2001-2010

The 1985 hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of the Mediterranean cruise ship Achille Lauro culminated in the murder of wheelchair-bound Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer. Adams’s controversial highly acclaimed opera plays out against the turbulent emotions and violence that are as ancient as Biblical text and as contemporary as today’s headlines.
Award-winning British film-maker Penny Woolcock, working with the composer, has ingeniously teworked the original, using techniques afforded by film to imbue the narrative with realism. Whilst the main action is shot on location in the Mediterranean, actual and recreated archive footage tells the broader story of the characters before and after the hijacking.Read More »

A young man in Uruguay has trouble expressing himself verbally. As the lead singer in a band, he interacts with the world through his music.Read More »

This is a remake of Charade with Cary Grant and done with a few twists that make it interesting. A well to do couple in Paris are headed for divorce. The woman finds out her husband is dead before she gets the chance to ask for the divorce. She finds this out when she returns to their residence to find everything in it is gone. Two members of the French police are there and inform her of her husbands death. She encounters several people who want money stolen by her husband.Read More »

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A massive natural disaster nearly destroys a city in Italy, while corruption and political double-dealing may well finish the job in this documentary from filmmaker Sabina Guzzanti. In April 2009, the city of L’Aquila in Central Italy was hit by an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the MMS scale; over three hundred people lost their lives, nearly 1,500 were injured and approximately 65,000 lost their homes, while many of the city’s most historic buildings and artwork were turned to rubble in the disaster. Swift and decisive action was needed from the Italian government, and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, hoping to win back the good will of the people following a number of embarrassing scandals, used the L’Aquila earthquake as an opportunity to burnish his reputation. Read More »

Paradise Now (Arabic: الجنّة الآن‎) is a 2005 film directed by Hany Abu-Assad about two Palestinian men preparing for a suicide attack in Israel. It won a Golden Globe for best foreign language film and was nominated for an Academy Award in the same category.

“The film is an artistic point of view of that political issue,” Abu-Assad said. “The politicians want to see it as black and white, good and evil, and art wants to see it as a human thing.”Read More »

Inspired by the student revolutions of 1968, two women in Germany and Japan set out to
plot world revolution as leaders of the Baader Meinhof Group and the Japanese Red Army.
What were they fighting for and what have we learned?Read More »

Minoru Kawasaki (The Calamari Wrestler, Executive Koala) returns with yet another bizarre offering of Japanese film oddity.
Taisho’s father is a supermodel cat, and everybody believes that Taisho will be a supermodel as well. His family has great expectations of him, because he is the eldest son, but he can’t bear all the pressure and runs away from home.Read More »

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Beijing, 1988. On the cusp of middle-age, Chen Handong has known little but success all his life. The eldest son of a senior government bureaucrat, he heads a fast-growing trading company and plays as hard as he works. Few know that Handong’s tastes run more to boys than girls. Lan Yu is a country boy, newly arrived in Beijing to study architecture. More than most students, he is short of money and willing to try anything to earn some. He has run into Liu Zheng, who pragmatically suggests that he could prostitute himself for one night to a gay pool-hall and bar owner.Read More »

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This is a documentary with rare images of real life stories in the so-called “asentamientos” in the poor underbelly of Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, and in its youth jails. It centers on the life of a family, and some of its teenage neighbors. Filmed at times by only one discreet camera, the documentary exposes the youth legal system and youth jails in Uruguay, as well as the daily lives of its former or future prisoners: teenage prostitutes, petty thieves, single mothers, and their miserable lives, contrasting with upper middle class neighborhoods. A former prostitute now “single” grandmother is a central character, being the mother of a few teenage criminals, a single mother who is also a prostitute, and a repeat offender who eventually dies of AIDS in jail, and whose burial we witness in the film.Read More »