After a dreadful incident coupled with an ungovernable paroxysm of violence, a butcher will fall into a downward spiral that will burn to the ground whatever dignity still remained in him.
A fictionalised exploration of Beethoven's life in his final days working on his Ninth Symphony. It is 1824. Beethoven is racing to finish his new symphony. However, it has been years since his last success and he is plagued by deafness, loneliness and personal trauma. A copyist is urgently needed to help the composer. A fictional character is introduced in the form of a young conservatory student and aspiring composer named Anna Holtz. The mercurial Beethoven is skeptical that a woman might become involved in his masterpiece but slowly comes to trust in Anna's assistance and in the end becomes quite fond of her. By the time the piece is performed, her presence in his life is an absolute necessity. Her deep understanding of his work is such that she even corrects mistakes he has made, while her passionate personality opens a door into his private world.
A Jewish woman named Jettel Redlich flees Nazi Germany with her daughter Regina, to join her husband, Walter, on a farm in Kenya. At first, Jettel refuses to adjust to her new circumstances, bringing with her a set of china dishes and an evening gown. While Regina adapts readily to this new world, forming a strong bond with her father's cook, an African named Owuor.
Jimmy Muir comes from a typical gritty, northern town where there are only two options: working down the pit or in a factory. But Jimmy has other ideas - he dreams of becoming a professional footballer. Confronted by a bitter and unsupportive father, hard drinking friends and a lifetime of bad habits...has Jimmy the will to achieve his ultimate goal?
Bored and restless, Alice spends much of her time lusting after Jim, a local sawmill worker. When not lusting after him, Alice fills the hours with such pursuits as writing her name on a mirror with vaginal secretions and wandering the fields with her underwear around her ankles. And, in true teenaged tradition, she spends a lot of time writing in her diary.
A young man confesses his sexual past to an unseen phone sex operator. He reflects on his sexual identity as we follow him on a solitary excursion to a beach.
A kidnapped boy strikes up a friendship with his captor: an escaped convict on the run from the law, headed by an honorable U.S. Marshal.
The adventures of a group of Texas teens on their last day of school in 1976, centering on student Randall Floyd, who moves easily among stoners, jocks and geeks. Floyd is a star athlete, but he also likes smoking weed, which presents a conundrum when his football coach demands he sign a "no drugs" pledge.
Nicolas, an aimless adolescent who hasn't yet found his way in life leaves his grandparent's home, hitchhikes to a small town, and befriends, Charly an outspoken and slightly older prostitute, a red-headed beauty who appears to ply her trade in the same no-nonsense way she clears the breakfast dishes. She seems to find something endearing about Nicolas' mussed hair and dopey face, so she puts him up in the teeny trailer home that she maintains with such hilarious fussiness. As their unusual domestic arrangement evolves, each stumbles vulnerably into new emotional territory.
A mother and daughter dispute is resolved by the "Yaya sisterhood" - long time friends of the mother.
With their father away as a chaplain in the Civil War, Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy grow up with their mother in somewhat reduced circumstances. They are a close family who inevitably have their squabbles and tragedies. But the bond holds even when, later, male friends start to become a part of the household.
Dusan and Laza are traveling through Eastern Serbia to Belgrade. Terminally ill, Dusan has to find a new home for his son Laza, to whom Dusan is all he has.
Alan, a 70-something widower, struggles to accept the fact that he's not the young and healthy man that he used to be. This is sparked after his daughter suggests that he should move into an assisted living home.
Having enabled a loss that now torments her, a woman enters an adult store in search of redemption. Adapted from a short story by Christos Tsiolkas.
A single father wants to fulfil his young daughter's wish to throw a slumber party for her friends, but it turns out to be more of a challenge than he thought due to the rules of modern society.
Set against the backdrop of the execution of Ted Bundy in 1989, the story centers around a 16-year-old girl named Lauryn who makes a little extra money by taking and selling Polaroids of the people who are camped out near the prison, celebrating the execution.
Written, directed, and self-financed by Juleen Compton, The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean is the story of a clairvoyant teenage girl, Norma Jean (Sharon Henesy), taken advantage of by a boy band, fashioned after The Beatles, determined to exploit the young woman's powers as part of a hoax revival.
Compton's first feature was the autobiographical Stranded, which she wrote, directed, starred in, self-financed and distributed. Released in 1965, the film shares the cinematic experimentation and stylish, youth-centric rebellion of the French New Wave made even more radical by its progressive portrayals of female independence and sexuality, beatnik culture, and discussions of homosexuality. Stranded follows Raina, a young American woman (played by Compton), traveling through Greece with her American lover (Gary Collins), and her French, gay, best friend (Gian Pietro Calasso). Raina partakes in several love affairs rejecting marriage offers for no other reason than she likes her life the way it is. Made just prior to the arrival of second wave feminism, Compton, as writer-director, never judges her on-screen alter-ego the way similar female characters were frequently punished in other films during this era by stigmatizing female sexuality.
"REM" is an Afrikaans Sci-Fi Drama about a grief-stricken father, Dehan, who becomes obsessed with the memory of his late wife, Lena, through the use of a high-tech, dream-altering device, the REM. This unhealthy obsession leads to Dehan struggling to reconnect with his young son, Erich, who survived the car accident that caused Lena's death. Dehan must decide to face and to confront his grief, reconnecting with his son, or to become so immersed in his fantasy dream-world that he loses touch with reality, and Erich, altogether.
In 1960s San Francisco, bright and talented catholic school girl Celina Guerrera survives a difficult home life by following the rules. That is until an indiscretion creates a series of devastating consequences. As Celina faces the compounded obstacles of being young and alone, she sets out to rise above the oppression of poverty and invest in a future that sets new precedents for the time.