A Bit o' Heaven

One of the most acclaimed movies to come out of China last year, Feng Shui harnesses the talents of underrated actress Yan Bingyan to deliver this family drama about a woman desperate to ascend to the middle class and willing to pay any price. Powerful and emotionally tense, this is a portrait of the hidden side of the great Chinese success story.

Gülcan and her husband İbrahim dream of a happy future together in their village. However, they are subjected to the cruelty of the Agha, the local landowner who lords over the entire village. İbrahim is fed up and moves to Germany to find work. On the other hand, Gülcan has to deal with Agha's evils alone.

In this Sufi tale, Nadia, a young Moroccan emigre returns from Paris to Fez to visit her dying father. At his funeral, she is overcome by the voice of Karina chanting the Koran. A powerful friendship develops between the two women as they decide to turn the father's palace into a shelter for Muslim women.

Pepe has left the psychiatric hospital after serving time for stealing to work. Only the solidarity of Antonio, a disabled activist, allows him to build a fragile life on which to project his weak hopes. Nevertheless, his need to fit in a senseless world becomes a desperate chore. The horizon of his long-awaited “normality" proves unreachable. The relationship with Antonio interpellates his view of life, inviting him to recognize himself as an anomaly and invent a new madness in which to live.

Jess Bhamra, the daughter of a strict Indian couple in London, is not permitted to play organized soccer, even though she is 18. When Jess is playing for fun one day, her impressive skills are seen by Jules Paxton, who then convinces Jess to play for her semi-pro team. Jess uses elaborate excuses to hide her matches from her family while also dealing with her romantic feelings for her coach, Joe.

Lili, a pouty and voluptuous 14-year-old, is caravan camping with her family in Biarritz. She's self-aware and holds her own in a café conversation with a concert pianist she meets, but she has a wild streak and she's testing her powers over men, finding that she doesn't always control her moods or actions, and she's impatient with being a virgin. She sets off with her brother to a disco, latching onto an aging playboy who is himself hot and cold to her. She is ambivalent about losing her virginity that night, willing the next, and determined by the third.

As the romantic monsoon rains loom, the extended Verma family reunites from around the globe for a last-minute arranged marriage in New Delhi. This film traces five intersecting stories, each navigating different aspects of love as they cross boundaries of class, continent and morality.

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

An emotionally scarred highway drifter shoots a sadistic trick who rapes her, and ultimately becomes America's first female serial killer.

Eight very different couples deal with their love lives in various loosely interrelated tales all set during a frantic month before Christmas in London.

In a barren, arranged marriage to an amateur swami who seeks enlightenment through celibacy, Radha's life takes an irresistible turn when her beautiful young sister-in-law seeks to free herself from the confines of her own loveless marriage.

Terry O'Farrell pulls off several rescues in the course of the plot, whose locale is a steel mill, and Ann McGreagor uses her common sense to expose the villain's trickery and save the day for her sweetheart.

Over the course of a week-long beachside getaway, Amy, having recently undergone dramatic weight loss, finds herself wrestling between loyalty to her best friend Kim and her attraction to Kim's new boyfriend.

Two sisters from Indiana, the wide-eyed and innocent Mae Thorpe, and her more streetwise sister June, move into the Rolf House for Homeless Girls in New York. With June's help, Mae obtains a job as a stenographer for the scientist Joseph von Schraeder, while June gets work as a telegraph operator at Western Union.

A fatally ill mother with only two months to live creates a list of things she wants to do before she dies without telling her family of her illness.

Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies.

Cecilie and Joachim are about to get married when a freak car accident leaves Joachim disabled, throwing their lives into a spin. The driver of the other car, Marie, and her family don’t get off lightly, either. Her husband Niels works in the hospital where he meets Cecilie and falls madly in love with her.

Several lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginner's course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives. The film, which unspools the connections and family drama shared between the students, complies with several aesthetic principles of Dogme 95 movement.

A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.

A solitary nurse bonds with a badly burned patient who survived an accident on an oil rig.