English

After the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, a boy grew up obsessed with all the movies he couldn’t see. He met a mysterious film collector who saved thousands of films from destruction by the new regime. Despite arrest and torture, the collector refused to give up his secret hoard. Together they forged a friendship based on passion for cinema and resistance against tyranny. The boy escaped to exile in London to become a filmmaker, and tells their shared story of obsession and celluloid dreams.Read More »

An intimate look at the life of astronauts aboard the International Space Station and the future of space exploration.Read More »

With Anton Rodgers, Lucy Gutteridge, Julian Holloway, Rosalind Ayres.

When Sophie, the manicurist, learns that her best friend Muriel is to be married to the notorious and middle-aged Lord Quex, she determines to prevent it by exposing him for the despicable roué he is. But her plans go badly wrong. Pinero’s bitter-sweet comedy, first performed in 1898, scandalised the playgoers of the day with its unblushing portrayal of marital and sexual mores.

Adapted from the play by the British writer Arthur Wing Pinero.Read More »

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The spirit of Tarkovsky is never far from this rebarbative fable of guilt and atonement by Pavel Lounguine.

A prologue set in 1943 reveals how a young Russian sailor, captured by the Nazis, saved his own life by shooting his captain. Thirty years later the man, Anatoly (Pyotr Mamonov), lives a monkish existence on a remote island in the White Sea, begging God to forgive his “sin” and baffling his fellow monks with his strange behaviour. The film’s austere palette of white, black and icy blues are contrasted with the fiery reds of the furnace Anatoly tends – his personal hellfire or a purifying flame? Nothing much is certain in this bleakly enigmatic tale, which moves at a pace most will find unacceptable. Those who stay the course will perhaps, like the monk himself, want to take a long rest afterwards.Read More »

Fact based drama about an American couple on vacation in Italy in 1994 with their two children who are attacked and shot by highway bandits. Shortly, they discover that their son is brain dead. The parents are then faced with the hard decision to donate the boy’s organs, which ultimately led to saving the lives of seven seriously ill Italian patients.Read More »

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A corrupt hospital administrator decides to get as much money as possible from the patients by any means necessary – lie, cheat or steal.Read More »

A loony farmer finds a prehistoric monster hiding in a cavern on his land. To feed his newest critter, the farmer kidnaps three people. The three desperately try to escape and finally, one of them succeeds.Read More »

The 1937 Thirteenth Chair was the third film version of the 1919 stage melodrama by Bayard Veiller. Dame Mae Whitty dominates the proceedings as Mme. La Grange, a phony mystic who is on hand when a man is killed during one of her seances. The killing takes place in the home of a provincial British Indian governor, and the victim was a blackmailer whom everyone present had good reason to despise. Complicating matters for Mme. La Grange is the fact that one of the suspects, Nell O’Neill (Madge Evans) is her own daughter. Dissatisfied with the manner in which brusque Scotland Yard inspector Marney (Lewis Stone) is investigating the case, La Grange takes matters in her own hands, stage-managing a second seance so that the guilty party will be frightened into a confession. More slickly produced than the 1929 version of Thirteenth Chair, the remake isn’t quite as enjoyable, lacking two vital ingredients: Margaret Wycherly and Bela Lugosi, the earlier version’s Mme. LaGrange and Inspector Marney.Read More »

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Troubled, unemployed New York office worker Sue (Anna Thomson) lives in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. However, job interviews lead nowhere, and she’s behind in the rent, forced to accept a prostitute as a roommate. Meanwhile, she veers close to a mental precipice as she wanders the city, seeking human contact. She finds a friend in free-lance journalist Ben (Matthew Powers), but after he leaves the country on an assignment, she becomes increasingly disturbed and unable to cope, facing both eviction and mental collapse. Shown at 1997-98 film festivals (Toronto, Berlin).Read More »