 111 min, feature, color
Liza is a young Russian immigrant married to a Portuguese man, with whom she has a child. Vitor, her husband, is in fact a petty crook who lives off scams and tricking old ladies. Mauro, the couple's son, is a strange child who has taken it upon himself not to speak. Besides all her domestic chores, Liza also has to take care of Vitor's grandmother, a bed-ridden, moribund, hundred-year-old lady who rejects any care that is given to her by Liza. Fernanda, Vitor's Spanish ex-wife, taking advantage of the wave of illegal immigrants into Portugal, turns up with a proposal for a false passports business. From then on, and to Liza's great despair, her house becomes a halfway house for countless immigrants of several differing nationalities and races, all looking for a better future. One of those to arrive is Andrei, a young Ukrainian orthopaedist who is wanted by the Russian mafia. Andrei ends up falling in love with Liza, who sees in him the opportunity to get out of that life. But things are not as straightforward as that...

European Day - Lux Prize :

- Illegal, Olivier MASSET-DEPASSE, Belgium-Luxembourg-France, 2010, 90 min, documentaire
Tania, a Russian illegal immigrant, has been living in Belgium for eight years with her 13-year-old son Ivan. Quietly integrated, they live in constant fear of being detained for questioning, which is an inevitability. As soon as this happens, the camera clings to Tania’s body, and follows her to a closed detention centre. Her sole obsession is to protect her son from deportation, and this angle enables Masset-Depasse to avoid the pitfalls of the genre. It is not a question here of offering viewers a sociological study of detention camps, although the film doesn’t hide the realities of that world. Through Tania’s encounters, we discover the centre’s “residents”, the other refugees, as well as the police officers and wardens, who are all plunged into an inhuman situation, at the limits of the describable