Newlywed Oliverio receives disturbing news that his mother is on her deathbed. He travels to a remote part of Mexico to fetch a lawyer who can sort out her will. Leaving his wife behind, he embarks on a bus ride that’s interrupted by an increasingly absurd series of episodes, including an impromptu birthday celebration; a one-legged man writhing in the mud; come-ons from an insatiable small-town belle, Raquel; and Oliverio’s frequent, Freudian nightmares.
Desperate for clients, Isabelle, the owner of a small bookstore, accepts the offer to teach Caetano, an elderly illiterate man, how to read. The lessons turn into conversations about life and the history about their lives, even with contrasting experiences and opportunities. She begins to see in the lessons and in the closeness with her student a vocation never explored before.
An espionage thriller set in the 1950s and adapted from the novel "Year Suan/Plot Against" by May Jia. Tony Leung Chiu Wai plays a blind man who works for a piano tuner. He is recruited for a spy mission because of his exceptional hearing.
A functionally illiterate factory foreman (Dennis Weaver) loses his job after refusing a promotion that requires reading.
In 1975, in a village in southern Morocco, a young illiterate woman’s attempt to write to her absent husband becomes an intimate act of resistance against silence, distance, and the limits imposed on her world.
Too often, if a child is illiterate at the end of third grade, they will fall behind forever. By nine years old, many children are already SENTENCED to the cycles of poverty, prison, and addiction that have devastated generations before them. Our story begins with a heartbreaking look at adults who never learned to read and ends with the children who still have a chance.
A Praia do Pecado
Paris, 1884. Bella Fontanges, a renowned ballerina, is married to Georges de Segar. But after just a few years together, the couple slowly sinks into weariness. Bella has forgotten what happiness used to taste like. Then a mysterious squire appears. Aware of the couple's faltering situation, he makes Bella and Georges a most astonishing proposal: he claims to be able to separate Good from Evil in Georges. Reluctant at first, the couple eventually agrees to play along. But it's not long before they realize that in Georges, it's Evil that has prevailed.
Jerry Lewis plays an Ohio optometrist who has a six-year old daughter with epilepsy. He fights to get the FDA to approve a drug (at that time only available in England) for use in the U.S.
William Kell, the keeper of a lighthouse on a lonely stretch of coastline, marries cabaret dancer Eileen. His young wife, however, goes on to have an affair with Henry Cass, the handsome assistant later taken on by her husband; when she then begins to flirt with a stranger who is rescued from the wreck of a motor-launch, a chain of shocking events is set in motion...
Locomotive
A group of friends from a summer village. Over the past few years, they've been seeing each other less and less. Bruna invites them to lunch to celebrate her birthday, in the village, in the place where they have shared so many moments together, to relive it once more, perhaps for the last time.
By Heart follows Catherine as she tries to figure out a way to hold on to her American roots and identity, after being brought to Taiwan due to her parents' separation, by resisting an indoctrinating Confucian text she has to memorize at school.
An uncompromising and controversial short set in the Scandinavian suburbia on the hottest day of the summer. A sister reluctantly babysits her little brother. Two young boys catch her attention, and she makes a crucial decision.
Heli Valkonen is desperately in love with her husband. But Matti is just not in the mood. He is only interested in playing computer games, dressed in worn out fleece pants. For him, a shoulder massage is the highest form of intimacy. When subtle hints, nice words and fetching clothes won't help, Heli resorts in direct, and increasingly direct action - in vain.
A young, Polish woman is forced to choose between her family and her career as an actress.
A female worker in Socialist Hungary gains the acceptance of her male colleagues.
A journalist in a Bucharest publication, is the accidental witness of the street arrest of a communist. It intervenes in the defense of the young man, who manages to escape, and is arrested. He is obliged to look for the missing woman.
In a slum set to be demolished, dramas are played out among the picturesque slum dwellers, including a young couple who, denounced by the police, are forced to leave home.