——UPGRADED——
New York City custodian Daryll Deever is a big fan of local news reporter Tony Sokolow, so he is intrigued when she shows up to cover a story at his workplace. There’s been a murder in the office building, and Tony suspects that Daryll may have insight into the crime, a notion that he furthers to stay close to her. However, when those behind the killing begin to think that Daryll really knows something, they target both him and Tony to keep their secrets hidden.
Charming con-artist Charlotte is suspected of murder when her boyfriend is found dead in her apartment. She flees to her former lover and despite the fact that he is living with his fiance, he succumbs to her charms and joins her in a wild romp across the French countryside to Spain.
In 1914, with men gone to war, Marcel Proust hired Céleste Albaret as his attendant. More than eight years later, she was at his side when he died. During this entire time, she only entered his room when he rang for her, sleeping from 9 AM to 3 PM to wait during the night while he wrote. Marcel uses her as more than a servant: she is his muse, telling stories of her childhood to stir his remembrance of things past; she’s in cahoots with him as he manipulates those he wants to draw on for his writing; she listens appalled to his descriptions of the underside of Paris. Hers is a life of love and sweet devotion as he races time to finish his work before death.
Hell-bent on revenge, cocky reform-school runaway El Jaibo returns to his old neighborhood in post-World-War-II Mexico City’s poor and squalid slums, to reunite with his faithful gang of juvenile delinquents and street urchins. However, as the dangerous ringleader lives and breathes retribution, his destructive obsession to find the informant who supposedly sent him to jail will intricately interweave his bitter fate with that of Pedro, his weak, unwitting accessory, in a despicable act of pure evil. In the end, are humans inherently good or bad? Is immorality contingent with society?
Two yakuza, one of whom frequently reflects on an uncomfortable past taking advantage of Korean women, meet a stowaway on Japanese soil from across the Genkai Sea.
——UPGRADED——
In the winter of 1943 two young Jews, Alek and Fryda, escape, via sewer tunnels, from the atrocities underway in Warsaw ghetto. Alek, entrusted with undeveloped photos of the horrors within, makes his way to a supposedly safe apartment only to find it occupied by Germans. Another tenant, a pole Stephania, abruptly offers to shelter him in her spacious apartment. She comforts him and they make love that very night. Stefania is uncommonly generous and willing to jeopardize her own safety by hiding a Jew. She even goes to a nearby church and rescues Fryda. But Fryda is ungrateful and proceeds to sabotage the trio’s safety in insidious ways.
The patriarch Knut Borg (Victor Sjöström) lives an ascetic Christian life together with his family on his homestead, Knutsgården. His son Johannes is studying to become a priest, but when his fiancée dies Johannes loses his mind and thinks he is the Saviour. Intense drama about mental illness, faith and doubt, which became an international success and got unexpected political relevance when the Danish playwrighter, who wrote the play Ordet is based upon, got murdered by the Nazis one week after the opening night.
Associations sets language against itself by using the ambiguities inherent in the English language. Images from magazines and color supplements accompany a voice-over reading from the book ‘Word Associations and Linguistic Theory’ by academic linguistic Herbert H. Clark. Combining a wry sense of humor with word/visual games and puns, Smith explores the boundaries of cinematic montage by combining elements together and against each other in order to destroy and create multiple meanings at the same time.
