Social & External
As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills.
In an open letter to the most influential modern Indian political leader, the Late Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the filmmaker sequentially narrates the stories of three distinct individuals - that of a confused filmmaker who flows with time, a dedicated social reformer who guides the stratified masses into social upliftment and a divisive and regressive politician. The juxtaposition of their disfigured trajectories provokes a pertinent question: Did Gandhi ever foresee the dehumanized shape that his legacy has now dangerously morphed into?
Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.
Andrea and the simbionte travel to Toledo; when they arrive, they find a lonely bus station, which slowly turns off the lights for them. In the silence that surrounds them, Andrea watches the moment pass and with it her certainty about her future dream with the simbionte, feeling that everything she experiences is actually a memory.
After receiving a phone call, a man feels his inner world come to a standstill. Recalling the event decades later, he relives how everything changed in that moment and reflects on how quickly his life has passed and how his reality was constructed by all the things he repeated to himself like a mantra.
Inspired by a tumultuous period in the director's relationship with her mother, the film draws a poignant analogy between the phases of their conflict and the ever-changing states of water along the coast of São Paulo, where the director grew up.
Mara—the spirit of the night, the weaver of darkened dreams—pressed upon my chest as sleep held me captive. My memory. In the haze of a dream, I saw those I loved, their faces bathed in an otherworldly glow. The nightmare was not the shadows nor the fear they whispered, but the cruel certainty of waking—of losing them to the morning light
For 'Et les chiens se taisaient' Maldoror adapted a piece of theatre by the poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), about a rebel who becomes profoundly aware of his otherness when condemned to death. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures on display at the Musée de l'Homme, a Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris.
Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.
“Leda + Swans” depicts an infernal, mythic birth of cinema, dredging the violence and horror from Wallace McCutcheon’s comic short film “Photographing a Female Crook” (1904). Leda, who may or may not be a falsely accused young woman, is brought in for a mugshot by two officers. She first attempts to avoid the camera’s gaze, and, when overpowered and manhandled, contorts her face to ruin the photograph. However, her small rebellion proves futile; she was already being recorded, objectified, mapped, and co-opted by the Godhead of the director. As her body and image are repurposed and transmuted ad infinitum, the filmic universe also explodes into a supernova. What is born out of this suffering and manipulation is another example of our sublime medium and modern muse. She will not be last the Leda, and she may not even be the first. Who is the guilty party here? Is beauty a chimera in traditional cinema? Has the ephemeral cinema of the attractions and distractions era gone anywhere?
A youngster writes a letter to his grandmother about his last trip to Donosti (Spain). This city inspires him to ponder about the language of cinema, time, cities, and sharing memories with our loved ones.
Since its publication 200 years ago, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has influenced vast swathes of popular culture. Adaptations have starred cinema legends from Boris Karloff to Robert De Niro – and even Alvin and the Chipmunks. From tales of science gone mad (Jurassic Park) to stories of understanding the other (ET, The Hulk, Arrival), traces of the story and its themes have spread across our media. With Frankenstein Re-membered, video artist and film historian Chris Gerrard collects these diverse fragments from the birth of cinema until the present day and in the tradition of Victor Frankenstein himself, attempts to stitch them back together into an adaptation of the original Shelley novel.
The reunion of a group of former medical students results in a flood of bitter memories.
Valtos is a story told from thirty years hence, in the last moments of its narrator, who awoke one day in 1987 'with the knowledge that I had been duplicated during the night, and that I was an inferior replica of myself'. There follows a relentless, epic, pursuit of an absconding phantom - his 'original' - which ends in catastrophe at Valtos, a place at once ethereal and terrifying.
Through the story of one woman’s year in a room with a view, the film catches its audience up in the collective memories of all those who have loved and lost. Through a study of Liz’s obsession and loneliness, the film mixes the particular with the universal to cover the whole gamut of feelings and theories about lost love. Ranging from the popular to the more erudite, snatches of songs, quotes and diary jottings are all stitched together with stories from Liz’s past and descriptions in minutiae of her current existence. The B side of love is richly played out through the words of an A team of interpreters from Split Enz, Laurie Anderson and Bob Dylan to Freud, Marge Piercy, Collete and Roland Barthes.
Penthesilea, the first of six films made by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, traverses thousands of years to look at the image of the Amazonian woman in myth. It asks, among other questions, is the Amazonian woman a rare strong female image or is she a figure derived from male phantasy? The film explores the complexities of such questions, but does not seek any concrete answers.
Bern, 1979: a tower block called Tscharnergut. A group of friends get together to make a film about their experiences growing up in suburban Switzerland.
Charlotte Gainsbourg agrees to play a witch condemned to be burned at the stake in the first film directed by Béatrice Dalle. But the chaotic production, technical problems, and psychotic breakdowns gradually plunge the shoot into a chaos of pure light.
Grieving and facing the consequences of their crimes, the Traoré brothers get one last chance to forge a new path.
A bourgeois couple, modern yet conventional. One night by accident, a young prostitute barges into their lives. Hounded down, beaten up, threatened, she will continue to struggle, with the help of a well off lady, first for her survival-her resurrection-then for her dignity and freedom. Stormy encounters for everyone involved.
The true story of 20-year-old Colleen Stan, a hitchhiking woman abducted by a young couple and held captive for seven years, during which time she's tortured and forced to live as a slave to her captors.
Mélanie, 16 years old, lives with her mother. She likes going to school, her friends, playing the cello, and she wants to change the world. But when she meets a boy on the Internet and falls in love with him, her world changes as she is gradually recruited by Daesh. Sonia is 17 years old, and she almost did something irrevocable to “guarantee” her family a place in paradise. These teenage girls might be called Anaïs, Manon or Leila, and one day they all might go some way down the recruitment process. But can they ever come back from it?
94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein tries to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend. As a result, she moves back to New York City after living in Florida for decades.
In New York City, a young girl is caught in the middle of her parents' bitter custody battle.
20 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.
Two thieves, Hugo Sennart and Yan Kuq, wanted by the same police inspector, cross paths by chance.
Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.
A poetic and powerful story of a father forced to choose between love and duty.
Evangelist Carlton Pearson is ostracized by his church for preaching that there is no Hell.
When seventeen-year-old Hannah stumbles upon a website about Thinspiration--an online community devoted to anorexia as a life choice--she becomes an obsessive follower of the site founder, ButterflyAna. By the time Hannah's family realizes what is happening and get Hannah the help she needs, the disease has fully taken hold and Hannah is refusing to eat. Will this family be able to exorcise the demon of anorexia from their lives?
A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.
The story of a woman who is suddenly visited by her estranged ex-husband. The ex-hubby wants to buy her country house, which she received in the divorce settlement. Instead he finds himself locked in a cage in the cellar.
A troubled young woman becomes obsessed with her mysterious new neighbor, who bears a striking resemblance to the girl's dead mother.
Michel is a young technician in the fledgling TV industry and is due for military service in two months at the time of the Algerian War. Juliette and Liliane are inseparable best friends, and aspiring actresses, who hang around outside the TV studio. Michel invites them in to watch, flirts with them both, and dates them separately and together. When Michel goes on a holiday to Corsica, just before he is drafted, the girls follow.
MMA legend Patton James, now a commercial fisherman, is pulled back into the cage when his brother is in danger. Reuniting with his old coach Sammy, he commits to one final fight in one championship against the brutal champion Xavier Grau.
The relationship of a couple who meet by chance in New York City is put to the test when they encounter a life or death circumstance.
Four siblings' lives change drastically when their ailing mother takes a turn for the worse over the holiday season.
