13 year old Lili fights to protect her dog Hagen, and is devastated when her father sets Hagen free on the streets. Still innocently believing love can conquer any difficulty, Lili sets out to save her dog. Failing in his desperate efforts to find his beloved owner, Hagen joins a canine revolt leading a revolution against their human abusers.
The way home for Aleksandr Rekhviashvili is not charted in the conventional sense. It takes the viewer along some peculiar roads and across a unique landscape: Georgian history and legend, politics and social stratification, religion and ethics. Allusive, stylized and allegorical from beginning to end, his long-banned The Way Home is in part a tribute to Rekhviashvili’s favorite director, Pasolini, especially to The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966). Together with the short film Nutsa (1971) and the widely acclaimed Georgian Chronicle of the 19th Century (1979; SFIFF 1983), The Way Home closes a triptych of films that represent Rekhviashvili’s poetic contemplation of Georgia’s past. It makes extensive use of poems by Bella Akhmadulina (the major female poet of the cultural ‘thaw’ of the ’50s and ’60s and a Georgian by descent), and of sets by Amir Kakabadze. Like other films in the trilogy, The Way Home is stunningly photographed in black-and-white.--Oxymoron
In this dreamlike film, a nameless father and his son, Aleksei, live together in an apartment in St. Petersburg. Aleksei's mother has died and consequently the two have a very close relationship. When Aleksei acquires a girlfriend, she refuses to take a back seat to his bond with his dad, and breaks up with him. Aleksei is also experiencing nightmares, dreading separation from his father to be a part of the military as his father was.
The war is over. Once a young sculptor, and now a soldier, he returned home. Married, there were children. In search of work, he was hired to make grave monuments. Time passed... At one time, visiting a cemetery with friends, he saw with different eyes all his work done over the years...
This film ballad is dedicated to those who never returned home from WW2. A group of retreating Soviet soldiers, crossing a lunar terrain in a desperate attempt to escape death, is attacked by a German fighter plane that appears like a bolt from the blue. One by one they are killed. Then suddenly, in an unlikely denouement bordering on the mystical, the attacker is shot down with a simple rifle. For ideological reasons that defy understanding this film, one of Viktor Hres’ earliest works, was shelved in 1967 by Soviet censors. In 2010, it was restored by the Debut Studio of the Oleksander Dovzhenko Film Studio with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ukraine.
The short film (conveyed in a parable-like story structure) follows a man devoted to himself and the blessings of his attributed god. He struggles to survive a primitive life and is forced to take action to ensure his own prosperity.
Two monks on a mission choose very different paths
A poetized chronicle of the events taking place in one of the Georgian villages in the late 19th century, when, to save a forest, the innumerous intelligentsia could rally the people and oppose the industrialists…
Banned in the Soviet Union for its "negative" content and never released, Kalatozov was forced to retreat from filmmaking for seven years because of this film. The film sets out to illustrate the old adage, "For want of a nail, the battle was lost," showing how the inferior quality of something so trivial as a nail in a soldier's boot leads inexorably to the capture of an armored train. Kalatozov had intended to demonstrate the crucial and universal importance of efficiency in Soviet industry, but the government decided that his fable gave a negative impression of the Red Army's capabilities.
A full-blooded, interesting life has long eluded the house where a mother, father, son and daughter live. Trivial household matters, conversation at dinner about duty — that's all that connects them. The situation changes when it becomes known that the family inherited the village house, and that it will probably be necessary to enter into a struggle with the joint heirs. From the bottom of chests, old albums and documents confirming the priority of the family are extracted, and intrigues begin ...
Directed by Zulfikar Musakov.
Garib in the Land of Jinn
Lithuania, 1977. Memories of childhood, adolescence, and first love in a small provincial town, shown through complexity of human relations at this periodical film.
A high school teacher races home to cook dinner for his wife.
A dramedy that takes place entirely within the walls of a grocery store. The story revolves around six individuals, a diverse group of employees and customers, who find themselves unexpectedly trapped due to a severe storm.
Vincent Van Gogh's life was a masterpiece painted with the dueling colors of madness versus genius. However, this inner battle gave birth to some of the greatest works of art known to man. The film traces Van Gogh's journey through the many twists and turns of his tumultuous and exciting life.
A phone call to Izmir while she and Ege are living together in France turns their lives upside down. The caller claims to be Izmir's recently deceased mother.
Haunted by her mother’s death and recurring attacks by Israeli forces on her city, a young girl becomes obsessed with death. To distract her, her father makes a stop-motion film. However, his attempts fail and the girl finds nothing other than imagination to escape from reality.
70 year old Shen Yanhong (played by Yang Ziqiong) was sent to a nursing home by her son after falling seriously ill, and the house was also rented out by her son. In order to regain her life, she tried to make money but encountered obstacles everywhere. Just as she was about to give up, her talent in the Rubik's Cube was discovered by young Rubik's Cube coach Xiao Wu. One wants to make money and leave the nursing home, while the other wants to save the dying Rubik's Cube training class. The two hit it off and appeared on TV programs. From the beginning, she not only gained fame and fortune, attention, dignity, love, and initiative in life, but also brought vitality to the stagnant nursing home. She was not afraid of failure, fought against aging and prejudice, and arrived at the highest stage of the Rubik's Cube all the way. Finally, with her son's encouragement, she completed an extremely difficult challenge and won the Guinness World Record.
Sophie, a college freshman, is seeking social acceptance from her outgoing and popular peers. Her boyfriend, Andrew, is a wide-eyed pledge for the frat Kappa Alpha Chi. After some unfortunate events, Sophie starts to see Andrew's ghost all over campus. This causes her to confront her innate need to be accepted in a college culture that centers on partying and substance use.