When Yelizaveta Uvarova becomes a mayor of a small town, she puts her heart and soul into building a bridge there. Yet soon politics will have to make way for her family life as her son suddenly dies.
Category: Drama
A concentration camp on a barren island is hell for the exiled prisoners. The everyday life of the people who live there consists of interrogations, psychological and physical violence, arbitrary punishments and other torments. One of the prisoners who refuses to yield is subjected to torture. Trying to escape, he falls into the sea. When the Queen visits the island, the prison guards find the runaway and murder him without a second thought, since he is already assumed dead.
A family trip which transforms into a tragicomic psychological drama. Claiming that it was her son’s wish, Grandma Valerie is determined to transfer his urned remains from the small Czech town to their native Slovakia. Her daughter-in-law accompanies her, as do her two adult granddaughters, one nearing the end of her pregnancy with a five-year-old in tow, the other with her husband. Tense relations and conflict come to a head along the way, and the truth erupts from under layers of pretence and deferential consideration. The truths revealed are at times surprising, at others bitter or even comic, but always cleansing.
With the help of a couple of her oddball friends, a woman takes her former lesbian lover to a hotel to convince her that their affair shouldn’t end. After much shouting and some sex, things complicate when the lover’s husband shows up.
Mauro, a judge, is worried about his older sister Marta, who took care of him since he was a boy, and is now affected by psychic problems and suicide fantasies. She seems to recover from her depression when Mauro acquaints her with Giovanni, a brilliant actor at the edge of legality. Mauro become unconsciously jealous of this relationship, and tries to get Giovanni arrested.
The life and slow death of Communist journalist and Prague City Council member Jozka Jaburkova in the Ravensbruck concentration camp is the focus of this wartime drama starring Jana Rihakova as the tragic Jaburkova. Suffering almost from the beginning as an illegitimate child burdened with extreme moral expectations by her fanatically religious mother, Jaburkova suffered at the hands of the teachers and authorities in her all girls’ school. Her sympathy for the oppressed or those experiencing unjust hardship or discrimination got her into trouble again and again, both as a student and when she went on to seek employment. As the camera focuses on scenes in the concentration camp, Jaburkova’s memories of her past are shown in flashbacks.
Sandrine Bonnaire plays a European researcher who is abducted by some ill-educated rebels in a North African country. They have no clear reason for holding her hostage, and after a considerable period of time (and an escape attempt by their captive), they simply let her go. The story is based on a similar situation that the director Raymond Depardon covered when he was a reporter.
Around the year 1500, the Italian priest Don Filippo Neri helps street kids and orphans in his poor little chapel. He is no clergyman by the book, but a true believer in terms good and bad and he teaches this to his children. Neri is not very well-seen by the church and his only “friend” is the dry, humorless Ignatius De Loyola. But Neris real counterpart is the devil himself, working in endless incarnations in Neris direct neighborhood, trying to seduce his kids.