Following over two dozen different individuals in the almost wordless atmosphere of a dark night in a Brussels town, acceptance and rejection in the realm of romance is examined.
Social & External
The people behind it
Aurore Clément
Natalia Akerman
Paul Allio
Angelo Abazoglou
Frank Aendenboom
Véronique Alain
Jacques Bauduin
François Beukelaers
Michèle Blondeel
Philippe Bombled
Inka becomes an outcast to her small home town when she comes into conflict with the local priest. She is convinced she is right, but is being right worth the lonely fight?
The Romance film by Barbara Wong tells three touching love stories which are named the :three teardrops.” Each story portrayed by different actors explores the hidden emotions, confusion and desire of today’s young people.
A mother's courage, hardship, and love, in times of war. In 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, Gilane escorts her pregnant daughter, Maygol, from the relative calm of their village, Espili, into war-torn Tehran to search for Maygol's husband, Rahman. The journey is arduous and what they find when they reach the capital is dismaying and frightening. Fifteen years later, as another war begins in Iraq, Gillane is at home caring for her son Ismael, who suffers from epilepsy, a byproduct of war. As she cares for him, she hopes for a visit from the doctor and from another daughter, Atefah. "Better be a dog than a mother," she says.
While Eva Magnus and her daughter, Jenny, are taking a walk, they discover a dead body floating along the riverside. Eva runs to the nearest phone booth and pretends to call the police. Then she leaves the body for someone else to find. Why? Konrad Sejer, the police officer investigating the case, links it to another unsolved murder of a woman killed in her bed. A woman that used to be a childhood friend of Eva Magnus.
After a typical day at the garage, a young mechanic swaps her stained overalls for a leather ensemble—as she shifts gears into a different kind of routine. Driving through bustling Paris, she helps a passerby cross the street, delivers plants to a hardware store, and picks up an enigmatic passenger.
Lena returns to her home in a remote, war-ravaged Armenian village to try and persuade her grandparents to leave with her for safety in Moscow.
A sea faring father, a man living on the edge of mental sanity, periodically sees his young son. During the visits, the father tells the boy stories, exotic as well as close to home, about Magonia. This is a mythical place where clouds represent impossible dreams and unfulfilled desires. But the characters in this imaginary place all curiously resemble people now living near the father.
Set against the backdrop of a summer on the French Riviera, the Roussier family navigates the severe disability of the youngest daughter, 13-year-old Bertille, while her older sister, 17-year-old Marion, seeks refuge in a relationship with an older boy.
THE EDUCATION OF MOHAMMAD HUSSEIN is an intimate look at how the largest Muslim community in America responds to the provocations of an anti-Islamic preacher. Through the eyes of children, the film examines what it is like to come of age as a Muslim in the United States ten years post 9/11.
INOCENTE is a personal and vibrant coming of age story about a young artist's determination never to surrender to the bleakness of her surroundings. At 15, Inocente refuses to let her dream of becoming an artist be caged by being an undocumented immigrant forced to live homeless for the last nine years. Color is her personal revolution and its sweep on her canvases creates a world that looks nothing like her own dark past. INOCENTE is both a timeless story about the transformative power of art and a timely snapshot of the new face of homelessness in America: children. The challenges are staggering, but the hope in her story proves that the hand she has been dealt does not define her, her dreams do.
While Sandra opens up to a documentary film crew, flashbacks show her teenage son, Stephen, mysteriously kidnapping a toddler, and holding him captive. Eventually, the stories intersect to explain the abduction and the family's three-generation legacy of abuse in this mesmerizing psychological drama.
Years of carrying out death row executions have taken a toll on prison warden Bernadine Williams. As she prepares to execute another inmate, Bernadine must confront the psychological and emotional demons her job creates, ultimately connecting her to the man she is sanctioned to kill.
A headstrong Chinese-American woman returns to China when her beloved grandmother is given a terminal diagnosis. Billi struggles with her family's decision to keep grandma in the dark about her own illness as they all stage an impromptu wedding to see grandma one last time.
A coming of age story about a 16-year-old boy who finds himself searching for escape in the island of Puerto Rico after his mother leaves him and his sister with his grandparents in a surf town. His fascination with a hula hoop model leads him to steal his grandfather’s car to meet the object of his affection in person.
A passionate holiday romance leads to an obsessive relationship when an Australian photojournalist wakes one morning in an abandoned Berlin apartment and is unable to leave.
Two lesbian lovers are forced to flee their hometown after a brutal murder changes their lives forever.
One evening, Amra, a young Algerian living in France, accidentally runs over a pedestrian. Riddled with guilt and the certainty that she will lose her French identity papers, Amra is miraculously proved innocent by Angélique, a beautiful redhead who is as open and without any hang-ups as Amra is unsociable and introverted. The two young women become friends, but then Angélique's attitude becomes increasingly strange, indeed, even troubling...
After vanishing from her family’s lake house, 15 year-old Mary Solis returns without any memory of the traumatic events she experienced—and without part of her soul. Even while a shocking mystery surrounds her disappearance, and her disembodied soul begins a grim haunting, the Solis family’s biggest fear has yet to be faced. When it’s discovered that two little girls, the same age as Mary’s sister, Sophia, went missing on the lake the very night that Mary disappeared, the stakes are raised. Is Mary suffering from a centuries old condition known as Loss of Soul? Or, is it something more nefarious? After enlisting the help of a Shaman, the Solis family embarks on a journey to the spirit worlds, hunting for a supernatural cure.
Young directors are filming “The Exhibitionist” in the middle of a farm in a paradise-like region. The film poetically investigates the Brazilian soul, with the Amazon as the center of the world, reflecting on existential issues, the right to sexual freedom and individuality.
July 1996, the beach, the sea, the sun. Sophie, 10, spends her summer vacations with her mother and her cousin Laurence. But Laurence has grown up and her mother's thoughts are elsewhere. While the whole country is still looking for two missing little girls, Sophie discovers that this will be her last summer as a child.
This intimate drama follows Rebecca, a woman who has kept her sexuality a secret from her friends but chooses to reveal it to a stranger. While Rebecca's revelations may not yield the results she expects, a perfect ending is still in reach.
Trying to put her life back together after the death of her husband, Libby and her children move to her estranged Aunt's goat farm in central Texas.
Pregnant out of wedlock, an educated young woman is pressured by her father into an arranged marriage with a lonely farmer in this drama set during WWII.
Two outsiders, both shaped by the circumstances that have brought them together, forge a deep and lasting love.
In 1920s Paris, violinists and lifelong friends Pierre Belcroix and Marcel Blanc are happy with their lives, although Marcel has become famous and Pierre has not. Pierre is married to Romaine, a stylish young flapper. However, Marcel meets and falls in love with her, which Marcel little suspects.
Will Keane, a Manhattan restaurateur, is content with his playboy lifestyle until he meets Charlotte Fielding, a free-spirited young woman. Together the pair pursue a passionate affair that forces them both to reevaluate what they want out of life, even as fate threatens to steal away their future.
Algeria, the 1930s. Younes is nine years old when he is put in his uncle's care in Oran. Rebaptized Jonas, he grows up among the Rio Salado youths, with whom he becomes friends. Emilie is one of the gang; everyone is in love with her. A great love story develops between Jonas and Emilie, which is soon unsettled by the conflicts troubling the country.
Set in 1889 France, Dodin Bouffant is a chef living with his personal cook and lover Eugénie. They share a long history of gastronomy and love but Eugénie refuses to marry Dodin, so the food lover decides to do something he has never done before: cook for her.
After decades apart, childhood friends Nora and Hae Sung are reunited in New York for one fateful weekend as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life.
A lonely Parisian woman comes to terms with her isolation and anxieties during a long summer vacation.
Retreating from life after a tragedy, a man questions the universe by writing to Love, Time and Death. Receiving unexpected answers, he begins to see how these things interlock and how even loss can reveal moments of meaning and beauty.
An English mother and her teenage son spend a week preparing the sale of their remote holiday house in the South of France. Fifteen-year-old Elliot struggles with his dawning sexuality and an increasing alienation from his mother, Beatrice. She in turn is confronted by the realisation that her marriage to his father, Philip, has grown loveless and the life she knows is coming to an end. When an enigmatic local teenager, Clément, quietly enters their lives, both mother and son are compelled to confront their desires and, finally, each other.
Four tales, each centered on a woman, journey inward to explore the enigmatic reality of their lives, connecting through a single narrative thread.
Tala, a London-based Palestinian, is preparing for her elaborate Middle Eastern wedding when she meets Leyla, a young British Indian woman who is dating her best friend. Spirited Christian Tala and shy Muslim Leyla could not be more different from each other, but the attraction is immediate and goes deeper than friendship. But Tala is not ready to accept the implications of the choice her heart has made for her and escapes back to Jordan, while Leyla tries to move on with her new-found life, to the shock of her tradition-loving parents. As Tala's wedding day approaches, simmering tensions come to boiling point and the pressure mounts for Tala to be true to herself.
Two girlfriends on a summer holiday in Spain become enamored with the same painter, unaware that his ex-wife, with whom he has a tempestuous relationship, is about to re-enter the picture.
When his mother dies, young Peter Ibbetson leaves Paris and his best friend, Mary, behind to live with a severe uncle in England. Years later, Peter is an architect with little time for women, until he begins a project with the Duke and Duchess of Towers. When Peter and the duchess become great friends, she reveals that she is Mary — but the duke soon suspects his wife of infidelity and challenges Peter to a duel, threatening the pair's second chance.
A holiday fable that tells the story of an elderly man discovering love for the first time.
In the 1930s, British officer John Truscott journeys to a remote village in colonial Malaysia to educate and Westernize the local Iban population. There, he's introduced to the lovely Selima. In keeping with tradition, Selima is assigned to sleep with Truscott and teach him the native language and customs. But when they fall in love, both colonists and natives object to their plans to marry.
Jacques, a young man with artistic aspirations, spends four nights wandering Paris with a young woman, whom he rescued from suicide.
A young social climber wins the heart of a beautiful heiress but his former girlfriend's pregnancy stands in the way of his ambition.