Barren Lives

An emotional journey of a former school teacher, who writes letters for illiterate people, and a young boy, whose mother has just died, as they search for the father he never knew.

A death row inmate turns for spiritual guidance to a local nun in the days leading up to his scheduled execution for the murders of a young couple.

Photographer Robert Kincaid wanders into the life of housewife Francesca Johnson for four days in the 1960s.

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.

In the 1930s, jazz guitarist Emmet Ray idolizes Django Reinhardt, faces gangsters and falls in love with a mute woman.

Carolyn's sorority sisters set their sights on the Sorority of the Year award and coaching challenged athletes is their ticket to the trophy. But when the queen of formals finds herself mentoring Pumpkin, a disabled athlete, their two worlds collide.

Stéphane Blanchon lives a quiet life in Switzerland with his wife, Christine, until a young American boarder named Belle, who was living with them, is found murdered. Despite Stéphane's innocence, the evidence points to him, and he learns that Belle harbored romantic feelings for him. Suspicions mount against him; even Christine thinks he is the culprit. Stéphane's sanity begins to crumble, and he lashes out in unprecedented ways.

In the vein of "The Breakfast Club", four teens head to the forest to celebrate grad night and end up with more than hang overs when they are detained by the Ranger on charges of arson.

During the Rio Grande do Sul revolution of 1923, two brothers fight on opposite sides.

Set off the West Coast of Canada in 1965, a hip new teacher with a miniskirt and lots of ideas turns a small town upside down. The soft autumn light of Galiano Island is beautifully rendered in writer/producer Peggy Thompson's The Lotus Eaters, and that's not the only elusive element that this film has captured. In revisiting its particular time and place - the Gulf Islands of the early '60s -Thompson obviously draws on her own family experiences there. For those who share Thompson's love of Gulf Islands magic, the elements she has assembled will feel as familiar as their own childhood blanket. But there are problems at the core of this story about a family's loss of innocence.

In the 1970's a young idealistic teacher arrives in a remote impoverished North East Issan village to teach in a school. He must first reform the womanizing, gambling addicted, wife beating headmaster. He helps poor families get school uniforms and books for their children. He does his best to improve everyone's lives. Soon he becomes very popular. Unfortunately he faces many obstacles from the local mafia who run an illegal logging business which he exposes. They view him as a major threat and do their best to stop him but he decides to take them on.

Trying to shake his troubled past and start a new honest life, Floyd loses his job because of that past. With nowhere to go but back home in Oklahoma he gets news that his father's been murdered and the local sheriff lets the killer off with a self-defense plea. Bent on revenge, Floyd does what he must which leads him down a dark road littered with robbing banks and loose women. Floyd's final days are anything BUT pretty!

Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged British novelist who is both appalled by and attracted to the vulgarity of American culture. When he comes to stay at the boarding house run by Charlotte Haze, he soon becomes obsessed with Lolita, the woman's teenaged daughter.

A misguided museum guard who loses his job and then tries to get it back at gunpoint is thrown into the fierce world of ratings-driven TV gone mad.

A top Hollywood talent agent finds his cushy existence threatened when he discovers that his wife is cheating on him and that his journal has been swiped by a reporter out to bring him down.

When a marriage of convenience becomes the real thing, Joe moves his pregnant French wife to a tenement building on New York's Lower East Side. The street is like a war zone with none of the nostalgic appeal that Joe remembers from tales of his immigrant grandparents arriving in the same neighborhood with a new life. This is the urban frontier filled with comic mixture of gentrifies, homeboys, dealers and local residents simply bent on staying a float

A 16-year-old girl visits her gay half-brother and ends up seducing his boyfriend, thus wreaking havoc on all of their lives.

Former Marine Louanne Johnson lands a gig teaching in a pilot program for bright but underachieving teens at a notorious inner-city high school. After having a terrible first day, she decides she must throw decorum to the wind. When Johnson returns to the classroom, she does so armed with a no-nonsense attitude informed by her military training and a fearless determination to better the lives of her students -- no matter what the cost.

In seeking her own redemption from the one man of whom she is most afraid, 10-year-old Cadi Forbes discovers a secret sin haunting her community of Welsh immigrants in 1850s Appalachia.

A down-on-his-luck American Indian recently released from jail is offered the chance to "star" as the victim of a snuff film, the resulting pay of which could greatly help his poverty stricken family.