Thursday, June 8-----Every major film festival has its specific focus. At the Troia International Film Festival, first works by up-and-coming directors is a major part of the Festival, having its own competition section named Primeiras Obras.

This year, the section boasts 13 films of diverse genres and geographic origins. Films from Europe represents the lion’s share of the section. A SOAP is an unusual love story between an independent woman who has just split with her longtime boyfriend and her transvestite neighbor who is awaiting a sex change operation, directed by Danish tyro Pernille Fischer Christensen. LOVE + HATE, by UK director Dominic Savage, also explores a forbidden relationship between two teenagers, one white, the other Muslim, who defy local convention in their small town in the north of England.

In GO WEST, by Bosnian director Ahmed Imamovic, a gay couple, one Muslim, the other Bosnian, experience the hazards of war and racism when the Serbian army invades Sarajevo in the mid 1990s. The politics of individuality versus autocratic rule is also the theme of CHARITON’S CHOIR, a comedy/drama by Greek director Grigoris Karantinakis, which stars Greek superstar George Corraface as a bohemian school principal whose free-thinking spirit will not be crushed by the fascistic military after their 1970’s coup d’etat.

In the Norwegian film KISSED BY WINTER, director Sara Johnsen tells the moving story of a successful physician with a secret in her past, who moves to a small rural village to escape a tragedy she caused, only to be confronted by memories of the past.The inescapability of one’s past is also the theme of KONTAKT by Macedonian director Sergey Stanojkovski. In this finely acted drama, two mentally unstable people, recently released from institutions, find their own way in the world, while dealing with the abuse they suffered as young adults.

Switzerland’s Stiona Werenfels’ cynical film GOING PRIVATE looks at modern marriage as a business contract, as it explores the imploding relationship between an arrogant investment banker and his wife.

Two Spanish-language films are included in the First Works section. HERMANAS (Sisters), a Argentina-Spain-Brazil co-production directed by Julia Solomonoff, explores the highly emotional reunion of two sisters, one of whom left Argentina at the height of the military dictatorship’s “secret war