A 20-year old woman living a life without direction in Los Angeles provides the focus of this contemporary drama. Jane is the unfocused protagonist and narrator of the story. She makes a minimal living as a typist. In her spare time she writes a novel. Jane experiences a constantly deepening depression as she copes with her father’s death, a distant lover, and her new romance with an artist. She prefers to avoid confrontation, but cannot when Sam, the distant lover, returns from Europe.
Author: Jon W.
This short fiction has much to say about kindness, although without any dialogue. In a combination of live action and animation, we are introduced to a man who discovers a small plant hidden under the snow and takes it inside his house. The plant responds to his loving care with rather startling enthusiasm.
Zaza is a good-looking and intelligent Israeli man in his thirties, but despite his family’s wishes he is still a bachelor. His relatives, holding fast to the traditions of their Georgian Jewish heritage, try to arrange a marriage for him by setting him up with a series of eligible young virgins. Zaza, however, is secretly in love with Judith, an opinionated divorcee with a young daughter. As Zaza struggles to decide between tradition and love, Late Marriage manages to become comic, emotional, and erotic all at once, while constantly maintaining respect for both sides of the debate.
A first film made almost single-handedly on a tiny budget, this is an admirably ambitious stab at the documentary-essay form familiar from films like Chris Marker’s Sunless. A brazenly personal response to Calcutta, it attempts to delve beyond the facile notions the West entertains about the city (‘an example of wretched over-population’), and combines vivid visuals with a narration that plunges fearlessly into economics, politics, religion, sociology and philosophy. Adverts, movie clips, comic strips, stills of the director’s mother, footage of religious ritual and street life merge into a complex web of ideas that are neither hackneyed nor obvious. A tantalising effort.
Marya is married to medical student Victor Sablin, who finds it impossible to deal with military life when he is inducted into the Russian army during World War I. When her husband is sentenced to death by firing squad due to his insubordination, Marya offers herself to General Gregori Platoff in order to save him. When the two unexpectedly fall in love, Victor — not caring that his life has been spared — threatens to kill his rival.
Robert is delighted when his father returns from Africa with a baby chimpanzee which he names Tereza. When Tereza is kidnapped, Robert, his brother and friends, search the city and foil the kidnappers.
Marcello Rondi is a very rich Brazilian who is found dying in his apartment. Her daughter Berenice is not convinced that it is a heart attack, and she begins to investigate the matter.
Adapted from an Appalachian Jack Tale set in the late 1940s, this tale follows a World War II veteran named Jack who, in return for an act of kindness, receives two magical gifts: a sack that can catch anything and a jar that can show whether a sick person will recover or die. Jack becomes a national hero when he rescues the president’s daughter from a serious illness by capturing Death in his magic sack. However, after many years without Death in the world, Jack realizes that he has upset the natural order and releases Death to save humankind from perpetual old age and misery.