Berlin Stories

Sonora Mexico, 1880s: Seri Indian tribe splits into two factions after a white woman comes to live in their settlement.

Margarita leaves the famous reporter Marco Matanich, joining her brother and his friends from different Balkan countries, windsurfing on an island. But the wind stops and a beach war-game begins. To prove his skills to Margarita, Marco shoots them in reportage. Quoted by leading media it fires a Balkan conflict, the friends start building national borders between their tents, while Margarita disappears in the open sea.

Three novels - three dramatic stories in the walls of the women's prison. The first story - a brand new, first went to prison inmates. The second - about a mother whose son has ceased to go to prison for visits. The third - about the experiences of women on the eve of its release.

Between fantasy and reality of her childhood, Marian runs into family, death and sexuality, all in a single day.

A sickly young woman experiences visions of her dead mother. She struggles to determine if the apparition is simply a side effect of her daily medication, or her mother actually reaching out to her from beyond the grave.

A strange yet familiar sense of place dominates Shambhavi Kaul's deceptively disorienting and visually entrancing Mount Song. As a wild, foreboding gust courses through the night, a subdued elegance is brought forth from past cinema spectacles, whose generic albeit highly suggestive set constructions remain lodged in our imaginary.

The film is set in 1905, in a time of feverish revolutionary underground activity in Poland partitioned between three neighbours. All the characters are committed anarchists. The bomb maker puts an invention together to place it at the disposal of young inexperienced terrorists fighting against Tsarist oppression. The story follows the passing of this bomb from anarchist to anarchist as several attempts are made on the life of Tsarist governor general, until, at the end, it is effectively and harmlessly defused by a bomb expert. The presence of the bomb has a destroying effect on all of the Polish revolutionaries, they either die or breakdown.

This film is made up of three segments that share no plot but have a general thematic relationship. In the first segment, Virginia and her three children are left by her shiftless husband and she is courted by an old beau who is now divorced. In the second, a divorced woman reacts to some unexpected revelations from her aged father. In the third, a childless, middle-aged social worker is swept into an affair with a young cab driver and finds herself pregnant.

Michael Carlin, a teacher, has been having an affair with a much younger fellow teacher Carolyn Warmus. When his wife is murdered, the police suspect him due to inconsistencies in his alibi, and no evidence points to anyone else.

A team of astronauts on the first mission to Mars crashes onto the surface, losing contact with Earth. With no other recourse, and help millions of miles away, the crew is forced to make desperate choices in order to stay alive. Will they be able to survive as the minutes slip away?

On the one hand, there’s the desert eating away at the land. The endless dry season, the lack of water. On the other there’s the threat of war. The village well has run dry. The livestock is dying. Trusting their instinct, most of the villagers leave and head south. Rahne, the only literate one, decides to head east with his three children and Mouna, his wife. A few sheep, some goats, and Chamelle, a dromedary, are their only riches. A tale of exodus, quest, hope and fatality.

Young computer enthusiast Liam runs a website streaming video of his every action captured on a webcam. He lives a reclusive life, temporarily staying in a friend’s apartment in Paris until waitress Alison and her British husband, James, move in.

Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to chose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.

When a young boy makes a wish at a carnival machine to be big—he wakes up the following morning to find that it has been granted and his body has grown older overnight. But he is still the same 13-year-old boy inside. Now he must learn how to cope with the unfamiliar world of grown-ups including getting a job and having his first romantic encounter with a woman.

A serial in six episodes: 1) La seconde Marquise de Sombreuse; 2) Le Chateau maudit; 3) Folle; 4) L'Exilee; 5) La Danseuse inconnue; 6) Hallucination et realite. Set in modern day France in a chateau thought to be haunted since the Revolution, a Marquis and his daughter Irene (granddaughter of Marie Antoinette's lady companion) are preyed upon by Latin seductress, Lola, and her brother, Pedro. (Summary by Tami Williams, from the 2018 Il Cinema Ritrovato film program)

"I've often wondered what makes beauty" - So says Monique Miller who personifies in this short documentary universal woman, anxious to please since childhood, vulnerable, according to the hours, to the eyes of others, to torture from the wait, to the obsession of the wrinkles of tomorrow.

When Allie's Dad can't afford to pay for her to attend Juilliard Summer School, she decides to raise the money by selling her most precious asset.

Hanna, 32, is on her way home one late evening when she runs in to an acquaintance, Andreas, 20, who invites her to a party close by. The party consists of five twenty year old boys. At first, Hanna feels uncomfortable, but she’s adjusting. Soon she feels like she’s one of them.

When President Abdoulaye Wade wanted to run for office yet again in 2011, a resistance movement formed on the streets. Shortly afterwards, a group of school friends, including rappers Thiat and Kilifeu, set up "Y'en a marre" ("We Are Fed Up"), with filmmaker Rama Thiaw soon coming on board to start documenting events – meetings, campaigns, arrests, concerts, states of exhaustion, trips – from an "insider" perspective. Over several years, a stirring portrait emerged of a youth protest movement to whom independent observers were not the only ones to ascribe the role of "kingmaker" in the last elections. Rama Thiaw shows the rappers and their environment with an intimacy whose cinematographic finesse provides space and context for the thorny conflicts between music and politics, street and state.

Across the heartland of America, farmers and landowners are fighting to protect their land, their water, and their livelihood in what has become the most controversial environmental battle in the U.S. today: The Keystone XL Pipeline. Routed from Hardisty, Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast, this tar sands pipeline is set to cross the country's largest freshwater resource, the Ogallala Aquifer, and the fragile Sandhills of Nebraska, posing devastating consequences to human health, livestock, and agriculture.