Stéphane, a young Parisian, goes to Romania to search for Nora Luca, a Roma singer harshly criticized by Roma activists for allegedly denigrating Roma’s image that his father listened to incessantly in the last days of his life. His search takes him to a gypsy village where he befriends Izidor and witnesses the pains and joys of the Romani experience.
Two men meet while travelling north on separate missions. Charlie wants to catch up with the man who has stolen his wife, while Vicente is trying to escape a contract castration. After their car breaks down, they seek sanctuary in an isolated building home to a strange sect whose whole equilibrium is threatened by the arrival of the two men. The result is chaos.
A collaboration by four budding Indonesian filmmmakers, ‘Kuldesak’ intercuts the stories of four young urbanites, exploring problems and dilemmas in contemporary Jakarta. Aksan is an aspiring filmmaker in need of money to finance his first film; Andre, a lonely teen on his birthday who somewhat identifies with Kurt Cobain; Dina, the box office attendant is preoccupied with her television star idol who often comes to the theatre she works at; and Lina, the office girl is taken hostage by her own boss. The film took three years to complete, commencing pre-production in 1996 during the Suharto rule and was released five months after his resignation.
Adapted by Károly Makk and Zoltán Kamondi from a 1955 work by Tibor Déry, the film follows celebrated writer György Nyári, who unexpectedly rises from his coffin during his own funeral and heads toward the cemetery. As rumors spread about a secret diary exposing the intellectual elite, the story reflects with irony on Hungary’s late Kádár-era cultural circles.
Isabelle Kahn is a successful film actress whose young daughter, Emily, is frequently cared for by her parents in Normandy while she’s away working. After a production ends in Berlin, she returns to visit her daughter. However, the rejoicing is short-lived. Her smitten costar follows, and his presence sets off an intense clash between the self-centered thespian and her mother.
In a future ruled by a corporate monopoly, a machine capable of fulfilling every human desire transforms society and renders genuine relationships obsolete. As a marginalized young woman is absorbed into the system, she confronts a world increasingly defined by consumption, control, and isolation.
Based on the novel by FE Sillanpää and directed by Matti Kassila, the film is about an aging writer, Martti Hongisto, who makes his last trip to visit his childhood sweetheart. The writer’s ultimate goal is to go over the missed opportunities with his former lover and what life could have been like if they had not broken up.
The first film of Latvian cinema’s “new era”, that of the Riga School of Poetic Documentary Cinema. The story of a little girl in a white dress wandering the streets of Riga in search of the flowers she has seen in a shop window was originally conceived and shot as a short film, but its documentary character is so abundant and artistically valuable that this little film became a turning point in cinema history and the beginning of a new era.
