Ema is a sweet and innocent girl who is so beautiful she turns the head of every man she passes. Her life takes a despairing turn for the worse when her father forces her into a passionless marriage to his friend, a wealthy doctor. To make matters worse, she is relocated to the scenic but unfamiliar and isolated vineyards of Abraham’s Valley, Portugal where the breathtaking river Douro flows. Trapped in a marriage to a man she does not love, she scorns her husband and threatens to kill herself rather than submit to his desires.
Year: 2020
A close-up of Berlin coal carriers from Prenzlauer Berg. No portrayal of heroic workers or progress here. Instead, bright, deeply-felt sketches of rough men and their resolute female boss.
Losing faith in their original idea for a movie to celebrate Finland’s 50 years of independence, a film crew decides to hire a typical Finnish taxpayer to tell them what to shoot. The result becomes a comedic cavalcade of Finnish promotional clichés – Lapland, sauna, moose hunting, beautiful blond women etc. – as presented by a slick entourage following on the heels of William Nurmi, a Finnish-American hair tonic millionaire on a visit to his ancestors’ homeland. Add some half-baked criminal hanky-panky, and towards the end even one of the main characters has to confess to the camera that he’s lost track of this movie’s plot about fifteen minutes ago.
A department store floor walker is persuaded by four husband-seeking salesgirls to pose as their father in a Long Island mansion which they have rented by pooling resources and pretending to be wealthy themselves.
Following the relationship that grows up between a reclusive old lady and a fast-talking escaped convict after she finds him raiding her fridge one night. Because he bears an uncanny resemblance to her long-dead true love, she decides to shelter him. In exchange for friendship, she hides him from the police; and as their time together passes, both parties learn a lot about each other and about themselves.
This is a nostalgic look at the typical “Class Reunion” of a group after about a quarter of a century of going their separate ways after graduation. The girls that used to be pretty and the ugly ones have someway become beautiful. The guys that were the most handsome are not necessarily the best looking guys anymore. Some of the once homely guys and girls are better with age. Everything is going great until tragedy strikes when one of them is murdered.
When a lawyer loses an appeal to stop a logging company from clear-cutting Native American land, Arthur, an Indian militant drags him and the kidnapped logging mill manager into the forest. The lawyer’s empty talk about how the company’s greed should be punished is put into brutal action by Arthur, who tortures the manager in allegorical ways mimicking what loggers do to the forest.