A young girl leaves her Nigerian village to attend a ballet school in England. Fascinated by Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, she dreams of performing as lead ballerina Princess Odette, but the girls in her close-minded ballet school mock her ideas of a 'black swan'.
Gisela involuntarily ends up studying in the cosmopolitan city of Chemnitz. There she meets her friends Jana, Fred and Meryam, with whom she spends her nights out, fights with Nazis, eventually founds the band Superbusen and, through music, hopes to find answers to all the problems life throws at her.
Eighteen-year-old Shira is the youngest daughter of the Mendelman family. She is about to be married off to a promising young man of the same age and background. It is a dream come true, and Shira feels prepared and excited. On Purim, her twenty-eight-year-old sister, Esther, dies while giving birth to her first child, Mordechay. The pain and grief that overwhelm the family postpone Shira's promised match. Everything changes when a match is proposed to Yochay-Esther's late husband-to a widow from Belgium. Yochay feels it's too early, although he realizes that sooner or later he must seriously consider getting married again. When the girls' mother finds out that Yochay may marry the widow and move to Belgium with her only grandchild, she proposes a match between Shira and the widower. Shira will have to choose between her heart's wish and her family duty. She will find out that the void which she must choose exists only within her heart.
A young woman leaves a state orphanage to find her mother in this interesting examination of how the overt repression of women in the older pattern of village life has been replaced by the more subtle exploitation inherent in the apparently freer existence of young girls in the contemporary city.
An ode to the Hollywood classics of the 1940's. A film noir that tells the story of a reclusive actress, Jane Prescott, in the midst of a psychological breakdown.
Hans and Anna – together they make the Hannas: A hefty couple who love to cook. They meet sisters Kim and Nicola, both anorexic and excitingly different. Opposites attract, however, and anything goes, so the Hannas each wind up having an affair without the other’s knowledge. But Kim and Nicola have a secret of their own in store.
In order to save the man she loves from jail, Mathilde takes his place by helping his break-out. While she exclusively relies on him to survive in this prison setting, Mathilde has not heard from him since her imprisonment. Isolated, with her son as her only support, she is now identified by the inmate number 383205-B. Will Mathilde become a convict like any other one?
Angélica has spent her whole life escaping from her mixed racial identity, but a family crisis forces her to return to Puerto Rico and rethink her life.
Romania, 1968. Two very different brothers. Mihai is a secret police informant, Emil is a dedicated dissident. When they have the opportunity to have their ailing father’s eyes operated on in East Germany, the three set out on a moving odyssey.
Two women go on a shared quest to find resolution and closure.
Anna, an artist, is obsessed with the invasion of alien doubles bent on total destruction. Her schizophrenia is reflected in the juxtapositions of long movie camera takes with violently edited montages: private with public spaces; black & white with colour, still photographs with video, earsplitting sounds with disruptive camera angles. Anna uses her body like a map; after a devastating quarrel with her lover, she paints red stitches on herself. Watching their scenes together, we realize how seldom, if ever before, the details of sexual intimacy have been shown in film from the point of view from a woman. Export privileges rupture over unity and never settles for one-dimensional solutions
On his return from America, András simply cannot find his place: he has lost his wife, friends and job, and he cannot even find his way back to his former great love. Eventually, as a surrogate father, he takes in a wild young girl (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi) and a particularly strong bond is formed between these two rootless people. Márta Mészáros’s remarkable movie starring Jan Nowicki and Anna Karina is about displacement, loneliness and attachment.
In Torino, a bittersweet crowd is bringing its own belongings to a pawn shop, waiting for a ransom or the final auction. Between the thousands of faces that tell the human inventory of the crisis, three stories intertwine unconsciously in the thin line of moral debt. Sandra, a young trans, in order to escape her past sells her fur coat. Her gaze will cross Stefano’s, a novice who just started working at the bank, and who drags her towards a tender obsession. Michele, a retired porter, asks for a loan to a family member, who will turn out to be fatally the wrong person to ask a favour from.
Elle Marja, 14, is a reindeer-breeding Sami girl. Exposed to the racism of the 1930s and phrenological examinations at her boarding school, she starts dreaming of another life. To achieve this other life she has to become someone else and break all ties with her family and culture.
Marijana's life revolves around her family, whether she likes it or not. They live on top of one another in a tiny apartment, driving one another crazy. Then her controlling father has a stroke and is left completely bedridden, and Marijana takes his place as head of the clan. Soon, she is working two jobs to keep everything afloat, while her mother and disabled brother do their best to scupper the ship. Driven to the edge, Marijana finds comfort in seedy sex with random strangers; and this taste of freedom leaves her wanting more. But now that she has finally found freedom, what's she meant to do with it?
A young woman marries a wealthy man she isn't in love with, but finds romance instead with the couples' painter friend.
Joy can't let go of her ex, but doesn't seem to be able to fall for the new guy. In the meantime she keeps having casual sex with strangers.
A man's daughter disappears after falling in love with the son of a right wing, white-supremacist terrorist organization.
A rebellious teenager forced to repeat her last year of high school is caught between adolescence and adulthood - and between two very different male admirers.
When his grandfather's drive-in cinema and home in the outback town of Wyndham is threatened with demolition, a twelve-year-old Aboriginal boy must journey through Australia's bush country — equipped only with ancient survival skills — to stop the city developers.