It’s summer on the Danube river. The music is loud, the cars are fancy, the girls are tanned. Beautiful and exuberant Veli runs away from home. Handsome Luca falls in love with her. This is no fairytale romance. Luca, a 20-year-old boy from a Romanian village, makes girls fall in love with him in order to lure them into prostitution networks in a town nearby. In the language of the police he is a loverboy.Read More »

PLOT:
A May-December romance.
Roué Giulio Marengo, a Roman landscape architect unhappy in his marriage, meets Francesca, a young and beautiful Florentine, and then learns she might be his daughter. He resolves to keep his hands off but can’t seem to stay away, and she’s eager for a lover who’s a father figure. He’s happy to be a kid, so he tries to find out who her father is; his wife knows that something is up; his daughter, who’s Francesca’s age and is pregnant, encourages the affair.
Should he tell Francesca his fears that it might be incest? If he tells her and she doesn’t care, what next? And what of his wife, who still wants to be married? Francesca takes control.Read More »

Directors:
Chantal Akerman, Bernard Dubois, Philippe Garrel, Frederic Mitterand, Vincent Nordon, Philippe Venault

“Two young French filmmakers, Bernard Dubois and Philippe Venault, had the provocative idea of making a follow-up to the 1964 anthology film, Paris vu par, that became a manifesto for the emerging directors of the New Wave. Unfortunately, the unity of that movement is long gone, and this new project is wildly uneven, ranging from the brilliant (Chantal Akerman’s opening sketch, J’ai faim, j’ai froid, is an entire coming-of-age film compressed into 12 frenetic, hilarious, and ultimately touching minutes) to the intriguing (Philippe Garrel’s Rue Fontaine offers a rare Stateside opportunity to see the work of this acclaimed avant-gardist, whose work suggests a crossing of John Cassavetes with early German expressionism) to the mediocre (the segments by Dubois, Venault, and Frederic Mitterrand) to the unwatchable (Vincent Nordon’s Paris-Plage, certainly the longest 13 minutes in film history). A sad lesson emerges–that the French have no more new ideas than we do–but the Akerman itself is worth it all.” -Jonathan RosenbaumRead More »

Synopsis
Most societies consider incest to be the ultimate taboo. Yet, a strange phenomenon called ‘Genetic Sexual Attraction’ has been known to affect adults who meet long-lost blood relatives for the first time.

This program features several brother/sister couples (along with one mother/son couple) who’ve developed sexual relationships and insist on maintaining them in spite of pressure from society and, sometimes, criminal prosecution.Read More »

Ryevsk, Russia, 1870. Tensions abound in the Karamazov family. Fyodor is a wealthy libertine who holds his purse strings tightly. His four grown sons include Dmitri, the eldest, an elegant officer, always broke and at odds with his father, betrothed to Katya, herself lovely and rich. The other brothers include a sterile aesthete, a factotum who is a bastard, and a monk. Family tensions erupt when Dmitri falls in love with one of his father’s mistresses, the coquette Grushenka. Two brothers see Dmitri’s jealousy of their father as an opportunity to inherit sooner. Acts of violence lead to the story’s conclusion: trials of honor, conscience, forgiveness, and redemption.Read More »

Plot / Synopsis:
A woman arrives from the future in search of the healthiest human genes. Meanwhile, a pair of evil villains also follow her back in time to stop her quest …Read More »

Jorge is the doctor in charge of the Haematology Department of a big hospital. One day he meets Clarisse, a patient suffering from advanced leukaemia, and falls in love with her. His struggle to save her inevitably fails in the end, and Jorge will now have to deal with a future of pointless routine and despair.Read More »

*Macedonian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 83rd Academy Awards

Two nine-year-old girls report a flasher to the police even though they never saw him. Three filmmakers meet the only residents of a deserted village – an elderly brother and sister who have not spoken to each other in 16 years. Retired cleaning women are found raped and strangled in a small town.

The fiction slowly turns into a documentary.

Marking the return of Milcho Manchevski, ‘Mothers’ portrays all types: dedicated, neglectful, loving, absent. Through these women, Manchevski renders the faces of human tragedy and joy.

Employing an innovative structure, the three stories in ‘Mothers’ highlight the delicate relationships of truth and fiction, of drama and documentary. What is the nature of truth?

Directed with a keen eye for contemporary Macedonia, the film eschews neat narrative devices and pushes the viewer to confront their own definitions of filmic reality.

In a traditional structuralist manner, the structure of the film itself (two parts fiction and one part documentary) becomes part of its message.Read More »

Synopsis:
Set on the hottest day of August, with no one on the deserted streets besides a few extras, the story stretches from noon to midnight as French writer Paul (Francis Frappat) waits for an appointment with “a ghost”. He whiles away the day meeting long-dead friends from his memories, who materialize out of nowhere with complete naturalness. Pierre (Andre Marcon), a poet with whom he had a girlfriend (Myriam Szabo) in common, takes him to eat in a local restaurant (recipe details are furnished by the cook). In one of the more curious apparitions, his father appears as a young sailor (Alexandre Zloto) and demands that Paul recount the way he died. The legendary Pessoa – never named, but the well-read viewer is supposed to guess who he is – reflects on life and literature over dinner.Read More »