Winner of the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, Ozualdo R. Candeias masterpiece A OPÇÃO OU AS ROSAS DA ESTRADA combines masterful handheld documentary camerawork in black and white with staged action based on firsthand experiences to delve into the profoundly quotidian reality of a group of rural women who cut sugar cane and live modestly in ramshackle neighborhoods along the highway. Dreaming of a better life and with no other option than prostitution, many of them hit the road towards the big city, where new forms of exploitation awaits them.
Category: Drama
When the atheistic ranting of Irish-American author James Mulcahy upsets the inhabitants of the Irish village to which he has retired, a mob threatens him. But moments after he has dared God to strike him dead, a stranger appears and does so. The man, dubbed “Johnny Nobody” by the press, claims no knowledge of Mulcahy or even of himself. He asks the help of the village priest, Father Carey, in his upcoming trial for Mulcahy’s murder. While the amnesiac Johnny goes to trial, Father Carey mulls questions of belief raised by the case. And then, the good father learns a little more about Johnny Nobody…
After the death of his father, 17-year-old Nino is finding adolescence a traumatic and lonely ordeal. One autumn, during a holiday on the slopes of Mount Etna, he finds he is strongly attracted towards his young aunt, Cettina. Although married, she has no children of her own and his interest in her awakens her maternal instincts. An intimacy develops between them and his liking for her turns into an all-consuming desire. When he discovers that she is pursuing a secret affair with another man, Sasa, he is overwhelmed by jealousy and fails to comprehend her infidelity.
Agostina is a maid turned prostitute during World War II. She sends all the money she makes to the local priest in her home village for safekeeping. After the war is over Agostina and her friend Australia plan to open a clothing store so they return to her home island to collect the money from the priest. But after arriving there Agostina learns in shock that the priest has been dead for more than a year and that his eccentric successor mistook the received money for donations and spent all of it on building a new orphanage for war orphans. To make matters even worse, other islanders think that Agostina is now a millionaire and beg her to help them financially.
In the small variety company of the Cavaliere Martoni, three chorus girls in search of fortune must decide their fate: Vera marries an industrialist, even if she doesn’t love him; Franca contracts a happy marriage; only Margherita becomes a star of the show.
A poor Harvard student’s romance with a girl hits a rough spot when he realizes, on his 21st birthday, that he’s in love with her brother. Based on the 1970s off-Broadway smash.
Francis and Blake Falls are Siamese twins who live in a neat little room in a rundown hotel. While sharing some organs, Blake is always fit and Francis is very sickly. Into their world comes a young lady, who turns their world upside down. She gets involved with Blake, and convinces the two to attend a Halloween party, where they can pass themselves off as wearing a costume. Eventually Francis becomes really ill, and they have to be separated.
Maria learns that her aunt Oriana has died and willed her a crumbling and remote Venezuelan hacienda where Maria spent a short time as a girl just entering puberty. Maria goes to the hacienda to prepare the place for sale; while going through her aunt’s papers, she recalls her visit years’ before. In flashbacks, we see the young Maria trying to sort out why Oriana never leaves the hacienda, what secret may be in Oriana’s past, and who the mysterious Sergio was. The young Maria, as she learns things, imagines her aunt’s youth, cruel father, and first love. After these reveries within reveries, Maria, now a grown woman, makes one more discovery.