——UPGRADED——
Jacques is an artist whose world changes when he meets Marthe, a woman intent on taking her own life. After he stops her from doing a swan dive into the Seine River, the two start regularly meeting, and Jacques learns that Marthe almost killed herself over a broken heart. As Jacques and Marthe wander through Paris over a series of nights, he begins to fall in love with her — only to find that her former lover is not entirely out of the picture.
——UPGRADED——
Natsuko nurses a helpless crush on her roommate Mitsu and tries to possess her for herself by generating conflict between Mitsu and her boyfriend, Hideo. Mitsu discovers what is happening and throws Natsuko out of the apartment. But Natsuko cannot bring herself to sever the one-way emotional bond.
Georges Menessier, a 45-year-old celebrity press writer, smuggles into a mental hospital to take pictures of…his ex-wife Clara Noël, once a great film star now confined to this clinic for alcoholism and nervous trouble. Once inside the place he meets Clo, a beautiful twenty-year-old woman, another inmate. They fall in love but madness is synonymous with tragedy not happiness…
When Max dies in an accident, he goes straight to hell. But the devil Barney makes him an offer: if he manages to get three innocent youths to sell him their souls in the next two months, he may stay on earth. Max accepts and returns to earth, equipped with special powers. However, his task is harder than expected, especially when 7-year-old Tobi demands that he marry his mother.
Hollywood legend Shirley Maclaine sings, dances and does commentary on the times in this speculative look forward at the United States’ next 200 years. Her guests are Jimmie Walker, Don Rickles, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Jimmy Stewart, and Orson Welles.
This film is a playful depiction of the festivities around the performance If All Trains of the World by Alex Mlynárčik on June 12, 1971. Still photography, live action, interviews, old etchings and archive footage of old train journeys are skilfully blended to create a sympathetic and humorous portrait of the romance of an old steam train and the joy of artists and the general public in participating in this children’s game for adults. Once again, the avant-garde is imaginatively used to eulogise over traditional values and the past. Deň radosti is important not just for the considerable pleasure it brings; it is the first of a series of films in which artists use film to document happenings.
Struggling actress accepts high paying job to play a rich heiress committed in a lunatic asylum, not knowing she’s really being set up as a surrogate for the real girl who’d been murdered.
In 1969 Palestinian Leila Khaled made history by becoming the first woman to hijack an airplane. As a Palestinian child growing up in Sweden, filmmaker Lina Makboul admired Khaled for her bold actions; as an adult, she began asking complex questions about the legacy created by her childhood hero. This fascinating documentary is at once a portrait of Khaled, an exploration of the filmmaker’s own understanding of her Palestinian identity, and complex examination of the nebulous dichotomy between ‘terrorist’ and ‘freedom fighter’.
Based on the famous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, this adaptation is fairly faithful to the original. Portraying the sinister tones of old fairy tales in a dream-like or theatrical style, this surreal film focuses mainly on the young girl Kerttu’s journey to rescue her brother Kai from the evil Snow Queen. Kerttu travels through beautiful and hostile lands, meeting various strange and threatening characters on the way – befriended and helped by some, waylaid and trapped by others. In the classic style of such tales her journey is episodic, punctuated with scenes of events unfolding at the Snow Queen’s palace.
