1981-1990

A young boy is locked into his apartment when his mother goes out and must care for his baby brother and cope with various domestic catastrophes while his grandmother and a neighbor try to locate his mother or the key to the apartment.Read More »

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Kato (Ittoku Kishibe) is a small time TV producer. He has a wife Masako (Naoko Otani), and a young son Taro. Kato also has a friend Yamazaki (Akira Emoto) who he knew since college. Yamazaki has a girl friend Riko (Eri Ishida) who lives with her younger sister Yuko (Hitomi Takahashi) who’s an actress. Yamazaki is a lyric writer/womanizer and he starts to have an affair with Masako, but he’s still going out with Riko. Riko really isn’t too enamored with Yamazaki or to any man as for that matter. She has some deep rooted distrust for men in general. One day, Katoh comes home when Masako and Yamazaki is having an affair. Masako is in a skimpy negligee and claims that Yamazaki “just happened to drop by in the morning after getting drunk”. Read More »

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Two of Hong Kong’s most adored screen goddesses lend their girlish charm to Last Romance, re-released 29 years after it became a rare commercial hit in the career of art-house director Yonfan.

While its fashion and social setting are somewhat dated, the 1988 film still packs a punch with its deeply poignant tale of friendship and love that is repeatedly derailed by materialistic greed and lamentable life decisions.Read More »

Raúl Ruiz’s baroque mix of revolutionary politics, pop culture and semiotics is loosely based on the play La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. In this 17th-century classic, a young prince learns that life is but a dream from which we wake when we die, and that dreams may be as real as life.

Ruiz’s Prince is a Chilean revolutionary in hiding who spends his time in a run-down movie theatre watching old Flash Gordon serials while trying to remember a secret code he once memorized using Life is a Dream as a mnemonic device.Read More »

The story of Takeha, a free-spirited genius poet who lived through Taisho Romanticism, and the women who gave themselves over to his ambitions.Read More »

ASSA is set in Crimea during the winter in the mid eighties. A young musician (Bananan) falls for mobster’s (Krymov) young mistress (Alika). The parallel story line involves an 18th century assassination plot.Read More »

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The story of a family, where three generations live under a decaying roof. The widowed grandmother is the titular head, her son Raj Kishore Babu, father of four sons and a daughter, is the gentle yet disciplined headmaster on the verge of retirement. The father demands of his sons a diligent pursuit of education as the means of upward mobility. The centre of all their hopes is the brilliant second son studying in Delhi to get into the IAS. When he makes it to the coveted service, the family thinks all their sacrifices have been worth it. The family gets flattering proposals and the IAS probationer marries a city-bred girl above his status. The unvoiced protest comes from the eldest daughter-in-law Prabha, the beast of burden and kitchen slave. Her husband is a college lecturer. Prabha wonders if the IAS officer’s wife will share the chores. She is proved right when the new bahu defies tradition by opting to stay with her parents when the husband is away on training.Read More »

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During the Great Depression, a sheet music salesman seeks to escape his dreary life through popular music and a love affair with an innocent school teacher.Read More »

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Ten years after making his mark on Spanish cinema with The Spirit of the Beehive, Víctor Erice returned to filmmaking with this adaptation of a novella by Adelaida García Morales, which deepens the director’s fascination with childhood, fantasy, and the legacy of his country’s civil war. In the North of Spain, Estrella grows up captivated by her father, a doctor with mystical powers—and by the enigma of his youth in the South, a near-mythical region whose secrets haunt Estrella more and more as time goes on. Though Erice’s original vision also encompassed a section set in the South itself, scenes that were never shot, El Sur remains an experience of rare perfection and satisfaction, drawing on painterly cinematography by José Luis Alcaine to evoke the enchantments of memory and the inaccessible, inescapable mysteries of the past.Read More »