Alfredo S. Lim: The Untold Story

A retired farmer and widower in his 70s, Alvin Straight learns one day that his distant brother Lyle has suffered a stroke and may not recover. Alvin is determined to make things right with Lyle while he still can, but his brother lives in Wisconsin, while Alvin is stuck in Iowa with no car and no driver's license. Then he hits on the idea of making the trip on his old lawnmower, thus beginning a picturesque and at times deeply spiritual odyssey.

The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.

The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.

In a decades-spanning biopic, brilliant mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. makes history in his field as schizophrenia sets in.

The young Bavarian princess Elisabeth, who all call Sissi, goes with her mother and older sister Néné to Austria where Néné will be wed to an emperor named Franz Joseph, Yet unexpectedly Franz runs into Sissi while out fishing and they fall in love.

Sissi is now the empress of Austria and attempts to learn etiquette. While she is busy being empress she also has to deal with her difficult new mother-in-law, while the arch-duchess Sophie is trying to tell the emperor how to rule and also Sissi how to be a mother.

After a wonderful time in Hungary Sissi falls extremely ill and must retreat to a Mediterranean climate to rest. The young empress’ mother takes her from Austria to recover in Madeira.

A twice-divorced mother of three who sees an injustice, takes on the bad guy and wins -- with a little help from her push-up bra. Erin goes to work for an attorney and comes across medical records describing illnesses clustered in one nearby town. She starts investigating and soon exposes a monumental cover-up.

A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.

The true story of Henry Hill, a half-Irish, half-Sicilian Brooklyn kid who is adopted by neighbourhood gangsters at an early age and climbs the ranks of a Mafia family under the guidance of Jimmy Conway.

On the 20th anniversary of Federico Fellini's death, Ettore Scola, a devoted admirer of the incomparable maestro, commemorates the lesser-known aspects of his personality, employing interviews, photographs, behind-the-scenes footage as well as his drawings and film clips.

An account of the days of First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

Neerja is a portrayal on the life of the courageous Neerja Bhanot, who sacrificed her life while protecting the lives of 359 passengers on the Pan Am flight 73 in 1986. The flight was hijacked by a terrorist organization.

The title “Kamera Obskura” is a Filipino spelling of the latin “Camera Obscura” which simply means “dark room”. The film’s concept adheres to formalist cinema, where the filmmaker’s thesis is to make a semblance of a vintage film seemingly produced sometime in the late 1920s to early 1930s in the Philippines. The thesis is to conjure up a film from a period that did not really exist in Philippine cinema’s historical cultural heritage as we know it, such as a pseudo-expressionist / experimental Filipino cinema of the silent film era. It is a film within a film. The narrative plays with the idea of a retro-futurist world where a prisoner locked away in a dark chamber for over two decades only sees the reality of the world outside through the small hole in his cell, which projects an image of the city on his wall, the phenomenon of the “camera obscura”.

Every night, Nana Lusing lies on her bed sleepless because she sees a dark figure looming in her room. Who is this shadow? Is this the devil? Her late husband? A manifestation of her anxieties? Or simply a figment of her imagination?

Intoy has had the hots for Doray since they were kids in Kalye Marino, Cavite City, formerly the American Naval Base in Sangley Point. Both marginalized as the long-lasting effect of American abandonment of the said base, Intoy has become Kalye Marino’s best “tahong” caretaker-with-no-angst-about-poverty, while Doray a cheap prostitute-with-no-guilt, tending to her siblings’ needs. Intoy strives to have his own cages of “tahong” so he can have Doray, not for just a night of quickie sex, but forever. But what will he do to when she offers to drop by his hovel-on-stilts to quench his passion, but before it happens Nature has chosen to play a joke on his tahong cage? Will it be goodbye to his tahong business or to his damsel-in-distress and ultimately to Kalye Marino? From Eros S. Atalia’s 2001 Palanca Grand Prize-winning Short Story, Intoy Syokoy ng Kalye Marino is a love tale minus the obligatory romantic sentiments.

Guam, U.S.A. Thursday, November 24, Thanksgiving Day. Alex, a local newspaper photographer, gets into a “green card marriage” with her good friend James, a Guam-born Filipino. Miriam, a former member of the Philippine press and now an established Guam journalist, longs to repair a damaged relationship with her American husband. Ella, a hotel housekeeper for almost 20 years, finds means of sending her 88-year old mother to the Philippines with the uncertainty of coming back. As the island of Guam celebrates this classic American holiday when people count their blessings and give thanks, the lives of the three Filipina immigrants intersect and find themselves at a tug-o-war of sacrifice and significance where they must find their home or must they find it somewhere else.

Circus hijinks surround the barangay of Sta. Maria in the midst of an international murder sensation. Swanie, Sta. Maria’s barangay chair and a distant relative of the killer, tries to gain political points by staging a wake for the criminal-turned-celebrity. Meanwhile in faraway Manila, Joanna, Swanie’s runaway son, navigates his way through labyrinthine bureaucracy, to give a neighbor a proper burial. With these two unrelated deaths, estranged mother and son each bury the dead long shelved in their hearts. Amidst these unspoken family burials, the neighborhoods’ penchant for funeral fiestas, gossip and secrets, bizarre social events and the sheer mix of scandal and inebriation complete the picture of dying the Pinoy way.

Like the play from which it derived, the film tells of the early struggles of composer Edvard Grieg and his attempts to develop an authentic Norwegian national music. It stars Toralv Maurstad as Grieg and features an international cast including Florence Henderson, Christina Schollin, Robert Morley, Harry Secombe, Oskar Homolka, Edward G. Robinson and Frank Porretta (as Rikard Nordraak). Filmed in Super Panavision 70 by Davis Boulton and presented in single-camera Cinerama in some countries, it was an attempt to capitalise on the success of The Sound of Music.

Opon + Pasil + Tres + Echavez + Naval + Ormoc + Valencia. It’s Saturday and it’s black.