Soldier's tale

The war is over. Once a young sculptor, and now a soldier, he returned home. Married, there were children. In search of work, he was hired to make grave monuments. Time passed... At one time, visiting a cemetery with friends, he saw with different eyes all his work done over the years...

13 year old Lili fights to protect her dog Hagen, and is devastated when her father sets Hagen free on the streets. Still innocently believing love can conquer any difficulty, Lili sets out to save her dog. Failing in his desperate efforts to find his beloved owner, Hagen joins a canine revolt leading a revolution against their human abusers.

The way home for Aleksandr Rekhviashvili is not charted in the conventional sense. It takes the viewer along some peculiar roads and across a unique landscape: Georgian history and legend, politics and social stratification, religion and ethics. Allusive, stylized and allegorical from beginning to end, his long-banned The Way Home is in part a tribute to Rekhviashvili’s favorite director, Pasolini, especially to The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966). Together with the short film Nutsa (1971) and the widely acclaimed Georgian Chronicle of the 19th Century (1979; SFIFF 1983), The Way Home closes a triptych of films that represent Rekhviashvili’s poetic contemplation of Georgia’s past. It makes extensive use of poems by Bella Akhmadulina (the major female poet of the cultural ‘thaw’ of the ’50s and ’60s and a Georgian by descent), and of sets by Amir Kakabadze. Like other films in the trilogy, The Way Home is stunningly photographed in black-and-white.--Oxymoron

In this dreamlike film, a nameless father and his son, Aleksei, live together in an apartment in St. Petersburg. Aleksei's mother has died and consequently the two have a very close relationship. When Aleksei acquires a girlfriend, she refuses to take a back seat to his bond with his dad, and breaks up with him. Aleksei is also experiencing nightmares, dreading separation from his father to be a part of the military as his father was.

This film ballad is dedicated to those who never returned home from WW2. A group of retreating Soviet soldiers, crossing a lunar terrain in a desperate attempt to escape death, is attacked by a German fighter plane that appears like a bolt from the blue. One by one they are killed. Then suddenly, in an unlikely denouement bordering on the mystical, the attacker is shot down with a simple rifle. For ideological reasons that defy understanding this film, one of Viktor Hres’ earliest works, was shelved in 1967 by Soviet censors. In 2010, it was restored by the Debut Studio of the Oleksander Dovzhenko Film Studio with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ukraine.

Directed by Zaza Khalvashi.

The short film (conveyed in a parable-like story structure) follows a man devoted to himself and the blessings of his attributed god. He struggles to survive a primitive life and is forced to take action to ensure his own prosperity.

Two monks on a mission choose very different paths

A poetized chronicle of the events taking place in one of the Georgian villages in the late 19th century, when, to save a forest, the innumerous intelligentsia could rally the people and oppose the industrialists…

Banned in the Soviet Union for its "negative" content and never released, Kalatozov was forced to retreat from filmmaking for seven years because of this film. The film sets out to illustrate the old adage, "For want of a nail, the battle was lost," showing how the inferior quality of something so trivial as a nail in a soldier's boot leads inexorably to the capture of an armored train. Kalatozov had intended to demonstrate the crucial and universal importance of efficiency in Soviet industry, but the government decided that his fable gave a negative impression of the Red Army's capabilities.

A full-blooded, interesting life has long eluded the house where a mother, father, son and daughter live. Trivial household matters, conversation at dinner about duty — that's all that connects them. The situation changes when it becomes known that the family inherited the village house, and that it will probably be necessary to enter into a struggle with the joint heirs. From the bottom of chests, old albums and documents confirming the priority of the family are extracted, and intrigues begin ...

Garib in the Land of Jinn

Lithuania, 1977. Memories of childhood, adolescence, and first love in a small provincial town, shown through complexity of human relations at this periodical film.

A fatally ill mother with only two months to live creates a list of things she wants to do before she dies without telling her family of her illness.

Jarhead is a film about a US Marine Anthony Swofford’s experience in the Gulf War. After putting up with an arduous boot camp, Swofford and his unit are sent to the Persian Gulf where they are eager to fight, but are forced to stay back from the action. Swofford struggles with the possibility of his girlfriend cheating on him, and as his mental state deteriorates, his desire to kill increases.

Eyal, an Israeli Mossad agent, is given the mission to track down and kill the very old Alfred Himmelman, an ex-Nazi officer, who might still be alive. Pretending to be a tourist guide, he befriends his grandson Axel, in Israel to visit his sister Pia. The two men set out on a tour of the country, during which Axel challenges Eyal's values.

Matt, a young glaciologist, soars across the vast, silent, icebound immensities of the South Pole as he recalls his love affair with Lisa. They meet at a mobbed rock concert in a vast music hall - London's Brixton Academy. They are in bed at night's end. Together, over a period of several months, they pursue a mutual sexual passion whose inevitable stages unfold in counterpoint to nine live-concert songs.

At the height of the Vietnam war, Captain Benjamin Willard is sent on a dangerous mission that, officially, "does not exist, nor will it ever exist." His goal is to locate - and eliminate - a mysterious Green Beret Colonel named Walter Kurtz, who has been leading his personal army on illegal guerrilla missions into enemy territory.

Joel Barish, heartbroken that his girlfriend underwent a procedure to erase him from her memory, decides to do the same. However, as he watches his memories of her fade away, he realises that he still loves her, and may be too late to correct his mistake.

A fatalistic car crash in Mexico city sets off a chain of events in the lives of three people: a supermodel, a young man wanting to run off with his sister-in-law, and a homeless man. Their lives are catapulted into unforeseen situations instigated by the seemingly inconsequential destiny of a dog.