This drama is adapted from a Japanese television mini-series. In the story, an industrialist learns of a medical condition which will greatly shorten his life. He is on a trip to Europe at the time, and a glimpse of a Japanese woman in that setting causes him to fantasize about her as the personification of his impending death. As his dialogue with his imagined mortality continues, he actually meets the living woman who is the template for his fantasy, and together they tour rural churches. Gradually he comes to some kind of peace about the diagnosis. When he returns to Japan, he is met with a series of challenges which profoundly test the lessons he has learned.Read More »

Story of a young girl whose dream of becoming a superhero is threatened by terminal illness, inspiring her village to rally together to make her dream come true.Read More »

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A war drama showing the functioning of Hitler’s “racial purity” law, forbidding foreign workers from any contact with Germany. Foreigners on forced labor in Nazi Germany. Death, imprisonment or stigmatization awaited both sides for closer contacts with the Germans. A Pole, Władysław, and a widow and her daughter Linda, another Pole for an affair with a German girl, two American prisoners of war and a German woman who gave birth to a child to one of them, a German soldier who met his dream girl in a foreigner, Marice.Read More »

Belorussia, summer 1942. The war has moved on, far off to the east. The life of a small town where the German authorities of the region have set themselves up is getting back to “normal”. The Germans study Russian, flirt with the local girls, the women wash their clothes and feed them. They have to carry on somehow… But suddenly the teenage son of the film’s heroine decides to run away to the partisans and blows up a German train so that they could accept him. He gets caught and the Germans have to execute him in order “to teach others a lesson”. That’s the order and it can’t be disobeyed. The Germans know that this execution will bring an end to their peaceful lives. The local commandant understands this better than anyone as he is already involved in a close relationship with the boy’s mother. But he can’t ignore an order from his commanders …Read More »

Dietrich Leder, Film-Dienst 24/92 wrote:
In Europe in the fall of 1989, history took place before our very eyes. Farocki and Ujica’s “Videograms” shows the Rumanian revolution of December 1989 in Bucharest in a new media-based form of historiography. Demonstrators occupied the television station [in Bucharest] and broadcast continuously for 120 hours, thereby establishing the television studio as a new historical site. Between December 21, 1989 (the day of Ceaucescu’s last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost without exception. The determining medium of an era has always marked history, quite unambiguously so in that of modern Europe. It was influenced by theater, from Shakespeare to Schiller, and later on by literature, until Tolstoy.Read More »

A hypocritical swinging college student cat raises hell in a satiric vision of various elements on the 1960s.Read More »

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Against his father’s wishes, Pedro, a naive kid from Mexico City, joins the Federal Highway Patrol. His simple desire to do good rapidly comes into conflict with the reality of police work.Read More »

One day, Hélène goes to the home of Charles Piétri, a man she once loved and has not seen for twenty years. She meets Julien, Charles’ son, who tells her that his father has died. Shortly afterwards, she breaks off her marital ties with Alexandre, and her professional ties with Georges Birski (who has just commissioned her to restore a painting), to live with Julien and to devote herself totally to him. In the house where Charles used to live and where Irene, Julien’s mother, is about to move in, Hélène discovers disturbing signs, clues and even evidence of a disturbing link that would unite them and that will push her to commit a senseless act…Read More »

Synopsis
Angela Schanelec’s first feature since 2010 is the much-anticipated Der traumhafte Weg, a serious work that is deliberately constructed image upon image and allows the viewer to read a seemingly realistic, yet artificially created world as it is being experienced, yet ultimately works against any simple narrative comprehension. The best way to tackle Der traumhafte Weg is to proceed, scene by scene, with a description of the shots, of how within the shots the characters are framed, how the characters gaze, how they hold their bodies… In other words, it is an Angela Schanelec film, where attention is required and rewarded, and the characters are at the mercy of the elements of chance.Read More »