Ermo(1995)

Family Portrait(zh)

After laying bare backward village mentalities in Bloody Morning, Li Shaohong turns her attention to China’s urban middle class. Cao is a photographer, married to an opera singer and with an infant son, caught in the usual professional morass of political compromise. His life starts to fall apart when he learns that his ex-wife also bore him a son some months after their divorce – and when the boy turns up looking for his father. Nothing wildly dramatic, just believable people in believable situations. If the ending seems a touch forced, this is nevertheless a sign that ‘Fifth Generation’ cinema is changing and coming to terms with up-to-date realities.

An die Grenze(de)

19-year-old NVA soldier, Alex Karow, is sent to the West German-East German border in May 1974, shortly after Willy Brandt's resignation and during the World Cup. The army is dominated by brutal rituals, tolerated or used by the officers. Alex understands that the ideals of balance, democracy and human dignity are propaganda. The question of what happens when the other appears in the sights of the Kalashnikov occupies the soldiers day and night, interrupted almost exclusively by the games of the World Cup with the historic encounter between the GDR and the FRG. Alex draws strength from his love for Christine, a confident tractor driver who lives in the neighbouring village. Christine encourages him not to do what his father expects, but to follow his dream of becoming a photographer. But when her brother sends Alex's photo from the border fortifications to the West, everything gets out of control...

Day Is Done(zh)

A family lunch in China. The grandfather asks his grandson, who is about to leave to study in Russia, to show him his film and pour him some more brandy. The melancholy feeling of farewell hangs in the air.

Box(en)

The execution was scheduled and the last meal consumed. The coolness of the poisons entering the blood system slowed the heart rate and sent him on the way to Judgement. He had paid for his crime with years on Death Row waiting for this moment and now he would pay for them again as the judgment continued..

Forest(en)

Short film built from photographs, sped up like a traditional stop motion and is meant to be an evocation of the English Eerie and Folk Horror.

The House of Steinbrenner(en)

Love them or hate them, the Yankees dominated baseball for more than four decades, then sagged under ownership by CBS until a 42-year-old shipbuilder named George Steinbrenner led a purchase of the team in 1973. He turned that $10m investment into a billion-dollar business, and the 'House that Ruth Built' inspired generations of fans. Deteriorating facilities and changing revenue streams inspired Steinbrenner to build an impressive new stadium marking the end of one grand era and the beginning - perhaps - of another.

The Boy's Gone(en)

"The Boy's Gone" brings to life an absorbing story about how we carry on after loss and change. A once happy home slowly turns into a quiet nightmare as husband and wife grieve very differently over the loss of their little boy. We soon learn that nothing is as it seems.

Kandha Kadamba Kathir Vela(ta)

A strict mother rejects her daughter for marrying a poor man and seeks rich women for her sons. However, all hell breaks loose when the sons too fall in love with women from poor families.

The Light That Failed(en)

A London artist struggles to complete one last painting before going blind.

Tsuyukusa(ja)

Middle-aged Fumi lives a quiet seaside life, she spends her days working at a small local factory, spending time with her neighbor’s son, and attending her sober-lifestyle group. One night while driving home her car is struck by a small meteorite, the odds of which are 100 million to 1. Seeing this as a good omen, Fumi decides she should be open to new possibilities in her life, even perhaps romance…

Sakima and the Masked Marvel(en)

Feature version of the 1943 serial "The Masked Marvel", q.v., edited for television syndication and 16mm rental only.

NN891102(ja)

After Nagasaki is destroyed in a nuclear blast, Reiichi, believes the sound was caught by his father's tape recorder. However, he finds the tape to be empty. His trauma leads him into trying to reproduce the sound by any means necessary.

X+(fr)

In 2010 with the full-length film X+, Marylène Negro takes up a new dimension of human experience : the collectivity. "A Picture of Us". What are the aggregating forces that bring forth this drive - brusque or slow, woven from facts, simplifications and resonances that we can call, always approximately, collective history ? The cinema relentlessly records silhouettes, groups, crowds, masses - fleeting passers-by of a period they are going through, tiny extras of a zeitgeist that carries them along. X+ explores the visual and sound forms of presence thanks to which persist or dissolve the argentic traces of these innumerable figures whose existence forms the tissue of humanity and whose mingled gestures - noticed or unnoticed, make up the supposed "collective" substratum of collective history. X+ attains the very principle of figurativity. (Nicole Brenez)

Matadero en Laredo(es)

The Red Thread(en)

Mostly shot in San Francisco and Northern California, material filmed (using the camera almost as a p[r/a]inter, a means of shaping the visual world as film, but without reflection) in response to what that world was opening in me. "Material!" - analogies between weaving and spinning thread and images already a pattern within film history (e.g., in Deren) is here carried into further ramifications of unraveling and patterning in fabric- and cinema-making, as well as in personal and mythic dimensions. The open unfolding structure, which pulls away from the balanced design of much of my work, gives equal weight to the sound composition. Involves "opening" with its perils and ambiguities.

Tampopo(ja)

In this humorous paean to the joys of food, a pair of truck drivers happen onto a decrepit roadside shop selling ramen noodles. The widowed owner, Tampopo, begs them to help her turn her establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle-soup making". Interspersed are satirical vignettes about the importance of food to different aspects of human life.

10 Items or Less(en)

An actor who is considering the role of a supermarket manager arrives at a grocery store on the outskirts of Los Angeles to do some field research. He subsequently becomes stranded, without a car or cell phone, and accepts a ride home with Scarlet, a cashier who is about to interview for a new job. The actor rediscovers the essence of his craft while helping Scarlet gain the confidence she needs to change her life.

Repo Man(en)

A down and out young punk gets a job working with a seasoned repo man, but what awaits him in his new career is a series of outlandish adventures revolving around aliens, the CIA, and a most wanted '64 Chevy.

The Craic(en)

When Fergus and Wesley get in the bad books of a local rough in their home town in Northern Ireland they decide to flee to Australia. After making a new life for themselves in Sydney they soon outstay their visas and must go on the run again, this time from the immigration officials.

Fuel(en)

Record high oil prices, global warming, and an insatiable demand for energy: these issues define our generation. The film exposes shocking connections between the auto industry, the oil industry, and the government, while exploring alternative energies such as solar, wind, electricity, and non-food-based biofuels.

Eyes Wide Shut(en)

After Dr. Bill Harford's wife, Alice, admits to having sexual fantasies about a man she met, Bill becomes obsessed with having a sexual encounter. He discovers an underground sexual group and attends one of their meetings -- and quickly discovers that he is in over his head.

FINAL STAGE [The Time for All but Sunset – BGYOR](xx)

Enjoy the Party, Enjoy your Night, Enjoy the Sun, Enjoy your Freedom, Enjoy the Love, Enjoy your Life, Enjoy the Colors, Enjoy your Style The world is on colors. Times are hard, modern and bitter. A teenage boy in 'Europes Largest Shopping Mall'. He sheds lonely tears over someone. He senses that something is wrong. Brutalism, Sadness, Consumerism - Enjoy a Contemporary Love Story 'The world is on colors, we only could save us with grey. It's strange how oppression will make people working to pay. No, I don't wanna fall in love. This world is only gonna break your heart. This wicked game to play, to make us live this way.'

The Twonky(en)

A college professor, left alone by his wife for the weekend, discovers his new TV set is not only alive, but determined to take control of his entire life.

Little Miss Marker(en)

Big Steve Halloway, gambler and proprietor of New York's Horseshoe Cabaret, is in desperate need of money. He arranges for his fellow bookies, especially Sorrowful Jones, to each pay him $1,000 for his racehorse, Dream Prince, to lose. With all bets being placed at the window, Sorrowful encounters a gambler, having lost $500, wanting to place his bet but unable to come up with $20. Instead, he places his little girl, Marthy Jane, as security, or in bookie's terms a "marker". "Marky", as she comes to be known, winds up under the care of Sorrowful Jones and his lady friend, singer Bangles Carson.

Noodle(he)

At thirty-seven, Miri is a twice-widowed, El Al flight attendant. Her well-regulated existence is suddenly turned upside down by an abandoned Chinese boy whose migrant-worker mother has been summarily deported from Israel. The film is a touching comic-drama in which two human beings -- as different from each other as Tel Aviv is from Beijing -- accompany each other on a remarkable journey, one that takes them both back to a meaningful life.

Kesäkapina(fi)

Young photography model Susanna and her alienated teenage brother Veli spend the summer of 1969 travelling around Finland, mostly with another girl and her boyfriend. Sporting the latest fashions and trendy hairdos, they naïvely observe and criticise the modern consumer society, advertising, fancy boats and summer cottages, country dances, barbecues, and any other phenomena that were supposed to bother angry young intellectuals in those days. The plot and the political agenda are delivered with a cheerful, tongue-in-cheek mixture of documentary observations, fake TV commercials, fake interviews, philosophical voiceovers and titles, and a jazzy soundtrack by the progressive rock group Wigwam.

The Phantom Carriage(sv)

An alcoholic, abusive ne'er-do-well is shown the error of his ways through a legend that dooms the last person to die on New Year's Eve before the clock strikes twelve to take the reins of Death's chariot and work tirelessly collecting fresh souls for the next year.

Small Mall(is)

A Eurovision singer, Iceland's strongest woman, a male model, a plumber who wants to direct movies. They all work in the shopping mall that this documentary focuses on ... most of them want to get out, even just to the bigger mall down the road.

All, or nothing at all(zh)

On an urban island in Shanghai, Yoyo starts secretly following Lan Tian. In a parallel world, Lan Tian is quietly observing Yoyo in the distance. Trapped in a twin-towered shopping complex, they experience two variations of encounters, as affections, desires and other feelings start to appear.

El televisor(es)

Enrique buys a color television set just to satisfy a personal pleasure long time deferred but, from that moment on, he becomes obsessed with it in such way that eventually he is incapable to differ reality from fiction.

Good Morning(ja)

A lighthearted take on director Yasujiro Ozu’s perennial theme of the challenges of inter­generational relationships, Good Morning tells the story of two young boys who stop speaking in protest after their parents refuse to buy a television set. Ozu weaves a wealth of subtle gags through a family portrait as rich as those of his dramatic films, mocking the foibles of the adult world through the eyes of his child protagonists. Shot in stunning color and set in a suburb of Tokyo where housewives gossip about the neighbors’ new washing machine and unemployed husbands look for work as door-to-door salesmen, this charming comedy refashions Ozu’s own silent classic I Was Born, But . . . to gently satirize consumerism in postwar Japan.

Liquid Love(es)

A critique of liquid love through sarcasm and crude humor. With the desire that the viewer empathize with the protagonists and reflect on the ephemerality of sexual-affective relationships in modern society. At the end of the short film, the transformation of people into mere consumer goods will be clear, which, once they have been used, are discarded

The True Cost(en)

Film from Andrew Morgan. The True Cost is a documentary film exploring the impact of fashion on people and the planet.

Handsome Antonio(it)

Problems arise for Antonio Magnano when he is unable to consummate his marriage to the beautiful Barbara Puglisi and his virility is called into question. Despite the fact that he loves his beautiful wife and they have otherwise been happily married for a year, his problem becomes a source of contention for all concerned.

The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show(en)

Taped in Toronto between August 9-24, 1982, Miss Piggy hosts her own variety show, with special guests John Ritter, George Hamilton and Tony Clifton (Andy Kaufman). Under the direction of Kermit the Frog, the Muppets work in the control room and, amidst chaos, manage to keep the show on the air. Throughout the show, a romantic triangle develops among Piggy, Ritter (who is smitten with the pig) and Hamilton (who is deeply uncomfortable with the star's romantic inclinations).