Ana is 28. She feels useful and satisfied in her routine work helping others. Nevertheless, outside of her working day, Ana has serious problems relating to people. She is socially awkward and even aggressive towards those people closest to her and whom she loves.

Ana can’t control this behaviour or her emotions, so she suffers constantly and feels tormented and guilty. Really she would just like to feel at ease with herself and with others, to be happy. But her self-destructive, self-harming behaviour only isolates her more and more.

Ana is unaware that she suffers from what psychiatrists call Borderline Personality Disorder.Read More »

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In an early episode in Carmen, Carlos Saura’s second dance film with renowned flamenco artist Antonio Gades (in what would inevitably prove to be the second film of their collaborative Flamenco trilogy), a group of musicians rehearse at a large, open dance studio within earshot of the choreographer, Antonio (Gades) as he struggles to find the proper tempo suitable to adapting the Seguedilla from Bizet’s opera for a flamenco performance. Reinterpreting the operatic work from a waltzy, 3/4 timed vocal piece to a sprightly, improvisational bulería, the musicians perform their rendition to the receptive Antonio who, along with his studio partner – and perhaps, erstwhile paramour – Cristina (Cristina Hoyos), begin to re-envision Carmen, not as a French composer’s projection of the fiery gypsy seductress – and more broadly, a foreigner’s stereotypical notions of Spanish culture – but rather, as an indigenous adaptation of Prosper Mérimée’s novel, disconnected from the now iconic flourishes of Bizet’s opera. Read More »

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In And the Ship Sails On, I needed a large exterior to paint, so I used the wall of the Pantanella pasta factory. It was where my father, Urbano Fellini, had worked when he passed through Rome on his way back from forced labor in Belgium after World War I. It was while at the pasta factory in 1918 that he met my mother, Ida Barbiani, and carried her off, not on a white charger, but in a third-class coach on the train, with her full consent, away from her home, family, and social class in Rome.Read More »

Like a fish on a dry land, Kristofer is stuck in a dull everyday routine, working as a security guard. He got fired from the freight ship he worked on, when he was caught smuggling alcohol. Faced with money problems, he is tempted to accept the help of his friend, Steingrimur, who manages to pull some strings to get his old job back. He decides to take his chances one last time on a tour to Rotterdam.Read More »

A portrait of Łódź, Poland that exists in a time warp of sad memory. Hutton creates an empty world evoking the 19th century industrial atmosphere that is populated with the ghosts of Poland’s tragic past.Read More »

The mysterious death of an enigmatic young man newly arrived in the suburb of Wetherby releases the long-repressed, dark passions of some of its residents.Read More »

PLOT: Irene Rakowitz, aged 48, is a divorced mother of four, who lives with her two youngest children in West Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel public housing district, surviving on disability payments. Her ex-husband, a former miner, lives in the same high-rise. But loud and abrasive conflict persists regarding his ongoing influence on the children. The older daughters are hateful and judgmental of their mother, calling her a ‘crackpot’. Irene Rakowitz holds nothing back as she talks about why her family is falling apart, while at the same time expressing, sometimes vehemently, her own ambitions, in front of the camera and again during the editing process, throughout which she is associated.Read More »

A successful black woman discovers that her birth mother is a underprivileged white woman, but the woman denies it. As emotions run high, everyone’s secrets are exposed.Read More »

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Anne has a very active imagination, only natural for a writer. But in her mid-thirties, she still knows practically nothing of her own family’s past. After her mother’s death, Anne discovers old photos and letters that convince her to take a closer look at the life of her parents, Michael and Léna. The young couple met in the concentration camps during World War II, later moving to France to start their new life together. Soon, Anne’s research into their Jewish history and their ties to Lyon’s communist party reveals the existence of a mysterious uncle, Jean, whom everyone seems intent on forgetting entirely. As she gradually closes in on the discovery she didn’t know she was looking for, her father grows ever more ill, and may take the secret that kept them apart for so long to his grave. In a journey that stretches from post-war France to the 1980s, Anne’s destiny intertwines with her father’s past until they form a single, unforgettable story.Read More »