Ties of family, friendship, duty, and identity form the fabric of our lives, but just as often, they twist, tighten, and tangle.In these moments of confusion, friction, and tension, something tender and revealing is set loose. This program presents five coming-of-age stories where childhood brushes up against the raw edges of reality, and growing up means navigating the messiness between innocence and experience.

In the playful Slovakian documentary A Good Mind Grows in Thorny Places (Slovakia, dir. Katarína Gramatová), twelve-year-old Adam, a Romani kid with adult-sized burdens, tries to earn money for energy drinks by chopping trees with his brother in Slovakia’s so-called “hungry valley.” Braided (animation,China/USA, dir. Chenxi Zhang) explores the tangled contours of growing up through the memories of a young woman who recalls a childhood tightly bound in braids and a quiet, painful connection with her mother that endures even after the braids are cut off . Romanian short fiction Truth or Dare ( dir. Simona Borcea) takes us into a summer shared by two adolescent sisters, where flirting and jealousy become silent lessons in closeness, rivalry, and inevitable coming of age. Cowboys (animation, dir. Robinson Van Hoof) follows Billy – a not-so-successful cowboy in a forgotten Wild West town – as he tries to prove himself by chasing fame and outlaws, accompanied by his best friend and a reluctant sheriff. In The Sea in Between (Fiction, Czech Republic, dir. Lun Sevnik), a teenage boy is  stranded on a boat with a creepy tourist waits for his father to return, as discomfort rises with the tide.