Antoine - a grieving loner - spends his days in a cafe on Place Clichy watching people. Every day, he sees a woman he calls Albertine get out of the subway and go to the movies. Today, he takes it upon himself to talk to her. Thus began Antoine's down-going.
A recently-widowed science fiction writer considers whether to adopt a hyper-imaginative 6-year-old abandoned and socially-rejected boy who says he's really from Mars.
In the Swedish city of Lethe, people from different walks of life take part in a series of short, deadpan vignettes that rush past. Some are just seconds long, none longer than a couple of minutes. A young woman remembers a fantasy honeymoon with a rock guitarist. A man awakes from a dream about bomber planes. A businessman boasts about success while being robbed by a pickpocket, and so on. The absurdist collection is accompanied by Dixieland jazz and similar music.
A young social outcast in Australia steals money from her parents to finance a vacation where she hopes to find happiness, and perhaps love.
Matti and Niila, growing up in the mid-sixties in the harsh and conservative environment of a Finnish-speaking part of Tornedalen in Swedish Laponia, close to the Finnish border. Their big dream is to become rock stars. In the present the now grown-up Matti feels guilt for the death of his drug-addicted rock star friend Niila.
A mathematical genius discovers a link between numbers and reality, and thus believes he can predict the future.
An omnium-gatherum of film, poem, and song excerpts contextually juxtaposed in an attempt to explore masculinity, alienation, and identity in a post-industrial society.
Suffering from insomnia, disturbed loner Travis Bickle takes a job as a New York City cabbie, haunting the streets nightly, growing increasingly detached from reality as he dreams of cleaning up the filthy city.
In 18th century France, Marquise de Merteuil asks her ex-lover Vicomte de Valmont to seduce the future wife of another ex-lover of hers in return for one last night with her. Yet things don’t go as planned.
Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood.
An experimental journey through a year in the life of the director, using his always playing playlist to cross the boundaries of fiction and documentary. Through scenes of both comedy and tragedy, realistic documentary footage and experimental sequences of the director's environment and daily life we get a sometimes estranging image of a young man and also an intriguing insight in his mindset and how this translates to the imagery on screen.
Silvester Home Run
A young woman arrives in a city for the first time. She observes the people around her and realizes that she does not belong to that world, everything is alien to her. Even so, she tries to pretend to be one of them, to fit into this strange place.
After a painful breakup, Ben develops insomnia. To kill time, he starts working the late night shift at the local supermarket, where his artistic imagination runs wild.
Two different but strangely complementary young women living together are pictured in a fragmented and non-linear narrative about incommunicability and alienation.
A rebellious student embarks on an affair with the mother of his best friend, leading to disastrous consequences.
Julien Bouin, a former typographist, and his wife Clemence, who used to perform in a circus, hardly talk to each other in their small house, soon to be demolished. His cat Greffier being the only one he still gives affection to, he becomes the object of Clemence's anger.
Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Felix, a vagrant, who seems to be physically identical to him; a disconcerting fact that leads Hermann Hermann to plot a particular way out of a fake world he actually hates.
Elisa, 16, is bored by her suburban existence. One night, she discovers a book in her stepfather's library. The crude and tender words of a prostitute make her see her own desire in a new and unexpected light.
Lou and Noodles are consumers. Adrift and empty, they are separate from each other and from the world. Ruled by desire and uncontrollable drives to excess, they spend their solitary hours in spaces both real and unreal. Occasionally, they are in the same part of the mall.