This film is about what the routine of everyday life can do to the human mind and psyche. It also reflects on the importance of the choices we make and how limited these choices are in the first place. The plot evolves around a family of four. They live in the suburbs, in a strange villa that appears, through a complex game of mirrors, to be more like a piece of installation art than a real house. The main character, who hardly appears on screen, is the son, a man in his thirties. Suffering from asthma and eczema since childhood, he uses his condition to manipulate his parents and his sister. Thus the existence of the terrorized family turns into an endless ritual of attempting to satisfy his whims, and always on the alert for yet another one of his “health crises”. Las Meninas resembles the scattered pieces of a puzzle. It is up to the viewer to assemble them in order to form his very own picture – something that makes the film itself personal and unique.
When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.
An opportunity to extract revenge falls on The Barber’s lap belonging to the indigenous tribes as The Officer, the face of the government who killed her lover visits her salon for a shave. But there is an ongoing truce pact between the two parties and violence must be avoided so that the prisoners exchange can take place smoothly.
A man explains how he was obsessed when he was younger by a mysterious room and an extraordinary rarefied piano music that drifted through its open window during the night. Forty years later, returning to his home town after having spent most of his life abroad, in "a bunch of different places", he asks one of his friends to rent a room for him. As chance would have it, it turns out to be the same room which attracted him when he was a young man. What drew him again to this room?
The story of the first cloned human being - told in her own words: At the age of thirty the world-famous composer Iris Sellin learns that she has an incurable illness. She - a person who wanted to live for ever - does however not give in. In order to preserve her art and also herself, beyond death, for all posterity, she has herself cloned. Her daughter Siri, whom, in this way, she turns into her virtual twin, learns as a child that she is the world's first cloned human being. In fact a blueprint: a blueprint of her mother. From that moment on nothing is as it was before...
Pianist David Helfgott, driven by his father and teachers, has a breakdown. Years later he returns to the piano, to popular if not critical acclaim.
Anna and Marie are two women who could possibly love each other, but each must decide if she is willing to throw away her old life in pursuit of this new overwhelming feeling.
Allison's life falls apart following her involvement in a fatal accident. The unlikely relationship she forms with her would-be father-in-law helps her live a life worth living.
France, 1914, during World War I. On Christmas Eve, an extraordinary event takes place in the bloody no man's land that the French and the Scots dispute with the Germans…
1918, shortly before the end of the Great War, an Austrian soldier passes the barrier of the Italian lines and escapes. He is very young, alone, scared. During his journey in that enemy land, so similar to his own, the thoughts of the terrible experience on the front alternate with childhood memories. Along the way, death takes him and puts him back into the flow of nature, to which he has always felt he belonged.
A brother and sister's battle over a prized heirloom piano unleashes haunting truths about how the past is perceived — and who defines a family legacy.
In the beautiful yet slightly dark world of the Sisters Kane, where only dolls exist, Callalilly longs to play the piano perfectly. But her inability to be 'instantly great' sends her into a fit. What happens as a result may shock you as it did her sisters.
A former vaudeville child star viciously torments her paraplegic sister in their decaying Hollywood mansion.
A tale about the relationship between a businessman who launders money for a Mafia figure and his gangster bodyguard.
When 17-year-old Abigail stumbles upon her old piano, painful memories of her late father resurface. But when a mysterious entity tries to stop her from playing, she must make a difficult choice: continue avoiding the pain - or confront it head-on.
The story about the relationship between a manic depressive man, Mr. Jones, and the female doctor who takes more than a professional interest in his treatment.
An ex-prisoner moves to an old apartment, where one gets to see in the middle of a domestic problem between a police officer, his wife and his daughter. When he tries to intervene, he will be caught in a mysterious curse.
A young black pianist becomes embroiled in the lives of an upper-class white family set among the racial tensions, infidelity, violence, and other nostalgic events in early 1900s New York City.
A guitar playing car thief meets an autistic savant piano player, and together they transform a group of reluctant halfway house convicts into The Killer Diller Blues Band.
After a lavish dinner party, the guests find themselves unable to depart... and, over the next few days, all of their elaborate societal pretenses and façades deteriorate as they are reduced to living like animals.