The human being is a sick animal; its natural impulses and drive for self-development have been imprisoned by reason and culture. Lou and Martin, two adolescents living on an island, attempt to escape the suffocation of overprotective parents. Will they succeed in building trust in the midst of forces that drive them apart?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his wife Anna travel to Europe for their honeymoon and end up staying in a health resort in Switzerland, only to return to Russia after four years. Fyedya can’t shake his roulette habit and keeps losing their money. His wife accepts this fate since he keeps assuring her that it’s all for inspiration and soon he shall write his to-be masterpiece, 'The Idiot'.
Making Waves is the story of Cella (Jacqueline Blom) and her 71-year-old mother Johanna (Kitty Courbois). Life smiles upon Cella. Happily divorced, having two children and a successful job as a presenter at a local station, for which she interviews people every morning who take the ferry across the IJ river. In her enthusiasm, Cella resembles her mother, once a celebrated violinist, but the similarity also causes friction between the two women. Just when Cella meets a new love, her father's sudden death puts her life on a different track. Johanna increasingly muddles past and present and brings back fragments of memories that point to a painful secret she carries on her back. Cella tries to dig up the truth.
Iris, a 28-year-old studentin a big city, recently left by her boyfriend and too poor to pay her rent, begins to work for a strange old man. He wants Iris to precisely describe the trivial belongings of a dead woman, packed in white boxes, to keep the memory of the woman alive. Iris is disgusted and fascinated at the same time; reflecting on an invisible person's traces, she slowly becomes aware of her own wounds.
Five shorts spanning a century on lives impacted by the Panama Canal. Men, women and children who are influenced by the existence of the "Canal", the event that changed the history of not only a country but the world.
"Living the Dream" is a docudrama about two friends who after being bullied as children become corrupt when growing up because they have been conditioned to believe that they need to achieve materialistic success to be 'accepted' and liked by others, in a society where the end justifies the means.
Raymond Joshua, a young black performance poet, is arrested and imprisoned for a petty marijuana charge in a Washington, D.C. jail. Although the confining prison walls do little to shield him from danger, it is within those walls that Raymond establishes his identity, strength, and voice and meets a prison gang leader and a prison writing teacher, Lauren Bell. Bell inspires Raymond to use the power of creative expression to free himself from the struggles and demise of the Black male as another victim of the judicial system.
Pasqualino Frafuso, known in Naples as "Pasqualino Seven Beauties" is a petty thief who lives off of the profits of his seven sisters while claiming to protect their honor at any cost, Pasqualino is arrested for murder and later sent to fight in the army after committing sexual assault. The Germans capture him and he gets sent to a concentration camp where he plots to make his escape by seducing a German officer.
A romance develops between a happily married middle-aged British politician and an adventurous young aviatrix.
When an aging matriarch starts showing signs of dementia, her dysfunctional family in Istanbul must navigate a minefield of unresolved issues to care for her.
Set in Baroque France, a scheming widow and her lover make a bet regarding the corruption of a recently married woman. The lover, Valmont, bets that he can seduce her, even though she is an honorable woman. If he wins, he can have his lover to do as he will. However, in the process of seducing the married woman, Valmont falls in love.
A lonely young aristocrat in turn-of the century England struggles to meet the approval of his over-bearing, class-conscious father while trying to please the selfish woman he loves.
When Syd, a young editor at an influential art magazine, becomes involved with her neighbor, a drug-addicted lesbian photographer, both seek to exploit each other for their respective careers while slowly falling in love with each other.
This ensemble drama details the friendships that grow between survivors of the 1997 Umbria earthquake. The townsfolk—adults, children and foreigners alike—deal with various issues as they try to resume normal lives in a homeless situation.
Sayid wants to keep his status as a father and the family patriarch in a new linguistic and cultural setting, despite his sons progress in assimilating into the danish language culture.
In a small town in California's San Joaquin Valley, 14-year-old Homer Macauley is determined to be the best and fastest bicycle telegraph messenger anyone has ever seen. His older brother has gone to war, leaving Homer to look after his widowed mother, his older sister and his 4-year-old brother, Ulysses. And so it is that as spring turns to summer, 1942, Homer Macauley delivers messages of love, hope, pain... and death... to the good people of Ithaca. And Homer Macauley will grapple with one message that will change him forever - from a boy into a man. Based on Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Saroyan's 1943 novel, The Human Comedy, ITHACA is the quintessential wartime tale of the Home Front. It is a coming-of-age story about the exuberance of youth, the sweetness of life, the sting of death and the modesty and sheer goodness that lives in each and every one of us.
Using almost no dialogue, the film follows a number of residents (both human and animal) of a small rural community in Hungary – an old man with hiccups, a shepherdess and her sheep, an old woman who may or may not be up to no good, some folk-singers at a wedding, etc. While most of the film is a series of vignettes, there is a sinister and often barely perceptible subplot involving murder.
Four overweight friends from the Israeli city of Ramle are fed up of dieting and the dieting club they belong to. When Herzl (155 kilos), the main protagonist, loses his job as a cook and starts working as a dishwasher in a Japanese restaurant in Ramle he discovers the world of Sumo where large people such as himself are honored and appreciated. Through Kitano (60 kilos), the restaurant owner, a former Sumo coach in Japan (who is supposedly hiding from the Yakuza in Israel), he falls in love with a sport involving "two fatsos in diapers and girly hairdos". Herzl wants Kitano to be their coach but Kitano is reluctant - they first have to earn their spurs. "A MATTER OF SIZE" is a comedy about a ‘coming out’ of a different kind - overweight people learning to accept themselves.
After ten years, Sheldon returns from New York City to Paris, Georgia. His mother Evelyn, a laundress who is stubborn, ornery, opinionated, mean-spirited, insulting, and inflexible, has sent a ten-year-old boy who says he's Sheldon's son up to see Sheldon. Sheldon comes home to straighten things out. Old arguments flare up - between mother and son and between brothers. Sheldon wants no part of fatherhood or family. Then, someone else from New York shows up at Evelyn's door, bringing a new set of challenges. Will this family ever stop airing its dirty laundry? And what of Sheldon: where is his pride? Can he, in the words of James Baldwin, go where his blood beats and live the life he has?
A tale about Vietnamese refugees sent to an orientation camp on the Camp Pendleton Marine Base in California, 'Green Dragon' focuses on a young boy and his sister. Set in 1975, the film chronicles the stories told to the two children by other refugees in the camp and of Tai Tran, who dares to introduce himself to Sergeant Jim Lance. In developing a relationship with Lance, Tran is able to improve