Running on Empty (German: Der Lebensversicherer) is a 2006 German drama film directed by Bülent Akinci. It was entered into the 28th Moscow International Film Festival where Jens Harzer won the award for Best Actor.
Running on Empty (German: Der Lebensversicherer) is a 2006 German drama film directed by Bülent Akinci. It was entered into the 28th Moscow International Film Festival where Jens Harzer won the award for Best Actor.
2006-02-14
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An emotional journey of a former school teacher, who writes letters for illiterate people, and a young boy, whose mother has just died, as they search for the father he never knew.
A super-model begins to question her glitzy, frenetic lifestyle when she awakes after a all night party to find a strange man in her bed. She sees a surfer riding the waves below, follows him to his tented camp on the banks of a river. 'Leatherlip' earns a living making leather goods and roaming around on an extraordinary 'trike' with his worldly goods and surfboard strapped on an overhead rack. They fall in love and she abandons her previous life. Then inexplicably she disappears. Leatherlip sets off on a cross-country odyssey to find her, knowing only that her father lives on a boat on the West Coast...
Various lives converge on an isolated island, all connected by an author whose novel has become inextricably entwined with his own life.
A prison guard begins a tentative romance with the unsuspecting widow of a man whose execution he presided over.
When a first generation American son learns of his Russian immigrant father's financial catastrophe, he reluctantly agrees to one last tumultuous trip to their beloved family lake house before it's sold.
Pan Xiao, a young lawyer, goes to a rural small village settled in the western desert lands of China to handle the case of a falcon poacher who has ran over a policeman. Pan wins the case through sophisticated reasoning and forces the poacher to give him his car as a reward. Then, he just drives back home, but the return will not be an easy one.
Branko has been a truck driver for only a few months, a choice that is quite understandable, given that he now earns three times as much as he did as a schoolteacher. But everything has a price, which is not always quantifiable in terms of money. As children we were told: “work ennobles man”. But here the opposite seems true: it is Branko, with his efficiency, his obstinacy, his good will, who ennobles a job that grows more and more alienating, absurd and enslaving.
The heterosexual man Axel is thrown out of his girlfriends home for cheating and ends up moving in with a gay man. Axel learns the advantages of living with gay men even though they are attracted to him and when his girlfriend wants him back he must make a tough decision.
A boy and his brother run away from home and hitch cross-country, with help from a girl they meet, to compete in the ultimate video-game championship.
A Hungarian immigrant, his friend, and his cousin go on an unpredictable adventure across America.
In the 1930s, bored waitress Bonnie Parker falls in love with an ex-con named Clyde Barrow and together they start a violent crime spree through the country, stealing cars and robbing banks.
In a countryside house in the Ecuadorean Andes Mountains lives Christine, a paralytic old woman who has decided to be isolated from the world. In that place, she found refuge in old memories of her first love, Manuel. Years after getting married and widowed from another man, Christine and her daughter, Julia, decide to put together a plan in order to reunite two young people at their countryside house. Christine's drive is for them to fall in love, so she can relive love through their eyes.
In the slums of the upper West Side of Manhattan, tensions are high as a gang of Polish-Americans compete against a gang of recently immigrated Puerto Ricans, but this doesn't stop two romantics from each gang falling in love.
It all starts with a bang. The car breaks through the crash barrier and falls off the bridge. The lights go out. After that, he is not able to see anymore. His optic nerve is severed, from now on the young stage-director Jakob is blind. His life will change and nothing will ever be the same. Jakob cannot handle the idea of never being able to see again and screams at the only woman who is able and willing to help him, Lily. A rehabilitation teacher, she helps the blind deal with the darkness. Lily has been living with it since birth, she too is blind.
German journalist Philip Winter has a case of writer’s block when trying to write an article about the United States. He decides to return to Germany, and while trying to book a flight, encounters a German woman and her nine year old daughter Alice doing the same. The three become friends (almost out of necessity) and while the mother asks Winter to mind Alice temporarily, it quickly becomes apparent that Alice will be his responsibility for longer than he expected.
Several lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginner's course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives. The film, which unspools the connections and family drama shared between the students, complies with several aesthetic principles of Dogme 95 movement.
Jeud is a young man deceived by love. With all the money he has left, he buys a car in order to go on a road trip. By chance, he picks up two people who go along with him. Nud, a Southern-Thai girl who was trafficked into prostitution, but managed to escape. Roeng, a man with a history and who is on his way to reclaim his past.The further the three travel together, the more their true selves starts to be revealed. All of them begin to find hope in the future when they manage to discard the disappointments in their past.
Working-class waitress Slim thought she was entering a life of domestic bliss when she married Mitch, the man of her dreams. After the arrival of their first child, her picture perfect life is shattered when she discovers Mitch's hidden possessive dark side, a controlling and abusive alter ego that can turn trust, love and tranquility into terror. Terrified for her child's safety, Slim flees with her daughter. Relentless in his pursuit and enlisting the aid of lethal henchmen, Mitch continually stalks the prey that was once his family.
An introverted insurance executive at a car rental service is annoyed by his hyperactive, garrulous coworker, but the two end up becoming friends.