1990s

Sir Anthony Blunt was a Soviet agent in Britain for 25 years, the fourth man (after Maclean, Burgess and Philby) in the infamous Cambridge spy ring. Caught out in 1964, Blunt is granted immunity from prosecution and his treason is kept secret in exchange for a full confession. Meanwhile, he continues to work as an art historian, Director of the Courtauld Institute and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. Continually hounded by MI5, he presents his interrogator with a puzzle in the shape of a doubtful Titian painting. He also does art restoration work in Buckingham Palace, where he gets into an ambiguous conversation with the Queen. Meanwhile the investigators demand that he disclose the name of the elusive Fifth Man in the ring as part of his immunity deal, otherwise threatening to expose him to the nation.Read More »

An emotionally crippled woman prostitutes herself to help take care of her kid sister who has cystic fibrosis.Read More »

A shipping magnate goes bankrupt and the family being used to a high spending life. Moving to a summer resort with moonshine and smuggling as a way out. Love and art are sacrificed in the hunt for old honor, with the children as victims.Read More »

Verloc lives in London 1886 with a pretty wife and her retarded brother. He’s an agent for the Russian embassy. A new ambassador wants more from him than in the past years – something with a bomb. Verloc also informs the police.Read More »

PLOT SUMMARY:
Formal to the point of mystification, Alain Cavalier’s La Rencontre is a bittersweet love story shot from the most oblique of angles. Two voices – one a man’s, one a woman’s – discuss a series of objects, views, pictures and body parts, swapping observations back and forth. In between listing and analyzing this parade of possessions, the film’s “characters” read each other poems, tell each other anecdotes, describe their dreams, name their hopes and fears.
Eventually, we realize they love each other; equally eventually, they realize they may no longer do so.Read More »

During the Gulf War, Serge Daney wrote that conversation, “a typically Franco-Arab art”, was no longer possible between him and his Arab friends. Here, he is offered a setting – both real and cinematic – in which he can attempt to renew this dialogue, which has been interrupted for a time. His choice of interlocutor was an obvious one: Elias Sanbar, Palestinian, historian, director of the magazine “Études Palestiniennes” and image collector. Sanbar is an exile who archives the memory of his people: press photographs, family albums, postcards and so on. For him, images are proof of his identity. Daney, for his part, has spent most of his life watching films, but has always refused to keep still images. On both sides, there was a strong desire to confront these two attitudes to the image, and turn it into a kind of parable of North-South relations.Read More »

Shlykov, a hard-working taxi driver and Lyosha, a saxophonist, develop a bizarre love-hate relationship, and despite their prejudices, realize they aren’t so different after all.Read More »

During the Gulf War, Serge Daney wrote that conversation, “a typically Franco-Arab art”, was no longer possible between him and his Arab friends. Here, he is offered a setting – both real and cinematic – in which he can attempt to renew this dialogue, which has been interrupted for a time. His choice of interlocutor was an obvious one: Elias Sanbar, Palestinian, historian, director of the magazine “Études Palestiniennes” and image collector. Sanbar is an exile who archives the memory of his people: press photographs, family albums, postcards and so on. For him, images are proof of his identity. Daney, for his part, has spent most of his life watching films, but has always refused to keep still images. On both sides, there was a strong desire to confront these two attitudes to the image, and turn it into a kind of parable of North-South relations.Read More »

Jubei is a Japanese merchant who learns tricks from Western merchants to get ahead in the game.Read More »