Filmmaker Elia Suleiman travels to different cities and finds unexpected parallels to his homeland of Palestine.
The philosophical tale revolves around an elderly monkey prince who wakes up injured and disoriented in an environment he does not recognise. He navigates this new urban world with the support of a young monkey called Tom.
A young girl whose father is an ex-convict and whose mother is a junkie finds it difficult to conform and tries to find comfort in a quirky combination of Elvis and the punk scene.
Danesh works in a barbershop and dreams about becoming an actor. Manfered is an agent who would introduce Danesh to a famous director if he collects enough long hairs to be used as wigs. At the same time a series of murders have worried everyone. Who is the killer and is the barbershop in any way related?
Fanny, a single woman in her mid-thirties, has had enough of relationships that don't work, so she decides to seduce Paul, a colleague from the office, into a brief one-night sexual encounter. Everything is prepared when Paul arrives, but then, thanks to Fanny's clumsiness, things don't exactly work out as planned...
Santa Claus tries to outrun a gang of knife-wielding youth. It's one of several vignettes of Palestinian life in Israel - in a neighborhood in Nazareth and at Al-Ram checkpoint in East Jerusalem. Most of the stories are droll, some absurd, one is mythic and fanciful; few words are spoken. A man who goes through his mail methodically each morning has a heart attack. His son visits him in the hospital. The son regularly meets a woman at Al-Ram; they sit in a car, hands caressing. Once, she defies Israeli guards at the checkpoint; later, ninja-like, she takes on soldiers at a target range. A red balloon floats free overhead. Neighbors toss garbage over walls. Life goes on until it doesn't.
Hong Kong as seen through a cab window. Inhabitants discuss their lives, problems and dreams as they are driven to their destination through the chaotic streets of Hong Kong.
A rather regular state official, who works at the building authority, becomes a puppet of a few super rich. They want to make quite a lot of profit from a planned large-scale building project. Quicker than anticipated, the father-to-be gets surprised by a couple of amenities and notices that life isn’t too bad in the sphere of these semi-legal affairs. Soon, however, he has a prosecuting attorney on his tails and has to decide himself for a side.
Artemis, a single 24-year-old living in Paris, France, receives a frantic phone call from her mother—her father Paris is in the hospital and she must return home to Athens to care for him. Resentful of the tasking as she grew up estranged from her father, she becomes reacquainted with him over one emotional summer, learning the secret as to why their relationship was stifled when she finds out Jacob, Paris' friend, who's been always around from her childhood, was actually her dad's lover.
In a remote Icelandic town, an off duty police chief begins to suspect a local man to have had an affair with his wife, who has recently died in a car accident. Gradually his obsession for finding out the truth accumulates and inevitably begins to endanger himself and his loved ones. A story of grief, revenge and unconditional love.
Director Jean Renoir’s entrancing first color feature—shot entirely on location in India—is a visual tour de force. Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, the film eloquently contrasts the growing pains of three young women with the immutability of the Bengal river around which their daily lives unfold. Enriched by Renoir’s subtle understanding and appreciation for India and its people, The River gracefully explores the fragile connections between transitory emotions and everlasting creation.
Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the state of their chosen artform in the early 21st century.
Between scenes from his concert in São Paulo's oft-inaccessible Theatro Municipal, rapper and activist Emicida celebrates the rich legacy of Black Brazilian culture.
During the late 1990s, a busy working-class Singaporean couple hires a Filipino woman as a maid and nanny to their young son.
1779. Eight-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven, called "Louis", is already known as a musical prodigy. He learns to go his own way - much to the dismay of the people around him. Some years later, he meets Mozart during times of political upheaval. The unconventional genius and French Revolution are sparking a fire in Louis' heart; he doesn't want to serve a master - only the arts. Facing times of family tragedies and unrequited love, he almost gives up. However, Louis makes it to Vienna to study under Haydn in 1792, and the rest is history. Who was this man, whose music has since touched countless hearts and minds? At the end of his life, the master is isolated by loss of loved ones and hearing. Surely though, he was way ahead of his times.
A reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendor and banality, guided by a Scheherazade-esque narrator. Inconsequential moments have the same significance as historical events. Simultaneously an ode and a lament, presents a kaleidoscope of all that is eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.
Salma Zidane, a widow, lives simply from her grove of lemon trees in the West Bank's occupied territory. The Israeli defence minister and his wife move next door, forcing the Secret Service to order the trees' removal for security. The stoic Salma seeks assistance from the Palestinian Authority, Israeli army, and a young attorney, Ziad Daud, who takes the case. In this allegory, does David stand a chance against Goliath?
An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
In 1917 when the British forces are bogged down in front of the Turkish and German lines in Palestine they rely on the Australian light horse regiment to break the deadlock.
Drunk and disillusioned Roman, Marcellus Gallio, wins Jesus' robe in a dice game after the crucifixion. Marcellus has never been a man of faith like his slave, Demetrius, but when Demetrius escapes with the robe, Marcellus experiences disturbing visions and feels guilty for his actions. Convinced that destroying the robe will cure him, Marcellus sets out to find Demetrius — and discovers his Christian faith along the way.
Santa Claus tries to outrun a gang of knife-wielding youth. It's one of several vignettes of Palestinian life in Israel - in a neighborhood in Nazareth and at Al-Ram checkpoint in East Jerusalem. Most of the stories are droll, some absurd, one is mythic and fanciful; few words are spoken. A man who goes through his mail methodically each morning has a heart attack. His son visits him in the hospital. The son regularly meets a woman at Al-Ram; they sit in a car, hands caressing. Once, she defies Israeli guards at the checkpoint; later, ninja-like, she takes on soldiers at a target range. A red balloon floats free overhead. Neighbors toss garbage over walls. Life goes on until it doesn't.
A visual interpretation of the poem "the girl / the scream" by Mahmud Darwish.
Born in Brooklyn to Palestinian refugee parents, Soraya decides to journey to the country of her ancestry when she discovers that her grandfather's savings have been frozen in a Jaffa bank account since his 1948 exile. However, she soon finds that her simple plan is a complicated undertaking — one that takes her further from her comfort zone than she'd imagined.
Two childhood friends are recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
An examination of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 through to the present day. A semi-biographic film, in four chapters, about a family spanning from 1948 until recent times. Combined with intimate memories of each member, the film attempts to portray the daily life of those Palestinians who remained in their land and were labelled "Israeli-Arabs," living as a minority in their own homeland.
In Alexandria, in 1938, Darley, a young British schoolmaster and poet, makes friends through Pursewarden, the British consular officer, with Justine, the beautiful and mysterious wife of a Coptic banker. He observes the affairs of her heart and incidentally discovers that she is involved in a plot against the British, meant to arm the Jewish underground in Palestine. The plot finally fails, Justine is sent to jail and Darley decides to return to England.
Hasan Everywhere is an animation which broaches the subtlety of a relationship between a man and a woman who bear the passports of enemies, to sympathetically deal with the subjects of death, grief, lost opportunity; but mostly it seeks to demonstrate the possibility of friendship triumphing over the deepest of rifts between two people. In that regard it is most unusual among the standard fare of animated shorts.
As Abu Laila is forced to leave his job as a judge and become a cab driver, he faces a hectic challenge when he's told by his wife to bring a gift and a cake for their daughter's seventh birthday, which proves to be a task more complicated than he expected.
Chronicle of a Disappearance unfolds in a series of seemingly unconnected cinematic tableaux, each of them focused on incidents or characters which seldom reappear later in the film. Among the many unrelated scenes, there is a Palestinian actress struggling to find an apartment in West Jerusalem, the owner of the Holy Land souvenir shop preparing merchandise for incoming Japanese tourists, a group of old women gossiping about their relatives, and an Israeli police van which screeches to a halt so several heavily armed soldiers can get off the car and urinate.
When a bombing in a Tel Aviv café takes the lives of both a young Palestinian bomber and a young Israeli soldier, their two mothers encounter one another in a police station, neither aware of who the other is, until realization sets in...
A free spirited woman dancer, Kamar, finds herself the lonely wife of a prisoner, Zaid, and away from everything she loves until she returns to the dance, defying societys taboos. At the dance Kamar is confronted with Kais, a Palestinian returnee. Sparks fly between Kamar and Kais, creating more than a passionate, emotional dance for the both of them. Matters become even more complicated when Zaid's sentence is extended. Kamar's life is thrown into turmoil as she becomes increasingly attached to Kais, and caught in the midst of her desire to dance and breaking the family and society taboos of the prisoner's wife's role while life under occupation rages on.
Samir, 43, is the owner of a shoe shop in Ramallah who has never seen the sea. He decides to sneak past Israeli borders with other Palestinian construction workers to fulfill his dream of seeing the sea.
Hussein, a Palestinian young man, receives a letter from the Israeli post office in which he must show up to pick up a mysterious delivery. What he finds out right there is that he has to pay US$ 20,000 to take it out.