——UPGRADED——
In the summer of 1939, 13-year-old Marie goes with her parents to visit her grandmother in a small town near Avignon. Although rumors of war reach the countryside, it’s an idyllic place, and Marie’s parents are constantly making love. Surrounded by sexual frankness, Marie fancies herself a woman and develops a crush on Alexander, the town’s young Jewish doctor but is despondent when he treats her like a child…
In Amanha Lundju, the trees planted upon the birth of each child begin falling rapidly and mysteriously. Led by the tradition healer, Calcalado, the villagers begin a desert exodus in search of the cause of their curse and discover they must return home to fight for their traditions and their old way of life.
Haru, an aging scriptwriter, has isolated himself somewhere in the woods of Nagano to work on his first novel. As the last surviving member of his kin, he intends to chronicle the family he grew up in.
Set in 1944. A courtly sheepherder enters an abandoned palace he has seen only from the distance since he was a boy. Once he enters the palace, strange things begin to happen as though he was dreaming the events rather than living them.
Extending his fascination with genre cinema, Petzold’s second feature is a made-for-television variation on the 1945 noir Detour, transposing Ulmer’s Poverty Row classic from the gloomy backroads of postwar America to the drab railway stations and sunlit autobahns of 1990s Europe. Across this colorless landscape, homeless drifter Tom tracks ex-lover-turned-prostitute Tina with the questionable assistance of a slick rich guy named Jimmy, pursuing parallel paths on a desperate odyssey westward that just might lead all the way to Cuba.
Irene, a magazine editor who’s lived a sheltered existence under the shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1973 Chile, gradually awakens to the political tumult when handsome photographer Francisco enters her life and opens her eyes.
On a cloudy day in a small-town carnival, an unattended three-year-old boy with a small note in his hand cries inconsolably. As the years pass by, the same boy will start a career as an intrepid trapeze acrobat–and before long–he will reach the peak by being the biggest in his trade. Accomplished, with kids, wealth, and recognition, the man will quit the firm and his current lifestyle to set off on a solitary voyage of self-awareness in the vast landscapes of Africa, never to return. There, the most improbable friendship will start–and after two years of being presumed dead–a spark will rekindle, making him realise, that even if one has done and seen it all, he can be surprised by what life still has to offer.
