2000s

Synopsis:
In 1950, in South Korea, shoe-shiner Jin-tae Lee and his 18-year-old old student brother, Jin-seok Lee, form a poor but happy family with their mother, Jin-tae’s fiancé Young-shin Kim, and her young sisters. Jin-tae and his mother are tough workers, who sacrifice themselves to send Jin-seok to the university. When North Korea invades the South, the family escapes to a relative’s house in the country, but along their journey, Jin-seok is forced to join the army to fight in the front, and Jin-tae enlists too to protect his young brother. The commander promises Jin-tae that if he gets a medal he would release his brother, and Jin-tae becomes the braver soldier in the company. Along the bloody war between brothers, the relationship of Jin-seok with his older brother deteriorates leading to a dramatic and tragic end.Read More »

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In World War II Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia, a childless couple, Josef and Marie Cizek, can only watch while the Jewish family of their employers, the Wieners, are first removed from their own home to a spare room in their house by the Nazis, then removed to the far off facility of Thierenstadt. Years later, young David Wiener, the sole surviving member of that family has managed to escape and make it to the Cizeks. Although fully aware of the extreme danger of harbouring a Jew in the Third Reich, the Cizek’s can not permit themselves to leave David to certain death and agree to hide him. However, this decision leads to terrible danger of discovery by the Nazis and especially their friend and Nazi collaborator, Horst Prohazka, who is attracted to Marie. With desperate cleverness and luck, the Cizeks struggle to keep the secret, even when Horst begins to suspect. In doing so, they find themselves making unorthodox choices and learning about the true nature of the people around them.Read More »

In this mind-bending drama, six lives are shared through a rare mathematical phenomenon that situates people at specific coordinates, allowing them to continue life in a new body. When this threshold is crossed, an unusual mutation occurs, and as one of these characters experiences a remarkable transformation, their bizarre out-of-body experience forms an entirely new network of experiences and memories. All the while that these “travelers” must endure their transitions, it is equally difficult for those around them to cope. Asking the question, “what if I could be someone else?” Enlightened Blood is an existential journey into the nature of life and thought that both mystifies and forces you to ponder the “what ifs.”Read More »

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At the heart of Kira Muratova’s newest film, The Tuner (Nastroishchik, 2004), is her characteristic and enduring love of predation—predation for its own sake. Of course, any talk of “the heart of Muratova’s work” is a judgment of anatomy rather than sentiment, as any admirer would attest. With The Tuner, she has produced an extraordinary new film that offers a complex assessment of the human subject, civilization, and the creative act.Read More »

Set on the planet Mars, The Sea of Perdition tells the story of a stranded astronaut (Maggie Moor), who discovers an ancient temple in the wilderness and whatever secrets it may hold.

The Sea of Perdition was shot in Iceland in mid-2006, as a part of Errant Films’ IBM Film project, which consisted of five separate short films, all based upon the composition “The Sky’s gone dim and the Sun’s gone black” by the Icelandic composer Johann Johansson. The featured music is from the fifth part of his album, IBM 1401 – A User’s Manual.Read More »

A factory worker lives in a small house and does her shopping at the local store. One morning as she’s getting ready for work, she learns that the factory, which is the center of her universe, is about to move and disappear from sight.Read More »

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An artistic, shocking love story that disturbed audiences and confused almost all critics that couldn’t see beyond the disturbing images. A mute girl maintains a fishing resort where people stay in floating mini-houses while fishing, resting and using prostitutes. She services them in any way she can in order to make ends meet but the crude clientele annoy her often, forcing her at times to take revenge. Along comes a brooding, suicidal client with a dark past. Will they connect through their pain or treat each other like animals? Full of beautiful scenery, poetically breathtaking symbolism, animalistic sex and behaviour, and notorious for its faint-inducing scenes involving fish-hooks.Read More »

This art-film is an imaginary documentary film about a man who sets off from Paris to Siberia in search of his father’s past: His father was a communist who had voluntarily gone from France to the Soviet Union to work on a big engineering project in Magadan. Now his adult son travels by train from Paris, through the Ukraine into the depths of Russia, in search of the values and ideas that had been so relevant to his father. The title of the film alludes to Lenin’s definition of communism: communism equals Soviets plus electricity. (Soviets are councils).Read More »

A young woman named Miyuki returns to her hometown, camera in hand, after a difficult breakup. As she walks and takes photographs, she meets a variety of people and begins to realize she doesn’t have to go through this painful time in her life all alone.Read More »