No guide to adult life

Young people today face more possibilities than any generation before them, yet often have less protection when the paths they choose lead somewhere dangerous. Across these films, Eastern and Western cultures collide within young lives still searching for belonging and purpose: in “From Dawn to Dawn,” a man from Spain’s Chinese immigrant community struggles to build an ordinary life while being repeatedly drawn back into the gang world he entered in his youth; in “The Golden Swan,” a young Norwegian artist travels towards an idealised India, only to be abducted and killed in Kashmir; while the Western-educated filmmakers of “IMAGO” and “Confessions of a Mole” return to their families in the Caucasus and China, where their ideas of adulthood come up against traditional expectations. The three friends of “A Fire There” stand between the inherited life of their Armenian village and imagined futures elsewhere, while “If Pigeons Turned to Gold” follows a sister trying to save her brother who even tough is only 30 years of age, looks way older, given to his drug addiction.