A concentration camp on a barren island is hell for the exiled prisoners. The everyday life of the people who live there consists of interrogations, psychological and physical violence, arbitrary punishments and other torments. One of the prisoners who refuses to yield is subjected to torture. Trying to escape, he falls into the sea. When the Queen visits the island, the prison guards find the runaway and murder him without a second thought, since he is already assumed dead.
Category: Arthouse
With the help of a couple of her oddball friends, a woman takes her former lesbian lover to a hotel to convince her that their affair shouldn’t end. After much shouting and some sex, things complicate when the lover’s husband shows up.
Sandrine Bonnaire plays a European researcher who is abducted by some ill-educated rebels in a North African country. They have no clear reason for holding her hostage, and after a considerable period of time (and an escape attempt by their captive), they simply let her go. The story is based on a similar situation that the director Raymond Depardon covered when he was a reporter.
In 1900, Stepha, the vivacious 30 year old daughter of a wealthy couple, agrees to marry her cousin Paul, who has accumulated large debts as an Austrian army officer. Paul refuses to work or to consummate the marriage, and then his health steadily declines.
An anthology film drama featuring a poetic mirror structure based on existential identity. In “The Immortals,” adapted from a Helder Prista Monteiro play, two famous doctors, an 80-year-old father, and his 60-year-old son, contemplate senility and death. “Suzy,” from an Antonio Patricio story, is set in the ’30s when a young courtesan dies on the operating table. “Mother of the River” is from an Agustina Bessa-Luis fable about eternal life.
Ema is a sweet and innocent girl who is so beautiful she turns the head of every man she passes. Her life takes a despairing turn for the worse when her father forces her into a passionless marriage to his friend, a wealthy doctor. To make matters worse, she is relocated to the scenic but unfamiliar and isolated vineyards of Abraham’s Valley, Portugal where the breathtaking river Douro flows. Trapped in a marriage to a man she does not love, she scorns her husband and threatens to kill herself rather than submit to his desires.
Set in a dreamlike rural Japan, the story starts out to be about an adolescent boy’s attempt to escape his overprotective mother and then surprisingly becomes a filmmaker’s desire to confront his own elaborated creation. There is also an effort to reconcile the individual with the collective or old and new Japan through this parade of emblematic images. Gossiping women wear sinister eye patches. An outcast simple-minded woman drowns her own baby and later returns as a sophisticated prostitute. A circus fat lady yearns to have her fake body inflated by a dwarf. Curious and astounding scenes abound, all contributing to an overwhelming experience of a creative mind interrogating itself.
Chronicle of a Lonely Child, is an indictment of a fascist regime running roughshod over its most vulnerable citizens, its children. Focusing on the bleak life of eleven-year-old bad boy Polin, who’s been abandoned by his family and sent to live in a state-run orphanage, it’s also a moving portrait of the human spirit imprisoned by the chains of well-intentioned fools. Inside the harsh confines of the supposedly beneficial institution, Polin and his fellow inmates must deal with constant physical and psychological abuse by the staff, as well as the natural emotional tensions brought on by their own burgeoning adolescence. But through it all, they manage to keep their hopes alive with optimistic talk of freedom and bold plans of escape.