Artist and director Laurel Nakadate takes us beyond the prepackaged and sanitized world of the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana to the true heartland of America and the tween-aged girls that inhabit it. In Kansas City, pop culture is something to be twisted and reshaped, relationships are either nonexistent or refabricated, and time is unstructured and teasing. At the heart of these girls' lives—and this innovative work of cinema—is a quest for understanding and a sense of place. The risks run and solutions posed engender both laughs and tears. The film's amateur actors and nonlinear narrative bring an unnerving, utterly human face to the challenges of young womanhood in a world that would prefer that girls watch the Disney Channel.
Seventeen-year-old Athena Dizon unwittingly plays a trick on resident heartthrob and bad boy Kenji de los Reyes. All of a sudden, she finds herself pretending to be his girlfriend to make an ex jealous; however, she falls in love with him.
An accidental meeting between a man being pressured to propose to his girlfriend and a runaway bride.
The thoughts of a young African woman in Ireland as she considers her future, and her unfolding sense of identity, as she walks along the city street at night.
Three people from very different walks of life meet at a large construction site. Young, unmarried, self-confident construction manager Linda Hinrichs dedicates herself completely to her work and enjoys living more independently then most women. Daniel, a student works on the construction site to make money during his summer holiday, and impresses Linda with his spontaneous energy and idealism. Brigadier Böwe, an older, divorced man works his way from one construction site to the other and has lost his own personal happiness on the path to developing what was seen as officially suitable social standards. Both men try to win Linda over, not realizing that they are taking her freedom away from her.
A young girl abducted by a serial sex criminal and is released unharmed, but decides not to inform the police. She must face the moral consequences when the assaults continue against other women.
A compendium of three short science-fiction films, each with a decidedly feminist slant.
Narcissus (from Greek Narkissos) shares the root nark-, with narcosis and narcotic. All these words have the same origin in the verb narkaō – to intoxicate through a strong smell. I was particularly interested to find out why a handsome and overall fortunate man says he never feels happy. He draws people in, but ends up hurting them, yet he is impossible to resist.
This story follows a young student, who is orphaned as she grows to adulthood in the shadow of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Coming from the Communist intelligentsia, she sees her friends and family react differently. Her lover, a married factory manager, supports the patriots and later assists fellow workers in staging a strike. Meanwhile her sister and others express anger at being forced from their homes during the revolution and continue to express a hatred for the rebels afterwards. But in the end they realize that for all people, real life is not possible after the revolt and its brutal suppression by the Soviets and their collaborators.
The movie shows a smattering of images from the story of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva. The subject is sublimated desire.
Europa is a 12-minute anti-fascist film made in 1931 in Warsaw, Poland by surrealists Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. The film is based on Anatol Stern's 1925 futurist poem Europa. It uses collages and photograms, and articulates the sense of horror and moral decline its makers were witnessing. The film, while long thought to have been lost, is considered an avant-garde masterpiece.
Based on the novel of the same name by Oleksandr Dovzhenko. About the childhood of the famous Ukrainian film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was born on the ancient lands of Chernihiv, along the banks the Desna. The film consists of two parts. The first is the world shown through the impressions of the six-year-old Sashko. The second is the recollections and reasoning of Sashko, now an elderly colonel who liberates his native village during the war.
A biological mother, Sara, and a foster mother, Virginia, share a girl. Sara lost custody due to problems with alcohol and drugs. Five years later, the girl is returned to her.
Two teenage girls with parallel lives but coming from different socio-economic backgrounds meet one summer to discover friendship and a sexual awakening.
Paul, a teenager in the underground scene of early-nineties Paris, forms a DJ collective with his friends and together they plunge into the nightlife of sex, drugs, and endless music.
A group of villagers from Maranur, India, and their clash with a neighbouring village leader as their community begins to prosper. Soon, money and greed threaten a will for peaceful coexistence between the two rivalling communities.
1971. Three pregnant teenagers are interned in a flat in Bilbao to hide what in that time was a terrible disgrace, to be a single mother. Current time. Violet, NORA NAVAS, is a brave, strong woman that will insist on finding the truth. Helped by Angel, MIKEL LOSADA, what happened in that flat in Bilbao during the last days of Franco regime.
An (13) leaves a youth institution to move in with an adoptive family on a farm. She explores this unknown world, her new parents, and a little brother that has down syndrome. An observes this family and their environment, and cautiously tries to make this new place her home.
A tragic comedy about an 18-year old girl growing up near the new Berlin airport's construction site.
The story starts as a seemingly simple crime of passion, Jimmy, the persistent suitor, is stabbed to death by Salome, the young and pretty wife of Kario, an ordinary farmer. But as the story unfolds, conflicting versions of the crime are given.