Lu and Feng are a devoted couple forced to separate when Lu is arrested and sent to a labor camp as a political prisoner during the Cultural Revolution. He finally returns home only to find that his beloved wife no longer remembers him.
Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the state of their chosen artform in the early 21st century.
The reappearance of notorious criminal Paul Sanchez becomes an obsession for a young police officer who will do anything to catch him.
A chronicle of the events that led to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.
Takada, a Japanese fisherman has been estranged from his son for many years, but when the son is diagnosed with terminal cancer his daughter-in-law, Rie, summons him to the hospital. Through a series of obstacles and relationships, he is brought unexpectedly closer to both an understanding of himself and of his son.
When easy-going Aoyagi meets an old friend for a fishing trip, he ends up drugged, framed for the Prime Minister's assassination, and on the run from corrupt cops. It's only the beginning of what quickly becomes the worst, weirdest day of his life. But he'll get by with a little help from his friends, who include a famous pop diva, a rockabilly deliveryman, a crippled old gangster, and the world's most cheerful serial killer.
Based on the award-winning novel of the same name, this boldly erotic yet movingly tender portrait of a group of vulnerable, variously wounded people — a depressed housewife, her high-school-aged lover, and his best friend, who is struggling to provide for himself and his senile grandmother — whose intersecting lives yield both sorrow and a fragile, yet enduring, hope for a brighter future. (TIFF)
In 1942, Henan Province was devastated by one of the most tragic famines in modern Chinese history, resulting in the deaths of at least three million men, women and children. Although the primary cause of the famine was a severe drought, it was exacerbated by locusts, windstorms, earthquakes, epidemic disease and the corruption of the ruling Kuomintang government.
Muhammad, a rejected boy from the fringe of society, floats through the streets of a filthy city, exposed and desolated, until he meets Gurevich; a lone rover who rides his motorcycle into the bowels of the city, through the shadows of the back alleys, sharpening the knives of butcher shops and gourmet restaurants. Stubborn and tenacious, the boy forces his way under the man's wing. Within this hypnotic urban hell, what starts as an unstable and hesitant apprenticeship evolves into a struggle for self-control.
A tangle of stories in which aspirations and yearnings for freedom on the part of the white-collar worker are intertwined with those of Cristiano's personal and musical life in a discourse on our contemporary world.
A former spy in the Chinese Nationalist Party falls for an opium-dealing widow, as China is ravaged by war and revolution.
Aurelie Laflamme feels alone in the world, especially since her father's death five years ago. What if her father had been an alien who left Earth to return to his own planet? In that case, Aurelie would be an alien too. That would explain many things such as why she feels different from others, especially her mother, why she can't string two words together without making a mistake, and why boys really get on her nerves. Through the pages of her diary, Aurelie confides her joys and sorrows, successes and failures, love and friendships, and tries to find her place.
Determined to see “the river,” two young children living in Los Angeles leave home to embark on a magical urban odyssey.
Every Thursday a group of ladies would gather to play cards and discuss their loves, lives and children while their daughters played in the next room. Thirty years later, the daughters meet at a funeral for one of the mothers. Like their mothers, they discuss their hopes, dreams and fears.
Hilarity meets danger when a lovesick chauffeur and a bootleg mechanic mistakenly pick up a retired crime lord, igniting a wild, life-changing adventure.
Francesco, a young man who wants to be a comedian, insults his girlfriend to make his public laugh; she will break up with and so he will think of a crazy plan to win her back.
A middle-aged loser travels back in time to his high scool years to put his life on the right track.
People mysteriously start receiving voicemail messages from their future selves, in the form of the sound of them reacting to their own violent deaths, along with the exact date and time of their future death, listed on the message log. The plot thickens as the surviving characters pursue the answers to this mystery which could save their lives.
After losing their spouses in a plane crash, an internal affairs cop and a congresswoman find each other's keys in each other's loved ones' possessions and discover that the two were having an affair.
In the near future, breathable air is nonexistent. Virtually all of humanity has disappeared, and those chosen to reestablish society reside in a controlled state of suspended animation. Two engineers tasked with guarding the last hope for mankind struggle to preserve their own sanity and lives while administering to the vital task at hand.
While investigating noises in his house one balmy Texas night in 1989, Richard Dane puts a bullet in the brain of a low-life burglar. Although he’s hailed as a small-town hero, Dane soon finds himself fearing for his family’s safety when Freddy’s ex-con father rolls into town, hell-bent on revenge.
San Francisco's premiere wedding planner, Mary Fiore is rescued from an accident by the man of her dreams, pediatrician Steve Edison, only to find he is the fiancé of her latest client. As Mary continues making their wedding arrangements, she and Steve are put into a string of uncomfortable situations that force them to face their mutual attraction.
A story set in Indochina in 1959, a lawless land controlled by the criminal class: Vietnamese warlords and European war-criminals. Den-Dhin-Chan Labor Camp is run by four such dangerous men. The worst prison in the land, it is here that an Irish, former-champion boxer Martin Tillman has made a name for himself fighting tournaments, on which wealthy criminals gamble in high stakes events. When Tillman is due for release, he just wants to return home, but the corrupt forces running the jail will do everything in their power to keep him locked down. When all that Tillman holds dear is taken away in a vicious act of violence, he is forced to confront the men responsible and take his revenge. The birth of a legend.
A young man upsets his Punjabi family when he falls in love with an Irish schoolteacher.
This is the first Filipino feature-length film made by a Filipino director regarded as "Father of Filipino Movies" and is now lost forever. Dalagang Bukid is a story about a young flower vendor named Angelita, who is forced by her parents to marry a wealthy old man, Don Silvestre, despite her love for Cipriano, a law student.
Apu, now a jobless ex-student dreaming vaguely of a future as a writer, is invited to join an old college friend on a trip up-country to a village wedding.
As Garibaldi's troops begin the unification of Italy in the 1860s, an aristocratic Sicilian family grudgingly adapts to the sweeping social changes undermining their way of life. Proud but pragmatic Prince Don Fabrizio Salina allows his war hero nephew, Tancredi, to marry Angelica, the beautiful daughter of gauche, bourgeois Don Calogero, in order to maintain the family's accustomed level of comfort and political clout.
The young Harold lives in his own world of suicide-attempts and funeral visits to avoid the misery of his current family and home environment. Harold meets an 80-year-old woman named Maude who also lives in her own world yet one in which she is having the time of her life. When the two opposites meet they realize that their differences don’t matter and they become best friends and love each other.
A headstrong young girl in Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban, disguises herself as a boy in order to provide for her family.
When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
Samar wants to be successful in life but his parents force him to get married. His wife is shy and reserved and Samar does not like this. The other members in the family often ill-treat her.
The retelling of France’s iconic but ill-fated queen, Marie Antoinette. From her betrothal and marriage to Louis XVI at 15 to her reign as queen at 19 and ultimately the fall of Versailles.
Set in colonial French Indochina during the 1930s to 1950s, this is the story of Éliane Devries, a French plantation owner, and of her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille, set against the backdrop of the rising Vietnamese nationalist movement.
When the daughter of the miserly cooper Grandet is up for marriage, both families Des Grassins and Cruchot want to marry their sons to her and her substantial dowry. But the girl shows more interest in the impoverished cousin, whom she entrusts her entire fortune to.
As the romantic monsoon rains loom, the extended Verma family reunites from around the globe for a last-minute arranged marriage in New Delhi. This film traces five intersecting stories, each navigating different aspects of love as they cross boundaries of class, continent and morality.
Anzukko (Little Peach) is the daughter of a successful writer. She turns down each one of her suitors, until she marries a beginning writer named Ryokichi. Their life quickly sinks into despair.
Pia, a typical “Mumbai” girl, makes her first ever day trip to Delhi and agrees to meet a possible match for marriage on her mother’s insistence. She lands in Delhi determined to reject the guy after meeting him because after all he’s from “Delhi”. However, as it turns out she loses her phone while fighting with an auto driver and meets Goli Kohli, a witty “Delhi” boy who grudgingly agrees to help her. One thing leads to another and they end up spending the entire day together. They fight, they argue, they laugh and share a lifetime of emotions in one day. When they meet in the morning they are strangers with strong biases about Mumbai & Delhi, when they part in the evening, the biases have turned into affection for each other’s quirks and finally, love.
Two young wolves at opposite ends of their pack's social order are thrown together into a foreign land and need each other to return home, but love complicates everything.