——UPGRADED——
The Tied up Balloon was one of the most innovative and challenging works by Bulgaria’s pioneering female director, Binka Zhelyazkova. Set during WWII, a barrage balloon inexplicably appears in the sky above a remote peasant village creating an atmosphere of alarm, speculation and debate.
Mitamura Yuka is a normal, shy high school student… Except for the fact that she has psychic powers. When a new student with similar powers begins to show her skills, creating a force of psychic Nazi student enforcers, Yuka and her friends vow to stop her. But behind it all is a mysterious force that will put Yuka’s powers to the ultimate test!
An English singer travels around the Greek countryside. He meets a strange creature, part man part fox, and together they start looking for Danilo Treles, a legendary musician from Andalusia. Tornes’ craziest film wears its heart on its sleeve, starting with the title, which could conceivably allude to a Spanish surname but even the director himself could not deny the direct reference to the Greek language (Treles translates into madness).
After the Prague Spring of 1968 leaves Yorick, Martha and Ondrej orphaned, the trio of young characters find shelter in a bombed church and construct a surrealistically anarchic existence based on a philosophy of denial of life circumstances and careless playfulness with the purpose of pretending they enjoy the peace and freedom they do not have. Each character undergoes a personal growth process after Yorick and Ondrej competitively seek to develop a relationship with Martha, which escalates to unforeseen consequences.
A big fan of Chow Yun-Fat who works in an illegal arms sales shop finds one day a huge jar that allows him to transform snails into humans…
Conrad Veidt stars as Matathias, a Jewish man who, after spitting on Christ en route to his crucifixion, is doomed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. After two passages – one set during the Crusades, the other in Mediaeval Italy – Matathias is offered redemption during the Spanish Inquisition.
A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.
Mexico City circa 1965: Flavia is an aristocratic little girl, who is very lonely and bored. At school she meets and befriends a strange and beautiful girl named Verónica, who dreams of becoming a witch. Their games get increasingly sadistic and macabre, and escalate to involve the bloody murder of a piano teacher and macabre mayhem.
