Drama

Nadja is a guest student, who stays at Cité Universitaire and visits the Sorbonne, while preparing a thesis on Proust. Besides her student life she likes to stroll about Paris, to explore the variety of this wide and open city. She knows Saint-Germain-des-Prés well, but feels more comfortable among the bohemians, painters and writers in Montparnasse. Sometimes she wants to get out of the narrow area of intellectual Paris. She then goes to the park Buttes Chaumont and the working class neighborhood of Belleville. There she discovers a world that is simpler and more characteristic of France. This helps her to distance herself from everything that was superficial in her life. She thinks that Paris teaches you more about yourself than you learn about the city.Read More »

The childless family of the veterinarian and mayor of a small town, Robert Rýdl, and his much older wife, Klára, is joined by an orphaned girl, Jana. The girl is grateful for her new home but she slowly begins to feel a strange atmosphere that reigns in the house. Klára brought her property into the marriage and loves her husband with a possessive and stifling love. The emotionally suffering Robert falls in love with Jana. When he realizes that the girl returns his love, he uses the offer for a business trip to Opava to run away from the insoluble problem. Jana is unhappy, she is afraid of the two spiteful maids and discovers the bad side of Klára’s outwardly kind nature. The two women pay a visit to Robert in Opava. They are walking in the town and something unpleasant happens. Rýdl’s acquaintances think that Jana is his wife and Klára his mother-in-law. Robert Rýdl runs away again, this time to Prague. He leaves Jana alone with Klára who has fallen seriously ill and finally dies. Robert is free but his previous cowardly behaviour destroyed Jana’s love. The girl leaves Robert right after the funeral.Read More »

An uptight and conservative woman, working on tenure as a literacy professor at a large urban university, finds herself strangely attracted to a free-spirited, liberal woman whom works at a local carnival which comes to town.Read More »

Quote:
Fresh from the tangled dramas of two temporarily halted film productions—including his collaboration with Coppola—Wenders used the cinematic quagmires as fodder for a film about filmmaking. Patrick Bauchau, a Wenders-like German arthouse director, is in the midst of making a black-and-white existential science-fiction feature called The Survivors in Portugal when his funding from a US studio is suddenly cut. The lull in production allows the cast and crew—which features Viva, Robert Kramer and Samuel Fuller—to ponder their relationships to the film and indulge in philosophical rambles and wandering detours, biding their time as needs, both creative and practical, float to the surface. Austerely zooming in and out of narrative focus, with an eye on both Hollywood noir and European arthouse, The State of Things meditatively and wryly captures little truths of cinema’s strange dimension. As Fuller’s cinematographer states, “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.”Read More »

Synopsis:
‘For many years, Jean Servettaz has worked as a mountain guide in Chamonix but, too aware of the risks of his profession, he gives this up so that he can run a guest house for tourists. He intends that his son Pierre will follow his example and become a hotelier but Pierre is too in love with the mountains to even consider such an idea. A head injury sustained in a climbing accident puts paid to Pierre’s dreams of becoming a guide. Afflicted with vertigo, he leaves for Paris and works as a receptionist in a luxury hotel. It isn’t long before Pierre is drawn back to the snow-capped mountains and, with the help of his fiancée Alice he makes another attempt to overcome his fear of heights. When his father is caught in a thunderstorm whilst taking a tourist across a hazardous stretch of the mountains Pierre has a chance to prove himself…’
– James TraversRead More »

During the Cold War, a married young Soviet woman and a Polish officer are drawn together by music but their affair attracts the attention of the military authorities.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘In February 1945, Jean Diego is tasked with breaking the news to the wife of a friend of his, Pierre, that her husband has been executed by the Nazis. It turns out that he is mistaken – his friend is still very much alive. After a happy reunion, Jean goes on his way and has a bizarre encounter with a weird old tramp on the Paris metro.The bedraggled stranger claims he can foresee the future and prophecies that Diego is about to encounter the most beautiful girl in the world.Read More »

Adapted from the Seicho Matsumoto story “Tazutazushi”. Ryohei Suzuki, a manager at a travel company, is married to his superior’s daughter, but tires of their authority over his life. A chance encounter with Yukiko Hirai one rainy night brings a new romance into Ryohei’s life, and he and Yukiko fall deeply in love. Yukiko, however, reveals that she has a violent husband in prison – with only a week left until his release. Ryohei, desperate to maintain his social standing, brings Yukiko to the mountains in Nagano and sets in motion an unthinkable, tragic chain of events.Read More »

It is 1956. Dau is a distinguished Soviet scientist who meets up with the love of his youth – Maria, a Greek actress – during her three day visit to Moscow. They haven’t seen each other for 25 years. Dau is a successful and prosperous scientist, but feels excruciatingly dissatisfied with his family life. Through Maria he hopes to regain lost harmony and beauty, but reality intrudes when Nora, Dau’s wife, returns home.Read More »