Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey tells the story of a rickety bridge that has spanned a deep gorge for ages. When the bridge suddenly collapses–plunging five people to their deaths–the tragedy causes a wave of superstition to engulf the villagers as they believe they are destined for continued misfortune. Only a priest can find the connections to divine intervention that will quell the townspeople’s fears.
Category: Drama
In the early 1990s, five leading Arab film directors were asked to create a short work that expressed their thoughts and feelings about the first Gulf War and its impact on Arab people, culture and intellectual thought. The Gulf War, What Next? is the revealing and rewarding feature-length collection of these five impressive short works.
Lawyer Amy finds herself courted by two very different men: her client, a roguish street musician named Will, and her old boyfriend John Michael. A curious triangle develops as Amy gets pregnant by Will and both men vie for her affections.
Edson is having an affair with actress Maria do Rosário, who dreams of being a movie director. So he tries to get some easy money for her film, but is arrested and meets a police torturer instead.
Never one to shy away from uncomfortable topics, Kei Kumai adapted Shusaku Endo’s 1957 novel The Sea and Poison into one of the most complex studies on film of medical ethics. The movie (sometimes graphically) describes the use of eight downed American fliers as subjects of experimental surgical techniques at Kyushu University’s medical school and hospital in the summer of 1945, in the course of which all eight prisoners were murdered.
Ulveczky, the unbridled bull of the village, is incapable of living in the small community like others. He runs his farm and lives his life as a tyrant. His licentious temperament leads him to take whatever he wants, women included, who are swept off their feet. His victims include a beautiful young girl who nearly dies when the man tires of her and ejects her from the farm. With great difficulty she restarts her life, hoping that she has finally freed herself of the brute who, however, does not let go so easily.
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.
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.