In 1935, at the age of 13, Simon Chalumot is enrolled in a military school by his father. His reluctance to become a soldier is apparent to all and he is bullied and abused by the military staff and his fellow pupils. At 15, he runs away, but is captured and returned to the school by his father, a patriotic veteran of the last war. Soon after, Chalumot graduates to a higher military school, but now the bullying is so brutal that he can take no more…
Category: Drama
Eleven-year-old petty teen criminal Maroa lives with her violent grandmother Brígida in Caracas. After her boyfriend Carlos is involved in a shooting, Maroa is arrested and sent to a school where Joaquín conducts the youth orchestra, which he asks the naturally talented Maroa to join. Joaquín is immediately interested in the talented young girl who lacks all notion of discipline; as he becomes the only person to offer her hope in the midst of her rejection, he realizes that through Maroa his own world has also changed forever.
Jean-Claude Lauzon’s highly praised film tells the strange story of Léolo, a young boy from Montréal. Told from Léolo’s point-of-view, the film depicts his family of lunatics and Léolo’s attempts to deal with them. Not one individual in the boy’s life is well adjusted. His brother, after being beaten up, spends the film bulking up on growth protein. The grandfather hires half-naked girls to bite off his toenails and, in a brutal rage, almost kills Léolo. As he witnesses his family decay around him, Léolo retreats into himself and the fantasy world he has constructed. In response to the weirdness of his daily life, Léolo creates a little mental mayhem of his own which Lauzon renders in an amazing series of free-form, surreal images.
An American film-critic flies to Berlin to investigate about the life of German filmmaker F. W. Murnau. After meeting his former girlfriend, a painter, and finding a statue near Murnau’s tomb, begins a strange mystic journey through time and space: a romantic unification of ancient and modern world, suspicions and memories, art and life.
Ammonites were a kind of snail-like precursor to today’s mollusks, common in the seas of the Cretaceous period, many millions of years ago. They are among the most commonly found fossils, so they must have been extremely plentiful. In this meditative and largely unstructured first feature, a young geologist is traveling by train to visit his sister in the countryside after having received a disturbing and mysterious letter from her. As he travels, he remembers his childhood fixation with rocks, nurtured by his mother, and his very strong affection for his sister.
O Sangue (Blood), tells the story of seventeen-year-old Vincente and his ten-year-old brother, Nino, who must face the departure of their abusive father and its aftermath. With the aid of Vicente’s girlfriend, Clara, the trio attempts to pick up the pieces of their fractured family life while confronting an unwelcomed uncle and mobsters who try to collect debt that their father left behind.
A “cyclo” is a bicycle-drawn taxi similar to a rickshaw, and, in this story, the nickname of an 18-year-old boy trying to scrape together a living in the desperate poverty of Ho Chi Mihn City. Cyclo lives with his grandfather and two sisters, and drives his taxi for a bitter woman who devotes most of her time to her mentally unstable son. When the pedal-cab is stolen, Cyclo is forced into a life of crime to repay the debt and falls in with a group of petty thugs led by a self-styled poet. What Cyclo doesn’t know at first is that the poet is also a pimp, and he’s been using his romantic wiles to lure Cyclo’s older sister into a career as a prostitute.
The Wars focuses on rebellious Robert Ross, who battles against the uptight, upper-crust Rosedale society he was born into; when war is declared in 1914, he enlists in the Canadian army to escape from personal tragedy. Though it recreates the horrors of WWI trench warfare with harrowing realism, the film is more interested in how war replicates, and even amplifies, the class divisions of the homefront; in one of many telling details, Robert is the only man in his unit with a handgun because he is the only man wealthy enough to afford one.