The film focuses on the fate of three characters whose emotions are numb because of the blows of life and beings around them. None of them has the courage to change their lives, but their mutual encounter give them the chance to get out of this emotional drowsiness.
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Drama
Transe / Trance (2006) Teresa Villaverde, Ana Moreira, Viktor Rakov, Robinson Stévenin
Sonia, a girl from St Petersburg, decides to seek a better life in western Europe. She first gets a job at a car dealer in Germany. But she is suddenly kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. She will be dragged from country to country and resistance will only bring her misery and humiliation.
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Villa Amalia (2009) Benoît Jacquot, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Xavier Beauvois
Villa Amalia is the story of Ann, a musician, whose life is turned upside down by a kiss. When she sees Thomas kissing another woman, Ann makes a clean break, leaving him and everything else far behind her. Suddenly unsure of everything that seemed so certain, Ann knows only that she must change her life and become someone else to find herself. With her music and the friendship of Georges, who pops out of her distant past, she sets off on a journey that will take her to an island where the Villa Amalia stands.
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11’e 10 kala / 10 to 11 (2009) Pelin Esmer, Nejat Isler, Mithat Esmer, Laçin Ceylan
10 to 11 is the story of a passionate collector Mithat and the concierge of the building, Ali. For Mithat Istanbul is as vast as his collections and for Ali is nothing more than a few blocks around the building. When the neighbors decide to have the building rebuilt with the fear of earthquake and the wish for a more valuable house, Mithat’s most challenging struggle to save his collections begins. The building becomes the common destiny of these two men living alone. Their relationship that begins with the collaboration to save the continuity of the collections changes track with Mithat’s handing Istanbul over to Ali and ends when they involuntarily change each other’s fate.
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Sous les bombes / Under the Bombs (2007) Philippe Aractingi, Nada Abou Farhat, Georges Khabbaz, Rawia Elchab
Under the bombs, a woman searches for her son. A man accompanies her. They have nothing in common. Toni is Christian and dreams of leaving the country. Zeina is Shiite, and has emigrated to Dubai. Back in Lebanon to try and save her son, she realizes she doesn’t want to leave anymore. And yet, despite this all, Toni and Zeina will love each other, as a kind of response to the death striking all around them.
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Montag kommen die Fenster / Windows on Monday (2006) Ulrich Köhler, Isabelle Menke, Hans-Jochen Wagner, Amber Bongard
Frieder and his wife Nina, a doctor, are fixing up their house, though their relationship is obviously strained. Instead of picking up their young daughter Charlotte, Nina drives off to visit her brother Christoph in an isolated cabin. From there, she cycles to a sports hotel in the woods where she stays. Aimlessly wandering around the hotel, she has a brief encounter with an old tennis pro who has been giving demonstrations. Her brother, Frieder, and Charlotte find her, but she does not come home with them. After all the old windows have been removed, Frieder rejects the replacement ones that are delivered. Frieder has a liaison an old girlfriend Maria, who is now Charlotte’s nursery school teacher. Nina returns to the house without windows.
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The Great Lie (1941) Edmund Goulding, Bette Davis, George Brent, Mary Astor
Sandra and Pete elope but their marriage is invalid since she’s not yet divorced. Sandra is, however, pregnant by Pete. Pete marries his former fiancée Maggie, then flies to South America where his plane crashes. Maggie pays Sandra to let her adopt Pete’s baby. Pete returns “from the dead”. Sandra and Maggie contend for Pete and the baby.
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Glue (2006) Alexis Dos Santos, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Nahuel Viale, Inés Efron
A teenage summer in a small town in the desert, a dysfunctional family, a rock band, a can full of glue, two boys, one girl, loads of tongue kisses, dry heat, wind in Patagonia, existential angst… A teenage story in the middle of nowhere.
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Blume in Love (1973) Paul Mazursky, George Segal, Susan Anspach, Kris Kristofferson
Lawyer Stephen Blume, specialized in divorces, lives a paradoxical situation when, having his own marriage break up, is still in love with his ex-wife.
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Tadjrebeh / The Experience (1973) Abbas Kiarostami, Parviz Naderi, Hossein Yarmohammadi
Earning his keep at a photography studio where he also sleeps, an orphan aspires to be closer to the object of his affection, an older girl from a higher social class.
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Casa de Areia / House of Sand (2005) Andrucha Waddington, Fernanda Montenegro, Fernanda Torres, Ruy Guerra
Áurea arrives at a town in the dunes of State of Maranhão, Brazil, in 1910, having for female company only her mother Maria. She is pregnant and wants a way out of that arid place. But leaving is difficult and, somehow, she still hopes to find happiness there. The film follows these two lives for three generations, including Áurea’s daughter.
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The Poll Diaries / Poll (2010) Chris Kraus, Paula Beer, Edgar Selge, Tambet Tuisk
In the summer of 1914, thirteen-year-old Oda von Siering (Paula Beer) leaves Berlin to join her family and an assortment of German and Russian aristocrats on an estate in Estonia. The von Siering family home is a character in its own right, a hulking, neoclassical manor that hovers on stilts above the sea. Oda arrives there bearing her mother’s coffin and a gift requested by her surgeon father: a jarred, two-headed fetus to add to his laboratory of gruesome curiosities. Ebbo von Siering (Edgar Selge) sees himself in his daughter when she calmly and expertly learns to suture the corpse of a cat. What he fails to recognize – and what Oda luckily understands – is that their interest in science is their only similarity. His dedication to experimentation is linked to an appalling obsession with power and destruction, while Oda is genuinely curious about life. Her quick, quiet intelligence complements her humanity and her lucid understanding of right and wrong. When she strays from a family…
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Yoen dokufuden: Hitokiri okatsu (1969) Nobuo Nakagawa, Junko Miyazono, Reiko Ônobuta, Kô Nishimura
Okatsu, the daughter of a katana instructor must avenge a judge who rapes and kills his father. Next to the wild Rui, will conduct a bloody persecution.
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L’assedio / Besieged (1998) Thandie Newton, David Thewlis, Claudio Santamaria, Bernardo Bertolucci
When an African dictator jails her husband, Shandurai goes into exile in Italy, studying medicine and keeping house for Mr. Kinsky, an eccentric English pianist and composer. She lives in one room of his Roman palazzo. He besieges her with flowers, gifts, and music, declaring passionately that he loves her, would go to Africa with her, would do anything for her. “What do you know of Africa?,” she asks, then, in anguish, shouts, “Get my husband out of jail!” The rest of the film plays out the implications of this scene and leaves Shandurai with a choice.
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The Comedians (1967) Peter Glenville, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness
Set in the Haiti of “Papa Doc” Duvalier, The Comedians tells the story of a sardonic Welsh hotel owner and his encroaching fatalism as he watches Haiti sink into barbarism and poverty. Complications include his inability to sell the hotel so he can leave, a friendship with a rebel leader, some politically “charged” hotel guests, an affair with the German-born wife of a South American ambassador, and the manipulations of a British arms dealer who’s in over his head.
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