

Brings viewers into a small Chinese city and inspires familiarity with the rhythms of everyday existence, with people's dreams, shortcomings and illusions in a way that is universal.

Brings viewers into a small Chinese city and inspires familiarity with the rhythms of everyday existence, with people's dreams, shortcomings and illusions in a way that is universal.
2005-02-18
7.283
7.3A movie fan escapes from a labour camp during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and strikes up a relationship with a homeless female vagabond.
7.7An unrecognizable, charred corpse discovered in a remote mountain village in China connects three local stories.
7.3In the Chinese town of Fuyang, four brothers go about their day-to-day lives, their destinies shaped by love and challenges.
6.4Desmond Doyle is devastated when his wife abandons their family on the day after Christmas. His unemployment, and the fact that there is no woman in the house to care for the children—Evelyn, Dermot and Maurice—make it clear to the authorities this is an untenable situation. The Catholic Church and the Irish courts decide to put the Doyle children into Church-run orphanages.
7.1A former boxing champion takes decides to break a few rules and train orphans from China's remote countryside in order to give them a future.
6.9In Chengdu, China, a retired female opera singer named Master Chang takes in a trio of young tenants into her boarding home. The tenants include a rock singer and a college student who has run away from home.
7.1On the edge of the Gobi desert in Northwest China, Lang returns to his hometown after being released from jail. While working for the local dog patrol team to clear the town of stray dogs before the Olympic Games, he strikes up an unlikely connection with a black dog. These two lonely souls embark on a journey together.
6.9A moment of impulsiveness turns Gao Zhilei into a "stay-at-home" individual, but he never expected his life to take a turn in the opposite direction. A series of changes compel him to take on his responsibilities as the head of the family. When life's burdens hit hard, he must confront himself and start anew.
7.2Ah-Ching and his friends have just finished school in their island fishing village, and now spend most of their time drinking and fighting. Three of them decide to go to the port city of Kaohsiung to look for work. They find an apartment through relatives, and Ah-Ching is attracted to the girlfriend of a neighbor. There they face the harsh realities of the big city.
6.2Heaven Leigh Casteel, gifted and intelligent, is the eldest of five dirt-poor children struggling to survive in a mountain shack. As she endures neglect and abuse, Heaven discovers a dark secret that changes everything she thought she knew about her family. Then tragedy tears her world apart and she must forge her own way in the cruel, unknown world.
6.5Alone in her empty flat, from her window Anne observes the people passing by who nervously snatch up the personal belongings and pieces of furniture she has put out on the pavement. Her final gesture of taking a ring off her finger signals she is leaving her previous life in Holland behind. She goes to Ireland, where she chooses to lead a solitary, wandering existence, striding through the austere landscapes of Connemara. During her travels, she discovers a house that is home to a hermit, Martin.
7.2Young teen girl Xiu Xiu is sent away to a remote corner of the Sichuan steppes for manual labor in 1975 (sending young people to there was a part of Cultural Revolution in China). A year later, she agrees to go to even more remote spot with a Tibetan saddle tramp Lao Jin to learn horse herding.
6.9The employees of a massage parlour share a close bond with each other as they all share a trait in common, they are all visually impaired.
7.2Teased by hallucinations, Shu, a slacker living in a rural village, struggles with an ever-loosening grip on reality. Yet when one of his visions manifests as real, his fellow villagers come to regard him as a clairvoyant. Can Shu genuinely see into the future? Is he actually just a basket case? Or is he perhaps more lucid than he seems, and pulling a fast one on everyone?
6.3Clara and her two sons escape from her abusive husband with little more than their car and plan to start over in New York. After the car towed away, the family meets Alice, who gets them into an emergency shelter. While stealing food at a Russian restaurant called ‘Winter Palace’, Clara meets Marc, who has been given the chance to help the old eatery regain its former glory. The ‘Winter Palace’ soon becomes a place of unexpected encounters between people who are all undergoing some sort of crisis and whom fate has now brought together.
7.3A young man recalls his childhood growing up in a poor alley in Beijing during the 1950s and 1960s.
6.5When seventeen-year-old Hannah stumbles upon a website about Thinspiration--an online community devoted to anorexia as a life choice--she becomes an obsessive follower of the site founder, ButterflyAna. By the time Hannah's family realizes what is happening and get Hannah the help she needs, the disease has fully taken hold and Hannah is refusing to eat. Will this family be able to exorcise the demon of anorexia from their lives?
6.8Years after her boyfriend left her for the big city and promised to bring her there after he’s settled down, a Chinese woman sets out on a journey to be reunited with him.
6.9On the French island of Mont Saint-Michel, Jack, a failed presidential candidate, Tom, a poet and Sonia, a physicist, engage in an intellectual conversation about politics, philosophy and life over the course of a single day.
6.4In cold wintry Yanji, a city on China's northern border, young urbanite Haofeng, visiting from Shanghai, feels lost and adrift. By chance, he goes on a tour led by Nana, a charming tour guide who instantly fascinates him. She introduces him to Xiao, a personable but frustrated restaurant worker. The three bond quickly over a drunken weekend. Confronting their individual traumas, their frozen desires slowly thaw as they seek to liberate themselves from an icy world.
6.2In a small town in post-WWII France, 16-year-old Janine tries to improve her conditions by any means necessary. Three people—Michel, a married lover; Raoul, a fellow thief; Mauricette, a photographer she meets in prison—will help her learn from her mistakes.
6.6A look at a few chapters in the life of Poppy, a cheery, colorful, North London schoolteacher whose optimism tends to exasperate those around her.
7.2In the early 1900s, Miranda attends a girls boarding school in Australia. One Valentine's Day, the school's typically strict headmistress treats the girls to a picnic field trip to an unusual but scenic volcanic formation called Hanging Rock. Despite rules against it, Miranda and several other girls venture off. It's not until the end of the day that the faculty realizes the girls and one of the teachers have disappeared mysteriously.
8.0Paco is a young man who has gone through many difficulties since he was orphaned, he had to work hard as a clown in the streets of Guanajuato to be able to stay. One day, Paco meets April, a very pretty young woman, whom he fell in love with in her childhood, together with Pablito a young orphan, they will do the impossible to conquer April.
6.5William Walker and his mercenary corps enter Nicaragua in the middle of the 19th century in order to install a new government by a coup d'etat.
7.1The lives of a motherless young man, who's just starting to find interest in women, and his physically abused, poverty stricken friend, are mixed with more or less innocent childhood experiences and challenges most their age experience.
7.1A manager of an orphanage in India is sent to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he discovers a life-altering family secret.
7.2Haunted by his mysterious past, a devoted high school football coach leads a scrawny team of orphans to the state championship during the Great Depression and inspires a broken nation along the way.
6.2At the age of 8, Vaselinetjie is taken away by the Welfare and send to the orphanage. It's a strange, hard, dangerous world of rebel children, fierce house mothers,friends, first loves and where she finally finds true self-acceptance.
7.5When barbarian hordes threaten her homeland, the brave and cunning Mulan disguises herself as a male soldier to swell the ranks in her aging father's stead. The warrior's remarkable courage drives her through powerful battle scenes and brutal wartime strategy. Mulan loses dear friends to the enemy's blade as she rises to become one of her country's most valuable leaders — but can she win the war before her secret is exposed?
5.1When 9-year-old orphan Oliver Twist dares to ask his cruel taskmaster, Mr. Bumble, for a second serving of gruel, he's hired out as an apprentice. Escaping that dismal fate, young Oliver falls in with the street urchin known as the Artful Dodger and his criminal mentor, Fagin. When kindly Mr. Brownlow takes Oliver in, Fagin's evil henchman Bill Sikes plots to kidnap the boy.
7.1The tragic story of a young orphan girl who is befriended by an innocent but emotionally disabled veteran of the French Indochina War.
7.0A French playboy and an American former nightclub singer fall in love aboard a ship. They arrange to reunite six months later, if neither has changed their mind.
3.2Devan is an orphan raised by Maya, an investigative journalist. When she is abducted before she can expose a high-profile group of criminals, Devan consumes an invisibility potion to try and save her.
6.9A poor but big-hearted man takes orphans into his home. After discovering his scientist father's invisibility device, he rises to the occasion and fights to save his children and all of India from the clutches of a megalomaniac.
6.1The story focuses on high school girl Nagisa Yukiai who lives in a seaside town. She has believed her grandmother's story that spirits dwell in words and they are called "kotodama" (word spirit). One day, she strays into a mini FM station that has not been used for years. As an impulse of the moment, she tries to talk like a DJ using the facility. But her voice accidentally broadcasted reaches someone she has never expected.
7.0A new lawyer investigates the abuse case of a young orphan girl and begins to believe that the orphanage priests have something to hide.
6.5An orphan is provisionally adopted by the manager of a hotel populated by show business people. The hotel's owner doesn't like the entertainers and wants the girl returned to the orphanage.
10.0A hostile Chinese nurse (Yamaguchi) who works in an orphanage is won over by the care and commitment of the Japanese doctor (Sano) who treats her wards. Disease outbreaks and family obligations, however, threaten to torpedo their budding romance.
6.5Follow a group of international journalists into the heart of the once cosmopolitan city of Sarajevo—now a danger zone of sniper and mortar attacks where residents still live. While reporting on an American aid worker who’s trying to get children out of the country, a British correspondent decides to take an orphaned girl home to London.