Cinema

Forty years ago, during the uprising to overthrow the Shah’s regime in Iran, protestors set fire to movie theaters as a way of showing opposition to Western culture. Many cinemas were burned down. In one tragic case, a theater was set on fire with four hundred people inside, most of whom were burned alive. Forty years have passed and, in contemporary Iran, four individuals also decide to burn a cinema down. Their intended target is a theater showing a film about an unearthed, unexploded missile. Will past and present meet? More

‘We’re waiting to grow old’. This sentence briefly sums up Yaoyun and his wife Liyun’s bitter realisation about their lives. They were once a happy family – until their son drowned playing by a reservoir. And so Yaojun and Liyun leave their home and plunge into the big city, although nobody knows them there and they cannot even understand the local dialect. Their adopted son Liu Xing does not offer them the comfort they had hoped for either. Defiantly rejecting his ‘foreign’ parents, he one day disappears altogether. More

A Nurse, a Paramedic, a Gymnast and her Coach have formed a service for hire. They stand in for dead people by appointment, hired by the relatives, friends, or colleagues of the deceased. The company is called Alps while their leader, the Paramedic, calls himself Mont Blanc. Although the Alps members operate under a discipline regime demanded by their leader, the Nurse doesn’t. More

Luck By Chance is a new Indian drama in a wonderful mixture of Bollywoodstile and arthouse. Written and directed by Zoya Akhtar the film featured co-producer Farhan Akhtar and Konkana Sen Sharma in the lead roles of a loving couple. Rishi Kapoor, Aamir Khan, Dimple Kapadia, Juhi Chawla, Isha Sharvani and Sanjay Kapoor feature in the supporting roles. The film is about the journey of an young actor who arrives in Mumbai and gives everything to become a movie star. More

They live thousands of kilometres apart from one another and yet are chasing the same dream. In COMRADES IN DREAMS, we meet people whose lives revolve around cinema. One of them is Han Jong Sil, the North Korean with the unforgettable smile. She loves life – even one in which she is torn between propaganda, her own dreams and crop reports. She wants to improve the quality of other peoples’ existence by showing them films. Vulnerable, lonely and full of longing, she dazzles like a comet above a sea of uniformity. More

In the capital of Burkina Faso, a band of young people tries to survive and thrive vis-a-vis the thousand and one temptations. Adventures of a band of youngsters, living in a stripped district of Ouagadougou, who seek hopes. The easy way and ingeniousness compensate for the money which often is lacking. Sadness is banished of a resolutely optimistic way of life. Plunders and odd jobs constitute the daily newspaper of this struggle for life. The ones will succeed modestly, the others will fail more or less, but a great solidarity of group remains... More

The 20-year-old narrator André (Lázaro RamosI, relatively poor, falls in love with Silvia, a neighbor whom he spy's with a telescope. Becoming more and more attracted to her, he begins to follow her around the city and realizes she works in a clothing shop. He works in a xerox place and makes a copy of a brand new 50 real bill in order to buy a dress from her store. This becomes a vice and he begins to photocopy more and more money, until it gets out of control. However, things begin to go wrong when he decides that photcopying is not the only way to make money... More

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Don‘t Die without Telling Me Where You‘re Going is an extraordinary film by a remarkable director, Eliseo Subiela (Man Looking Southeast, Dark Side of the Heart).This is masterful filmmaking that brings to life an invisible dimension of our world: auras, souls, spirits. William and Rachel have loved each other in various lives. In the life this movie depicts, William is Leopoldo, lives in Buenos Aires, and is working on an invention: a dream collector. While testing his invention, he finds Rachel, who in this life is a soul. More

The movie tells a melancholic story of a little girl who is living in a city in the north. She is fascinated by the secrets of the south which seem to be hidden in the personality of her father. More

Between the autumn of 1897 and the summer of 1898, four families live together on a farm near Bergamo in the Bassa Bergamasca. Among the members of the community there is a deep spiritual connection that leads them to experience beautiful and tragic things, ordinary moments and extraordinary events together. Two young people court each other and marry; a penniless father secretly cuts down a tree to carve new wooden shoes for his son, who goes to school six kilometres a day; an old man fertilizes his tomatoes with chicken excrement so that they ripen faster. More

During World War II, Antonio (Nino Manfredi), Gianni (Vittorio Gassman) and Nicola (Stefania Sandrelli) are activists fighting for Italy's liberation from Nazi occupation. When the war ends and their ideals must change, the three men take different life paths. Antonio and Nicola incorporate their beliefs into adulthood, whereas Gianni takes a more affluent job as a lawyer's assistant. When the group reunites after several decades, their discourse unearths hostility and unsettling realizations. More

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