A new work by Maria Ramos, director of YIDFF ’95 New Asian Currents I Think What I Want to Say Is . . . Venturing inside the courts and prisoners of Rio de Janeiro, the unflinching gaze of the camera captures the state of affairs created when we "pass judgement" in the name of justice.

In About a Farm, the director’s parents who run a farm in a small town in Finland decide to sell off all their cattle and shut it down, while their ill daughter chooses life in the city. A self documentary that paints a portrait of a family buffeted by surging waves of change in a small town in Finland. In Moving Adult Cats, a traveling salesvan makes a stop once a week in a small rural village in Sweden. The camera closely follows the daily activities of two elderly folk, painstakingly observing their anxieties as they strive to live true to themselves until the end. Through the filmmaker's attentive observation, the issues of old age that we all must face are delicately delineated.

A pastoral farming village in The Netherlands. People and animals, trees and rivers all flow in abundance and in their own time. Seven years of scenes from this hamlet have been etched into film with a limpid cinematic sesibility. Meanwhile, at a demolition site in northern India, a tanker splits open into two. Shattering into pieces by a hammer, melting into flame, the beauty of this very human act is captured in Hammer and Flame.