A French lieutenant makes a bet that he can seduce any woman in town in the two weeks before his regiment leaves for maneuvers, but his chosen target (a Parisian divorcée) isn’t like other girls he’s known.
Category: Drama
A jobless young couple, Yoshigi and Tsutue, wind up at the outskirts of the Suzaki red-light district in Tokyo. Tsutue talks her way into a job pouring sake for male customers at a small bar run by a sympathetic older woman, while Yoshigi is shunted off into a nearby noodle shop, where he gets a job delivering noodles. Tsutue charms and runs off with one of her clients. Yoshigi, ignoring the attentions of a sweet co-worker, pursues Tsutue.
After an absence of years, Mara (15) moves into her hippy Dad’s shack in remote river country. Marooned in Harry’s world, Mara broods on her haughty artist mother who lives at the top of the valley. When Mara falls for Herringbone John, a tramp ‘waiting for death to come along and knock him on the head’, their encounter is a trip through the ecstasy and agony of romantic love. What Mara finds on the other side sets her free.
Hymn to a Tired Man uses a flashback narrative to reflect on war and its aftermath. A mild-mannered office worker is driven to recall his past when his son falls in love with the daughter of the commanding officer under whom he served during World War II. Memories of abusive discipline resurface throwing the former soldier’s relatively quiet postwar life into turmoil. Kobayashi offers an unsparing indictment of the lack of accountability for the scars of battle.
Jia-Li’s husband has disappeared. A clue at a beach suggests that he was drowned but no body was found. The film focusses not on the search for the husband, but on the reunion of Jia-Li and her brother’s ex-girlfriend, a successful pianist. The two women share insights on life and memories of growing up, and the struggle they face accepting or defying traditions in their romance and marriage. The film’s deliberation on changes in Taiwanese society and family, its mood of contemplation and reflection, went well beyond the melancholic tone of traditional Taiwanese films about women.
Fernando, the protagonist, finishes his military service in the cavalry and decides to buy the horse that has been his companion during this time. However, living with the horse becomes a grave problem, as the city that Fernando knew is not the same. He struggles to find accommodation for the animal, and he faces resistance from both his social circle as well as the new, modern world.
Fisher, a fine art dealer, goes to Prague after the death of a friend, the Baron von Utz, to see if he can obtain some of the pieces of the Baron’s priceless Meissen porcelain collection. He meets up with an old mutual friend, Orlik, who tells him about the Baron’s past, his struggle to keep his collection intact, while Fisher struggles to discover what happened to the collection.
Flame was the first Zimbabwean film since independence and is a tribute to the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army’s female guerrillas. In the 1970s in former Rhodesia, the people stand up against the oppressors. As war reaches rural villages, friends Florence and Nyasha run away from home to join the fighters in Mozambican training camps. Both adopt revolutionary identities: Nyasha becomes Liberty, while Florence brands herself Flame. Flame created controversy in Zimbabwe, as the realistic depiction of the treatment of women in the liberation army was seen as anti-nationalist. The film also serves as a critique for post-independence Zimbabwe, and Mugabe’s rule.