In 19th-century Vienna, composer Franz Schubert struggles with poverty and unfulfilled ambitions while finding solace in music and friendship. His bond with a devoted pupil brings warmth and inspiration, though his personal life remains marked by sacrifice and melancholy. The film blends melodrama with musical interludes, offering a romanticized portrait of Schubert’s final years.
Category: Drama
After their Tehran home is destroyed in an air raid during the Gulf War, Farhad Sadri and his family set out for the safety of northern Iran. As they travel, the family faces a series of unsettling and transformative encounters that expose the emotional scars left by conflict. Blending quiet realism with psychological tension, the film traces their attempt to rebuild a sense of normalcy amid uncertainty.
Paul, an irritable and stressed-out hotel manager, begins to gradually develop paranoid delusions about his wife’s infidelity. As he succumbs to green-eyed jealousy, his life starts to crumble. Each step on his downward spiral to madness seems to accelerate, driving him further along the path to a personal hell. Finally, the former shell of his personality cracks completely, with tragic consequences.
Evoking mixed marriages and their difficulties, the author depicts the journey of a young black husband, an elegant dandy, who has come to Paris to find his young white wife and their little daughter. This social satire is the feature-length directorial debut of Désiré Ecaré, originally from Côte d’Ivoire.
One of the most sublime color films ever made, Ballad of Orin follows the hardscrabble life of a wandering outcast goze (blind female musician) in early 20th-century Japan. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa and director Masahiro Shinoda interviewed surviving goza of the time to capture “a sense of the ideal beauty that these blind women had inwardly visualized.
A week in the life of a cosmetics salesman who visits beauty salons to beat his way through the after-work hours. His journey across a wintery Switzerland of grey suburbs and villages takes him via hairdressers shops, hotel rooms and sleezy bars to construction sites and fairs, over snow-covered mountains and through spooky shopping zones back to his home parking lot. He meets people of every stripe, chats, argues and remains silent with them and never gets rid of his silent companion, the melancholy of isolation.
With his monumental ‘film fresco’ Ferenc Kósa erected a monument to the peasant revolt led by György Dózsa (16th century). Although under the Marxist interpretation of history of the period the revolt was frequently simplified down to an early example of ‘class struggle’, in the screenplay of Ferenc Kósa and Sándor Csoóri the depiction of historical events bears the universally valid formulation of questions about revolution and violence, while the figure of Dózsa – thanks also to the characterization of Ferenc Bessenyei – takes on a more lifelike and human aspect.
Gito is a young African intellectual returning home from France with numerous academic degrees and ministerial ambitions. Gradually his ambitions are crushed by the daily realities of his country. Gito is tested further by the alliance between his French girlfriend and his old sweetheart who join forces to teach Gito an unforgettable lesson.