When bush fires break out in a small village in Malo, Sidy, a young forestry commissioner from the city, must journey into the spiritual realm. Although Sidy has been trained in modern techniques, he accepts that only by finding an herbal cure, called the seventh canari, prophesied by the oracle, can the fires be stopped. His journey into the Dogon country, popularized by western anthropologists, is his final step towards linking the two worlds, traditional and modern.
Japan, 1986. At the tail end of the world tour promoting their latest album Revenge, Eurythmics tops the charts. Between concerts, pop duo Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart survey Japan’s cultural soundscape with the help of Conny Plank: A world of sounds both brutally technological and highly refined by tradition.
Brulard, a French civil engineer on assignment in a remote Swedish village, meets Ina, who has been raised in forested isolation by her haggish mother and believes herself to be a witch. He falls in love with her and tries to convert her to civilization; but in the meantime, his female boss, Kristina, has fallen in love with him, while the villagers turn against him for consorting with someone they believe is cursed by the Devil.
At Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island, a territory of romantic landscapes, Eric Dahan visits Paul Morrissey in his retreat. The numerous views of the ocean seem to metaphorize the form of the documentary, which is constructed as a layering of the continuous flow of the filmmaker’s words, images from his films—’Trash’ (1970), ‘Forty Deuce’ (1982), or ‘Mixed Blood’ (1985)—and a tour of his home.
Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They’re all rather tight, or so they claim.
In Paris, Jef Costello is a lonely hit man who works under contract. He is hired to kill the owner of a club and becomes the prime suspect of the murder. However, his perfect alibi drops the accusation against him. His girlfriend Jane, her client and citizen above any suspicion Wiener and Valerie, the pianist of the club and main witness of the crime, provide the necessary evidence of his innocence supporting his alibi. Free, he is betrayed and chased by the gangsters sent by the one who hired him and also by the police, not convinced of his innocence. Jef seeks out who has hired him to revenge.
In Italy, gambler and poetry professor Daniele Dominici arrives in the seaside town of Rimini and is hired to teach for four months at a high school, replacing another teacher. His relationship with his partner Monica is in crisis and he spends most of the time with his new acquaintances and gamblers Giorgio Mosca, Marcello, and Gerardo Pavani. In the classroom he meets 19-year-old student Vanina Abati, who is Gerardo’s girlfriend, and they fall in love. Their relationship leads to a tragic end.
Separated from his wife Catherine, Jean Diaz, a writer and filmmaker, lives alone with his young son, David. As they set off on their holidays, Jean and David are victims of a car crash which has been arranged by Death herself. The latter offers Jean a strange proposition: his son will be returned to life providing he, Jean, makes an animated film which denounces the violence of the past century. Jean realises too late that Death intends to use the film to bring about the destruction of mankind. His only hope of saving the world is to find the passage through which one passes from life to death…
