Drama

Plot Outline: a story of one woman’s personal battle for acceptance, but also a portrait of a political movement that has forever affected millions of lives in the Middle East.Read More »

On a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles via Iowa, lawyer David Trask gets to know three of his fellow passengers as one technical issue after another leads to delays and unscheduled stops along the way. Those three are physician Dr. Robert Fortness, struggling actress with the stage name Binky Gay, and loud salesman Eddie Hoke, who is both quick with a joke and quick to show off a photograph of his beautiful wife, Marie Hoke. Below the surface, the three have deeper stories, which are bringing them back to Los Angeles and which Dr. Fortness and Binky divulge to David. Dr. Fortness, an alcoholic, is returning to own up to his drunken part in the death of a friend, and his wife Claire’s complicity in the matter. Binky, after being away in New York for a year, is returning to her husband, Mike Carr, hoping to take him away from his overbearing mother, former vaudeville star Sally Carr, who still basks in her former but no longer shining glory, and who is the cause of any marital problem she and Mike have had as she sees Binky as competition in every sense of the word. Because of an incident en route and his burgeoning friendship with them, David feels compelled to help them resolve their issues. Specifically in dealing with Eddie’s life, David is forced to reflect on his own and the reason he left his home in Midland City, Iowa.Read More »

Based on the novel by Antonio Di Benedetto written in 1956, on Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish officer of the seventeenth century settled in Asunción, who awaits his transfer to Buenos Aires. Read More »

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Fires on the Plain opens to a harsh and unexpectedly cruel act, as Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi) is struck in the face by his commanding officer for returning to his under-provisioned and demoralized regiment. Suffering from tuberculosis, Tamura had been sent to a field hospital in Leyte in order to avoid taxing their limited supplies. Tamura is sent away again – this time, with a handful of tubers and a hand grenade. If the hospital still refuses to admit him, the officer explains that it is his duty to serve the Imperial Army by committing suicide. As Tamura makes his way towards the field hospital, he is unnerved by the appearance of smoke emanating from isolated, contained fires along the Filipino countryside, and changes his route in order to avoid them.Read More »

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N’Dala, one of the orphans from the 30-years war that devastated his country, is brought over to the capital of Angola by missionaries. He rather chooses to run away from the nun who cares for him, to throw himself into the delusion-stricken streets, which will take their toll on the boy’s childhood.
His tragic past is crisscrossed with people. An older boy, Zé, sees the famous Pepetela’s character, the warrior-boy N’Gunga, in N’Dala. Zé tries to help him surviving in the city, but brings N’Dala into an unavoidable fate. By the sea, far from the general city’s ruin, lives an old fisherman who brings the boy many stories from the ocean. But continuously, N’Dala prefers to run… Survivors and outcasts amid the debris, Joka and Rosita will embrace N’Dala in their own world.Read More »

Somewhere, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, in a country torn apart by a war… A young woman in her thirties watches over her older husband in a decrepit room. He is reduced to the state of a vegetable because of a bullet in the neck. Not only is he abandoned by his companions of the Jihad, but also by his brothers. One day, the woman decides to tell the truth to him about her feelings about their relationship to her silent husband. She talks about her childhood, her suffering, her frustrations, her loneliness, her dreams, her desires… She says things she could never have done before, even though they have been married for the past 10 years. Therefore, this paralyzed man unconsciously becomes syngue sabour, a magic stone which, according to Persian mythology, when placed in front of a person shields her from unhappiness, suffering, pains and miseries. In this wait for her husband to come back to life, the woman struggles to survive and live. She finds refuge in her aunt’s place, who is…Read More »

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“Why would I tie myself to one woman if I were interested in others?” says Jerôme, even as he plans on marrying a diplomat’s daughter by summer’s end. Before then, Jerôme spends his July at a lakeside boardinghouse nursing crushes on the sixteen-year-old Laura and, more tantalizingly, Laura’s long-legged, blonde stepsister, Claire. Baring her knee on a ladder under a blooming cherry tree, Claire unwittingly instigates Jerôme’s moral crisis and creates both one of French cinema’s most enduring moments and what has become the iconic image of Rohmer’s Moral Tales.Read More »

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When Bolivian campesinos discover American doctors sterilizing women without their consent, they seek revenge­­ –– only to be repressed by the military. Filmed in Quechua in a remote Kaata village, it was banned by government censors, until a heated campaign forced them to relent. It went on to win acclaim abroad while provoking demonstrations, a Senate investigation and the expulsion of the Peace Corps at home. The film’s lack of success with indigenous audiences drove Sanjinés turn to collective filmmaking.Read More »

This undeservedly obscure film directed by Agnieszka Holland was her second feature, coming between the better-known Aktorzy Prowincyonalni (Provincial Actors) that launched her career and Kobieta Samotna (A Woman Alone). All three were made in her homeland before the Communist government’s crackdown on Solidarity that led to her going into exile in France.Read More »