Los de Arriba

Four different Alices wander through mazes constructed from 40 years of Spanish history in this post-Franco meditation. Loosely related to the "Alice" of Alice in Wonderland, in one episode of this film, Alice (who is clearly a metaphor for the Spanish people) is raped by some multinational corporations. Told in a somewhat confusing manner, especially for those unfamiliar with the nuances of Spain's history in the period between 1936 and 1975, this is director Jorge Feliu's first feature film.

After years of ignoring the shy cousin whom she and her peers taunted mercilessly as a child, a middle-aged woman (Ingrid Thulin) wrenches the poor man (Erland Josephson) out of his self-chosen solitude to accompany her on a trip. Despite developments which deepen their knowledge of one another, the communication between them does not portend long-lasting intimacy.

In a wealthy Italian home, the daughter of the family is trying to cut her mother's apron strings. Not only is she having difficulty with this, for her mother is extremely protective, but she cannot even cut vegetables skillfully. Despite that, she wants to go out and party, mother or no mother.

A rural community in the Ecuadorian Andes suddenly faces a land dispute with the legal representatives of a large company. The discovery of very rich ore deposits in the territory is the reason of the offensive greedy on those places, where the community lived since immemorial times.

Directed by Nicolás Sarquís.

A 17-year-old high school student, Jenny Kern, is found dead from cold and exhaustion in the suburbs of Lausanne, Switzerland.

The film travels in close-up over the mysterious terrains of nude human bodies as they touch and explore one another.

Between the two World Wars, Yugoslavia was ruled by a monarchy. This movie explores the difficulties faced by a Communist Party organizer under that regime when an order goes out to kill anyone threatening the current regime. At first he is willing to leave the country, but his experience of the situation of workers moves him to stay. Despite efforts of captors to help him escape, he refuses, and dies a martyr's death.

A sacrificial passive woman spends her life breeding happiness into her family. What happens when her world of security cracks, shatters completely and her identity dissolves?

Men in pairs, mostly naked, perform various sensual tasks together.

Broughton reads his poetry over various images.

The successful glass artist Stellan Sylvester ends up in the hospital after a car accident. He looks back at his life and finds it empty and meaningless. He falls in love with the nurse Marta but when he finds out that she engaged life turns out to be even more meaningless.

Das Rückendekolleté

Michalis returns to the tobacco growers of his rural village after having spent some time in the city and persuades them to form a collective, rather than suffer the poverty-inducing prices they are paid for their crops by tobacco brokers. They agree not to sell to any of the brokers and start to form a farmers' group. When one of the farmers breaks the agreement and is found dead, Michalis is accused. However, rather than expose the farmers' plight and give publicity to the brokers' greed, the motive the government gives for the killing is thi asimanton aformin, for unimportant reasons.

1919. Released from the teacher training college, Joachim Hofer takes up his first job as an assistant teacher in an Alsatian village. But only a few students come to class in the pigsty converted to school.

The efforts of a community to build a bridge which would allow their children to go school during the rainy season.

Directed by Gian Vittorio Baldi

Although he is something of a layabout, and is still living with his mother, her death comes as something of a shock to Louis Pelletier (Gilbert Sicotte). Still, he has hopes of some sort of legacy and believes that his relatives will help him find a job. All his hopes are dashed when, before the funeral, his three aunts come to Quebec City to settle their sister's estate. As grasping and efficient a crew as ever strode a parlor, by the time they leave, the estate has been cleaned to the bones, as if by vultures.

The manager of a whorehouse is in love with a young woman who works as a maid, there. He believes that his feelings are reciprocated, but the woman chooses instead to marry a rich man who has also been courting her. Punctuating the story of this romance are a magician's show, and an earthquake.

Bad luck and bad judgment follow two generations of men in this Rumanian tragedy, set in the World War II era. Ion (Dan Nutu) seeks to find out why many years ago his father was falsely accused of being a communist, an accusation which led to his execution. He discovers that his father's mistress, now married to a wealthy man, made the accusation for money, as she was deathly afraid of poverty. Ion's own girlfriend seems to be similarly concerned about issues of livelihood, and abandons him for a richer suitor. Frustrated and angry, he burns down these couple's houses and takes up with some anti-communist arms smugglers.