A collection of magical tales based upon the actual dreams of director Akira Kurosawa.
Child I
Based on the life of Hyakken Uchida, a Japanese author and academic. The film opens with Uchida resigning his job as a German professor at the onset of WWII. The story is told mostly in vignettes as he is cared for by former students in his old age.
In which Scheherazade tells of how desolation invaded men : “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad !
Fiore, an Italian conman, arrives in post Communist Albania with Gino, his young apprentice, to set up a shoe factory that will never open. The con requires a native Albanian, so they designate Spiro, an impoverished and confused former political prisoner as chairman of the board. When Fiore returns to Italy to get government funds for the project, Spiro unexpectedly disappears and Gino sets out on a journey to find him. The search leads him to discover Spiro's tragic personal history and witness Albanian poverty firsthand.
A jobless young couple, Yoshigi and Tsutue, wind up at the outskirts of the Suzaki red-light district in Tokyo. Tsutue talks her way into a job pouring sake for male customers at a small bar run by a sympathetic older woman, while Yoshigi is shunted off into a nearby noodle shop, where he gets a job delivering noodles. Tsutue charms and runs off with one of her clients. Yoshigi, ignoring the attentions of a sweet co-worker, pursues Tsutue.
A poor boy and girl in rags gather wood in the snow. They pass by a tailor, a butcher and a baker, all of whom pity the children. Later, they arrive home. Their poor mother sets before them the only food she can: Stale bread. The children get ready for bed; In their dreams, visions of ice cream and donuts, candies and cakes fill their sleeping minds-- Will they awake to the same sorry situation?
Writer Sílvio Proença needs to travel to São Paulo in order to promote his new book. At the airport, he meets a group of old mates. With the boarding canceled due to a strong storm, the group goes to the apartment of Marialva, daughter of one of Proença's friends. Seduced by Marialva's music and charms, Proença spends the night there, where he wakes up the next day, completely naked. Still groggy from his hangover, he goes to pick up the bread left outside the apartment; that's when the wind closes the door and leaves him naked outside.
After the Akizuku clan fall in defeat to rival clan Yamana, Princess Yuki (Nagasawa Masami) and general Rokurota (Hiroshi Abe), take cover in a hidden fortress, along with their clan and gold treasury. Fortuitously stumbling into the hideaways, brash young miner Takezo (Matsumoto Jun) and his bumbling sidekick Shinhachi (Miyagawa Daiuske) hatch a daring plan to help transport the gold out of enemy terrain - in exchange for a share of the stash, of course. With assassins hot in pursuit, Yuki disguises as a male and ventures into the real world with Rukurota and her peasant companions, getting her first taste of danger, toil, and budding romance with the strong-minded and willful Takezo.
Comedian Brad Williams' standup topics include his experiences as a little person and how to please your woman in bed.
Bickering husband and wife Tim and Sally Willows mutter a few angry words to a statue who grants their wish and they wind up living each other's life.
In order to impress the father of a girl he is keen on, a young man goes to the city in search of work. In his letters home he writes of his various jobs which her imagination expands into much nobler ones than those that he is actually attempting.
A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a hot, crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a life of crime. With each step, cop and criminal’s lives become more intertwined and the investigation becomes an examination of Murakami’s own dark side.
What would it be like to step inside a great work of art, have it come alive around you, and even observe the artist as he sketches the very reality you are experiencing? From Lech Majewski, one of Poland's most acclaimed filmmakers, The Mill and the Cross is a cinematic re-staging of Pieter Bruegel's masterpiece "Procession to Calvary," presented alongside the story of its creation.
It's early autumn and Dr. Headley eagerly demonstrates what seems to be a miraculous cure for tuberculosis. Not far from where he is working, the disease seems preparing to soon claim yet another life, a teenage girl named Winifred. Winifred's mother and little sister Trixie are devastated. When Trixie hears the family doctor say of Winifred that "when the last leaf falls, she will have passed away," she interprets the doctor's words literally. Thinking over what she has heard, she determines to do everything possible to save her sister.
The Enos duo convince Cletus, aka The Bandit, to come out of hiding and help them promote their new restaurant. With a little coaxing, he agrees, producing an almost-creaky Trigger as his mode of transport. But his nemesis, Sheriff Buford T. Justice, is on the hunt, forcing Cletus and Trigger to hit the road. Can they steer clear of the vengeful sheriff?
The story revolves around the clash between Ayyappan, a senior police officer who serves at the Attappadi Police Station and Havildar Koshi, who comes to the village with a motive.
Mum and Dad, and their 'adopted' children, Birdie & Elbie, work at the airport. The family live off whatever they scavenge from cargo holds, offices and hotels - including a steady stream of transient workers who populate the airport's soulless hub. When Lena, a young Polish office cleaner, is befriended by Birdie, she gets drawn into a nightmarish world of torture, murder and perversity.
Lisbon, 1938. Mr. Pereira is the editor of the culture section of an evening paper. Although fascism is on the rise in Europe, like in nearby civil war Spain or even inside Portugal itself in the form of Salazar's regime, Pereira only concerns himself with writing bios and translating French novels. Things change after he hires a young writer as his assistant, getting to know also his girlfriend – both opponents to the regime – and reluctantly helps them when they begin to get in trouble for subversive activities. Eventually, he's forced to take a stand...
The story centers on an elderly hibakusha, whose husband was one of 80,000 human beings killed in the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, caring for her four grandchildren over the summer. She learns of a long-lost brother, Suzujiro, living in Hawaii who wants her to visit him before he dies.
Aspiring to an easy job as personal physician to a wealthy family, Noboru Yasumoto is disappointed when his first post after medical school takes him to a small country clinic under the gruff doctor Red Beard. Yasumoto rebels in numerous ways, but Red Beard proves a wise and patient teacher. He gradually introduces his student to the unglamorous side of the profession, ultimately assigning him to care for a prostitute rescued from a local brothel.
Set in the years before and during World War I, this epic tale tells the story of a rich Argentine family, one of its two descending branches being half of French heritage, the other being half German. Following the death of the family patriarch, the man's two daughters and their families resettle to France and Germany, respectively. In time the Great War breaks out, putting members of the family on opposing sides.
Dedicato al mare Egeo is a forgotten and bizarre co-production produced between Italy and Japan from 1979, starring the famous Italian porn star Illona Staller (Cicciolina) and directed by the famous Japanese pinter, printmaker and novelist Masuo Ikeda (1934–1997) from his own script based on his novel “Ege-kai ni sasagu”, for which he won the Akutagawa Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Japan. Ikeda’s vigorous artistic activity even included screenplay writing and film directing. With this movie, Masuo Ikeda has undoubtedly left his mark on the ’70s Italian skin cinema.
Swapaanam (Malayalam: സ്വപാനം) (English translation: The Voiding Soul) is a Malayalam film directed by Shaji N. Karun and produced by M. Rajan for Horizon Entertainments. The film features Jayaram and Kadambari in the lead roles,[1] alongside Siddique, Vineeth, Lakshmi Gopalaswamy in supporting roles. The cinematography was held by Saji Nair and music was composed by Sreevalsan J Menon, while the script was written by Harikrishnan and Sajeev Pazhoor, based on Shaji’s own story.[2] The film was screened in the Dubai International Film Festival.[3] The film released with Auro 3D sound in selected theatres, becoming the third Indian film to employ the technology after Vishwaroopam(Tamil) and 1- Nenokkadine (Telugu).[4]
Four different couples have a romantic week over New Year's Eve. Both coming out of failed marriages, Ji-ho and Hyo-young are not open to the possibility of new love, while Jin-ah heads to the other side of globe and encounters Jae-hun.
A gifted artist finds himself in a broken balance between creating world class art and the all too silent struggle of self care as his life begins to unravel because of his Dissociative Identity Disorder.
In the affluent, gated community of Camelot Gardens, bored wives indiscriminately sleep around while their unwitting husbands try desperately to climb the social ladder. Trent, a 21-year-old outsider who mows the neighborhood lawns, quietly observes the infidelities and hypocrisies of this overly privileged society. When Devon, a 10-year-old daughter from one family, forges a friendship with Trent, things suddenly get very complicated.
Dr. Henry Jekyll is a well-regarded physician whose evenings are spent researching a rare and sacred Amazonian flower so potent it's said to literally separate the soul, giving life to man's Dark Self. The obsessive experiments to isolate its psychotropic properties happen to coincide with a series of brutal murders gripping the city with fear. Jekyll knows it's no coincidence. While his nights are lost to him, he awakens with bloody mementos and violent memories of the screams of his victims.
Down-and-out artist Joe Manning (John Bromfield) wakes up from a night of drunken revelry in a jail cell, where he's being held on suspicion for the murder of a nightclub singer.
Over a trio of summers, a caretaker for luxury condominiums relies on her resourcefulness and her eye for opportunity to take advantage of whatever comes her way.
Ken Harrison is an artist that lives to make sculptures. One day he is involved in a car accident, and is paralyzed from his neck down. All he can do is talk and move his head, and he wants to die. Whilst he is in hospital he makes friends with some of the staff, and they support him when he goes to trial to be allowed to die.
A two-part feature directed separately by Shimizu and his colleague Keisuke Toyoshima. Unrelated to each other, both have a common goal: to bring ghosts and aliens together in pure, referential and absurdistic delirium, including neo-Nazi specters, zombie yakuzas and nasty aliens.
Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge, he follows. After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Quentin arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Quentin soon learns that there are clues, and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer Quentin gets, the less he sees of the girl he thought he knew.
At dawn, Kelsey Akioka hikes out onto the Kalapana lava fields with a camera in hand and 80 lbs of gear on his back. We observe his methodical photography process amid one of nature’s most beautiful and chaotic events. Under the shade of a pop-up tent, he sells these photos at a small makeshift marketplace to apathetic tourists. By the end of the day, Kelsey returns home, exhausted and worn, to his son and elderly father. When he learns his friend is sacrificing his passion and moving away from home to pursue a better life for his family, Kelsey begins to question his own choices. As his frustrations spill into his home life, Kelsey must confront the turmoil stirring within him.
Wasteland is a five-part anthology film that deals with isolation, mental illness, and the subjectivity of reality. Each of the five parts can be watched individually, but when viewed in sequence, each story brings out a more interesting and distinct context to its respective pieces.
A crusty, eccentric priest recruits three reluctant convicts to help him rescue a children's leper colony from a Pacific island menaced by a smoldering volcano.
Teenage twins battle dark forces hidden beneath Auckland's volcanoes.