Desire for Beauty

When actress Sarah Marshall dumps aspiring musician Peter Bretter for rock star Aldous Snow, Peter's world comes crashing down. His best friend Brian suggests that Peter should get away from everything and to fly off to Hawaii to escape all his problems. After arriving in Hawaii and meeting the beautiful receptionist Rachel Jansen, Peter is shocked to see not only Aldous in Hawaii, but also Sarah.

By approaching the process of sexual reassignment, the work mixes data and experiences, focusing on family relationships and the nuances of the feminine.

Crownless

NUMÉRO 12

Can 3 young girls grow closely through the bittersweet journey of womanhood?

A boy in a gang of thieves gets fascinated by a figureskater as he hides from the cops.

In the age of surgically enhanced beauty and reality television, how do we perceive body image? MADE OVER IN AMERICA combines the style of reality television with experimental film to weave together the voices of producers and consumers, surgeons and their patients, clinical psychologists, media theorists, and youth who are coming of age in a culture where bodies seem to be customizable. Together they form a picture of how the desire for a better self operates within consumer culture and how this desire is fed by media, the makeover industry and culture at large.

Everyone has a routine. Ivy and Mia have theirs. In a small apartment, two roommates share an unusual way of approaching dating, until Mia grows tired of it and confronts Ivy, who refuses to listen. What follows reveals that beauty does not lie in the person themselves, but in the gaze we place on them.

Maurizio is a young university student living in Zürich, with a passion for diseases. Unlike many others, he can see an inherent beauty in them. Afterall, what difference can exist between a flower and an infection, if they are both a gift of nature?

Blue Cocoon follows the story of Cynthia, a woman who lives alone, isolated from the outside world. Her day-to-day routine involves listening to an old grammar phone and the catching and killing of butterflies in vicious traps that hang from her window. One day, this routine is disrupted as a curious young girl enters her garden unexpectedly. Cynthia is besotted by the girls’ grace, youth and beauty and in her deranged, intoxicated state, decides to kidnap her using the chloroform that she uses on her butterflies, and on herself recreationally.

The life of Dr Han has become a permanent quest for perfection. From the livestreamed operating theatre to art fairs via fashion shows, the famous Chinese plastic surgeon has only one aim: beauty. Through the implacable portrait of this character, the film questions beauty as a simultaneously essential yet vain element of society in the era of selfies.

A proof by example of the existence of beauty within Seattle.

Featuring never-before-seen film footage of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, The Architecture of Doom captures the inner workings of the Third Reich and illuminates the Nazi aesthetic in art, architecture and popular culture. From Nazi party rallies to the final days inside Hitler's bunker, this sensational film shows how Adolf Hitler rose from being a failed artist to creating a world of ponderous kitsch and horrifying terror. Hitler worshipped ancient Rome and Greece, and dreamed of a new Golden Age of classical art and monumental architecture, populated by beautiful, patriotic Aryans. Degenerated artists and inferior races had no place in his lurid fantasy. As this riveting film shows, the Nazis went from banning the art of modernists like Picasso to forced euthanasia of the retarded and sick, and finally to the persecution of homosexuals and the extermination of the Jews.

Soapy Gibson (Edward Ellis) and his wife Annie (Marjorie Rambeau) run a lonely hearts club in a small town. Even during the Depression years these were often "clip joints" - places where people with money but no mate got taken by someone offering the promise of companionship. However, Soapy and Annie are strictly on the level - and they have more than one reason to want to stay on the level. You see Soapy escaped from the law years ago, had some plastic surgery and changed his name, and has been living on the lam with his wife ever since.

Karen, a young woman obsessed with the most influential influencer of the moment, Kamilah Kay, decides to undergo surgery to look like her. Seeing how well the new Karen is received on social media, she begins to spend her savings on more operations. The more she looks like Kamilah and less like herself, the more her life begins to improve, until one day, something horrible shakes up her new and idyllic life.

A young woman gets ready for a midnight party while remembering the past and pondering her life.

Endlessly struggling to feel seen, David becomes infatuated with a mysterious company's promise to transform people's lives by permanently changing the color of their eyes. After traveling to India to get the controversial procedure, he begins to question if this artificial beauty will give him the fulfillment he truly seeks.

Two Canadian women of Asian descent are contemplating eyelid surgery. Maria and Sharon, of Philippino and Korean heritage respectively, believe their looks–specifically their eyes–get in the way of how people see them. Layering their stories with pop culture references to beauty icons and supermodels, filmmaker Ann Shin looks at the pain that lies deep behind the desire for plastic surgery.

In a world full of stupidity and fear, an unnaturally beautiful boy named Armin is born. Soon enough, Armin's magical nature begins to affect everything and everyone around him, leading to unexpected and dire consequences.

A brilliant plastic surgeon creates a synthetic skin that withstands any kind of damage. His guinea pig: a mysterious and volatile woman who holds the key to his obsession.