When The Night Falls

The folks who populate the rundown hotel in this story have all come there from someplace which offered a modicum of hope. Gloria, who runs the place, earns most of her money as a stripper. She lives there with her two daughters and a son with an untreated brain tumor. Charlie, who is forever in and out of jail, is Gloria's sometime lover. A recent check-in is there hoping she can work up the courage to commit suicide, since her rich doctor husband ran off and left her. Another resident is Tim, who keeps company with his dog and his booze in equal measure. A schoolteacher comes by from time to time, hoping to do these people some good, but in choosing this lot to work with, she proves to be just as much of a loser as the rest of them.

Marion, 14 years old, spends her holidays in Normandy. She meets a man. They see each other again in Paris. Marion makes love, for the first time, with him.

This adaptation of Geothe's The Sorrows of Young Werther offers a chilly and remote view of love and its passions. The setting is changed to Spain, and Werther (Eusebio Poncela) has taken a job tutoring the son of an estranged husband and wife. The boy's mother is a surgeon and therefore a rather uncommon woman for her society. She and Werther gradually become romantically involved, and his feelings for her begin to run much deeper than is apparent on the surface.

About the Swedish author Agnes Von Krusenstjerna during the period of her marriage to David Sprengel. In the hallucinatory opening sequence she is brought in a straitjacket by her husband and two psychiatric nurses through the Venice Carnival nocturnal antics to a mental hospital in the city. With her is a manuscript of her autobiography, which she calls "her child". The book is Agnes showdown with her family, and in flashbacks presented, Agnes progress from the author of innocent girls' books to serious and self-consuming novelist.

This poignant human drama is phrased as a "small sonata" in three movements -- a novel approach by director and writer Micheline Lactôt to tell the story of two teenage girls. In the first movement, Chantal (Pascale Bussieres) rides the same bus every day and slowly develops an infatuation with the bus driver. Their interactions are expressed through gestures and glances and facial expressions, but not words. Just as Chantal is getting old enough, and maybe courageous enough to actually say something to the driver, fate steps in and she loses her chance. In the second movement, Louisette (Marcia Pilote) hides out on a fishing boat and is discovered by a Bulgarian fisherman who treats her with kindness and consideration and they spend a special evening together -- without being able to speak a word in the other's language. In the third movement, Chantal and Louisette become friends, and as kindred spirits they share a sense of loss and hopelessness.

In this melodrama about love in wartime, Angela (Ida-Lotta Backman) is a Finnish nurse in Lapland who begins a torrid affair with Thomas Schmidt (Mathieu Carriere), a wounded German army captain. Their love for each other is verboten in Finland, where the Germans occupy northern Lapland until the end of the war. Finland had formed a brief alliance with Germany to fight an invading Russia in the winter of 1939, but when the Russians won that battle and took more than 16,000 square miles of land away from Finland, it was too late to successfully rout the Germans from Finnish soil. So for the entire war, the Finns were fighting Germany on their own national territory -- which makes the love affair between a Finnish nurse and German soldier a very complex issue. While Angela receives different reactions from her friends, acquaintances, and relatives, she continues on with her love for the German, against odds which are greater as time goes by.

Fernanda, António and Quim are travelling by train to a provincial Portuguese industrial city. Fernanda, a teacher, agrees to replace a pregnant colleague. António is returning to the home he was forced to flee long ago, accused of setting fire to the Duarte’s factory. At the station he bumps into Mariana who is in love of him. António is not welcome and is violently attacked by a group connected to Duarte ...

Tolik didn't succeed in life, sports career did not work, his wife left him. Unsuccessful, unloved, hopeless, he has lost faith in himself. All changes when he encounters a strange stranger Anna Ilinichna, who invites him to take part in an unusual marathon in faraway America.

14-year-old Siddharta, wise beyond his age, has to deal every day with his heroin-addict mother Silvia and an absent father. One day, his four-year-old sister Domitilla accidentally pricks her finger on one of Silvia's used needles without her noticing. Seeking advice on the Internet, Siddharta is told to have her tested for hepatitis and AIDS. Thus he embarks on a odyssey of medical bureaucracy and both kind and uncaring adults.

Paris, North Station, anything comes by, even trains. One would like to stay, but they have to hurry up... Like other thousands lives crossing, Ismael, Mathilde, Sacha and Joan are going to meet here...

A writer dying of AIDS searches for a cure and human interaction in the hospitals and sex clubs of Buenos Aires.

In "Skadeskutt" we follow the couple Einar and Else Wang in a painful drama about love, happiness, sorrow and eternal damnation. About a couple's struggle trying to get pregnant and the despair of not succeeding. About psychological disorders and the society's insane judging of people with such problems. A nationwide press was impressed with "Skadeskutt". The director Edith Carlmar, one of the first female directors in Norway, was compared with Hitchcock for her work. For actor Carsten Winger, his portrayal of the character in the movie was considered a victory and a big achievement. "A sure success", "Impressive" and "A victory for Norwegian Films" are some lines from the critics. "Skadeskutt" is one of the breakthroughs within Norwegian film making.

Alejandra, a young middle class woman from Bogotá, in her daily routines, capturing both her moments alone and her interactions with the world. A subtle, contemplative and deeply intimate examination of the way one young woman navigates the daunting terrain of sex, desire and identity.

Alice is a promising young artist in Paris. Her boyfriend Franck, a boxer, has just moved in to her attic flat. Then her sister Elsa, a bored housewife, leaves her unfaithful husband Thomas and turns up unannounced to stay with Alice and Franck. Elsa disrupts their life by playing psychological games with them, but they cannot bring themselves to throw her out.

This dark and intense drama follows the slow and painful destruction of a young, passive woman as she watches her family fall apart. Maria is the shy and dutiful daughter upon whose shoulders the family traumas have fallen. In addition to a regular job she cooks, cleans, and studies. Her parents offer no assistance as her father is blind, with a tendency towards violence when drinking. His wife, the focus of his violence is terribly unhappy. After a particularly brutal beating, Maria's brothers rise up against the father and end up leaving the home. It is up to Maria to try to bring the factions together. Maria's pressures increase after she calmly stabs her boss during an attempted rape, and then copes with her mother's suicide.

A deaf man rebels against his controlling mother by dating a high-school drop-out who shares his disability.

In this wry comedy, the self-deceiving exploits of Lasse (Peter Hesse Overgaard), are shown, as he more or less innocently runs small cons on the people in his life, all the while sponging off of his girlfriend in a bohemian quarter of Copenhagen. He is a no-count, but fairly handsome young stud who imagines that he is some sort of art promoter, or is perhaps even a video artist himself.

Having gone through many personal struggles, Eli (Lil Terselius) returns to her native village and begins to work on the farm of Ingeborg Eriksdotter (Anita Bjork), eventually tending a plot that once belonged to her family. But Eli has been gone a long time, and the opaque villagers see her as an outsider—she is suspicious from the start. The year is 1625, and stories of witches conjuring up evil are a part of the daily culture. Eli unwittingly makes matters worse for herself when she is able to cure the sick with herbs, and when she begins an affair with Aslak (Bjoern Skagestad) a farmhand—clearly she must have cast a spell on him. This all adds up to a witch hunt with a ready-made "witch." Eli, in the end, is officially accused of witchcraft by a devious bailiff, while Ingeborg makes every attempt to save her, and Aslak himself does not survive the stress—hardly a good omen for the outcome of the trial.

Writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar explores Algerian history, the psychological impact of war, and post-colonial female identity in this 1979 classic of film literature. Named for (and taking its structure from) a traditional song with five distinct movements, the film combines documentary-style observation with loose narrative form to tell the story of Lila, an Algerian expatriate returning to her country 15 years after independence has been won. In comparing her life with the lives and experiences of rural Algeriennes, Lila is able to put her childhood demons to rest and discover a new history -- one written in the ongoing strength of generations of women. Like much of Djebar's writing, the film has a strong subtext dealing with resistance to patriarchy and women's desire to appropriate the means of power and expression -- one of which, of course, is the filmmaker's camera.

In the village of Kenoma, inside Brazil, the artisan Linnaeus tries to make a big and quixotic dream: to build a perpetual motion machine. His contract is opposed by Jerome, powerful local landowner, but he wins the aid of mysterious drifter who decides to stay in town after charmed with the beauty of the young Tari.