2001-2010

The lives of a man, a cat, and a goldfish intersect in unexpected ways.
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Quote:Pauline et François contains little in the way of emotive revelations or garment rending histrionics. Its dramatic climax, if one can call it that, is a relatively minor moment of moral weakness that’s quickly discovered and rectified. The film is neither artfully minimal nor flashily intense. But it is a haunting and compelling construction, built only with the most rudimentary of filmmaking tools. And Fely’s honest labor rewards his viewers with a memorable perspective of one family’s drift down the meandering river of time.
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“Never my soul” is a phrase taken from the cliche sentence the good-Turkish-girl character says to her rapist in many old Turkish movies – “You can have my body but never my soul!”.

The film has at its centre a transsexual who is pretending to be Türkan Şoray, the real-life super diva of the Turkish Cinema. The transsexual’s true life is similar to the melodramatic plot of a Türkan Şoray movie. She was born a boy, beaten up by her military father throughout her childhood for exhibiting “effeminate” behaviour, taken to psychiatrists at the age of thirteen to cure her of her sexual “deviance,” and later beaten and tortured by a notorious Istanbul police chief. Now living in Lausanne, her kidneys have failed and she is on dialysis. She has to make her living through prostitution.Read More »

IMDB:
Edmond, a man in his sixties whose wife has recently passed away, is told about a secret establishment where men can spend an entire night in bed alongside beautiful, sleeping young women, who stretch, roll over and dream, but never awaken. Bedazzled by their seductive yet innocent tenderness, but distressed about the reason for their deep sleep, he delves into the mystery of the house of sleeping beauties. Read More »

IMDB:
A bag full of money lands in front of you. Is it luck? The answer to your prayers? Part of a predetermined plan? Or all of the above? Set in the chaotic streets of Istanbul, 40 is a story of three strangers making their way in a city of 12 million, all searching…for one bag. Shot entirely on location, ’40’ combines intense story telling with documentary style cinematography embarking on a synchronistic journey dealing with faith, love, luck, destiny, human trafficking…and a bag of cash that falls from the sky.Read More »

Feature debut of Caouette is an experimental documentary constructed from home movies, photographs, letters, phone messages, and created video footage that Caouette edited on his home computer and layered with appropriate songs. It follows the emotional journey of Caouette and his mentally ill mother from a Texas childhood legacy of abuse, neglect, and an escape into a self-created fantasy world, to their lives 20-odd years later.
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Synopsis
Explores how Zen Buddhist monks actively got involved in the Second World War and their position now regarding that participation.

“Zen and War” features Shodo Harada Roshi and other contemporary Zen Buddhist teachers speaking of their WWII predecessors’ collaboration in wartime atrocities for the first time on film. The impetus for this film came from Ina Buitendijk, a Dutch woman whose husband suffered severely under Japanese internment in Asia during the war. As a Zen Buddhist practitioner she wrote letters to Zen monastic centers, asking how Buddhist monks could have been involved in warfare.Read More »

Tahmineh Milani’s “The Fifth Reaction”
An Iranian Woman Fighting for Her Rights
By Josef Schnelle

Five women sit in a restaurant in Tehran and talk about their husbands and their marriages. First, the conversations are quite amusing, but later on we notice that each woman faces serious problems below the thin surface of legal rights granted to women in Iran.Read More »

Quote:
One of the most terrible ills of our time, people trafficking, follows the so-called Balkans Route for smuggling people into the West. Bosnian and Croatian papers often carry stories about groups of illegal immigrants discovered by the police, and just as frequent are the news of such imimigrants’ deaths. The Melon Route is inspired by the true story of twelve illegal immigrants who drowned in the river Sava on the border of Bosnia and Croatia. This event has been enlarged in the script, and seen through the eyes of a young Chinese girl, who loses her father in the accident. She enters into a tenuous relationship with an ex-Croatian Army soldier, a cured drug addict suffering from PTSD, who lost everything in the war. The linguistic and cultural barriers between the two protagonists give an added dimension to the film, shot through by the painful realization that it is hard to carry an inescapable burden: one’s place of birth.Read More »