Told from the perspective of two children, The Small Town describes the relationship between members of an extended family in a small Turkish town. Told in four parts which unfold with the seasons, the film is a touching and bittersweet portrait of childhood and fears. Intimately observed and beautifully shot, Ceylan’s feature debut won the Caligari Prize at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival.
Category: Drama
In a small Welsh town, a boy lives alone with his unstable mother. The mother is determined to see that her son enter the clergy some day, but her insistence on this issue is a source of tension between the woman and her boy. As the child’s protests grow more violent, the mother’s sanity deteriorates, leading to tragedy. Years later, the son, now a grown man, returns to the town where he was born to confront his dark past.
Saxophonist Danny witnesses the murder of his band manager and a deaf-mute girl after a gig. Questioned by the police, he remembers only the orthopedic shoes of the killers’ leader. So begins his quest to avenge her. He seeks an answer to the simple question ‘Why?’ but finds only more, and deeper, questions which resonate with the wider context of ‘the Troubles’, the inter-communal strife gripping the modern-day Northern Ireland which is the film’s setting.
30ish Patrick and teenage Dominic are two brothers living alone in a remote farmhouse in the Southwest of Ireland, while their mother is away traveling. When their aunt comes visiting, with her arrives Anya, a young woman from Germany who starts helping Dominic with his studies in return for a chance to improve her English. As time goes by, Patrick and Anya fall in love, while Dominic also develops feelings for the girl.
No one knows better than Mohsen Makhmalbaf that Iranians are movie mad, so when he placed a casting call for one hundred actors for a new film, he expected a crowd; what he got was a crush—five thousand people. After genially announcing, “You are both the subject and the actors in the film,” he begins auditions. What unfolds is a parade of individuals who, for love of cinema, are by turns brash, crafty, shy, touchingly open, unwittingly hilarious.
Little Gennarino, orphan of his parents, performs on the streets of Naples as a street musician together with his adoptive mother Angela. Unfortunately one day the woman falls ill and she has to be hospitalized, so the child, needing to find money for treatment, joins a group of petty thieves.
A rock and roll singer gets stranded in a small Australian town after losing her job in a band. She winds up in a trailer park only to encounter, by accident, the teenage daughter she deserted following her husband’s death.
Liz Erickson is an energetic young woman who is eagerly approaching her freshman year in college. But once on campus, she soon discovers the gritty reality of college life. From crass comments by male classmates to the cruel hazing rituals of the school’s sororities, Liz is shocked by the behavior of her fellow students. She finds solace in her burgeoning friendship with noble World War II veteran Joe Blake, who is attending college thanks to the GI Bill.