A black and white silent movie, based on the Snow White fairy tale, that is set in a romantic version of 1920s Seville and centered on a female bullfighter.
Rafita
Composed of six unconventional vignettes, each one dealing with the late communist period in Romania, a narrative is told through its urban myths from the perspective of ordinary people. The title refers to the alluded "Golden Age" of the last 15 years of Ceauşescu's regime.
A catalan manufacturer of intercoms travels to Madrid, accompanied by his mistress, to attend a hunt that he has organized. Its main purpose is to mix with people of high society to improve their business. All seems well until the owner of the farm shows full authority over James, who is the real organizer of the meeting. The celebration is diverse characters who live next to absurd situations.
Psychiatrist Caruso is arguably as nutty as his patients. He can remember at two years old being completely besotted by the charms of a naked girl. Even today, he can think of little else besides sex, sex, sex.
A country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse in the human. Love and death become interlaced and with terrible consequences. The fortunes of the people in the country through the horses' perception.
Blackfella Charlie is getting older, and he's out of sorts. The intervention is making life more difficult on his remote community, what with the proper policing of whitefella laws that don't generally make much sense, and Charlie's kin and ken seeming more interested in going along with things than doing anything about it. So Charlie takes off, to live the old way, but in doing so sets off a chain of events in his life that has him return to his community chastened, and somewhat the wiser.
Iraq, 2003. Pablo, a Spanish army doctor sent on a peacekeeping mission, is involved in an attack on his convoy during a routine trip through the desert.
A Serbian engineer falls for a younger woman, but he is inept at courtship.
Lord Shiva wakes. A convocation of magicians in the guise of figures from mythology; a masquerade party at which Pan is the prize. The wine of Hecate is poured: Pan's cup is poisoned by Shiva. Kali blesses the assembly as a bacchic rite ensues.
The stones of the title are the dreams and burdens carried by these five women with interlinked lives. This story of decision and transformation was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.
A woman suffers from amnesia after killing her husband, who was just about to demand a divorce for having found her engaging in an affair with a lover, who is only interested in her to find where some precious jewels are hidden.
In 1965 Mexico City, Flavia, a wealthy yet lonely schoolgirl, befriends Veronica, a young orphan girl who has a fascination with witchcraft. Veronica convinces Flavia that she is a real witch and forces her to be her assistant. The children's games gradually become more serious and Veronica demands more from Flavia.
The Alps, late 19th century. Greider, a mysterious lone rider who claims to be a photographer, arrives at an isolated lumber village, despotically ruled by a family clan, asking for winter accommodation.
Mabel Longhetti, desperate and lonely, is married to a Los Angeles municipal construction worker, Nick. Increasingly unstable, especially in the company of others, she craves happiness, but her extremely volatile behavior convinces Nick that she poses a danger to their family and decides to commit her to an institution for six months. Alone with a trio of kids to raise on his own, he awaits her return, which holds more than a few surprises.
A young Oxford academic and his attorney girlfriend holiday in Morocco. They bump into a Russian millionaire who owns a peninsula and a diamond watch. He wants a game of tennis. What else he wants propels the lovers on a tortuous journey to the City of London and its unholy alliance with Britain's intelligence establishment, to Paris and the Alps.
A young French Canadian, one of five boys in a conservative family in the 1960s and 1970s, struggles to reconcile his emerging identity with his father's values.
The story of three Korean outlaws in 1930s Manchuria and their dealings with the Japanese army and Chinese and Russian bandits. The Good (a bounty hunter), the Bad (a hitman), and the Weird (a thief) battle the army and the bandits in a race to use a treasure map to uncover the riches of legend.
Ip Man's peaceful life in Foshan changes after Gong Yutian seeks an heir for his family in Southern China. Ip Man then meets Gong Er who challenges him for the sake of regaining her family's honor. After the Second Sino-Japanese War, Ip Man moves to Hong Kong and struggles to provide for his family. In the mean time, Gong Er chooses the path of vengeance after her father was killed by Ma San.
A sixteen-year-old boy insinuates himself into the house of a fellow student from his literature class and writes about it in essays for his French teacher. Faced with this gifted and unusual pupil, the teacher rediscovers his enthusiasm for his work, but the boy’s intrusion will unleash a series of uncontrollable events.
In parallel stories, a social butterfly and a lower middle-class wife brace themselves for the challenge of birthing a child in the modern era.
THE WHITE DOOR, starring Giovanni Ribisi, is a more realized version of the Beck 'Lonesome Tears' music video from three years prior and now a love story.
Who Pays? was a series of twelve three-reel dramas, released between March and July 1915. Henry King and Ruth Roland starred in each episode, playing different roles each time, with a variety of supporting players who varied from one episode to another. Each episode told a complete and individual story, but they were all inter-related by a uniform theme. Although there were no cliff-hanger endings, each episode did, in fact, end with a challenge to the audience: Who was responsible for the misfortune of the principal characters? The titles of the twelve episodes were: #1: The Price of Fame; #2: The Pursuit of Pleasure; #3: When Justice Sleeps; #4: The Love Liar; #5: Unto Herself Alone; #6: Houses of Glass; #7: Blue Blood and Yellow; #8: Today and Tomorrow; #9: For the Commonwealth; #10: Pomp of Earth; #11: The Fruit of Folly; #12: Toil and Tyranny.
Don Carlos, heir to the Spanish throne, and Princess Elisabeth of Valois are deeply in love but King Philip, Carlos's father, wants Elisabeth for himself.
A Spanish soldier seduces and falls in love with the young wife of a smuggler.
An aspiring New York painter returns home to the Kentucky mountains to settle a feud between two rival families.
A clairvoyant warns divorcée Adrienne Van Couver to beware of Robert Warren, whom she has spurned. The warning comes true after Adrienne's ex-husband, John Dean, meets Warren, an old friend, and tells him the story of his marriage to Adrienne. He tells how her frivolity and malice caused both the death of their only child, and after their divorce John’s romance with Lorraine Barkley who left him for lawyer Henry Armstrong. Enraged by Adrienne's treachery, Warren goes to her apartment and kills her. Dean arrives after Warren has fled and is arrested for the murder. Believing that Dean is innocent, Lorraine persuades Armstrong to defend him. After a last-minute confession by John is cleared.
This psychedelic horror short inspired by vintage cinema follows a raped girl's descent into derangement and makes the audience feel as claustrophobic as the character.
The supposition was that she was born a tease, for from her first teeth to the time she was almost grown, she vented her witcheries on her unsuspecting parents and the wild things of her mountain home. But that was before the man from the valley lost his way and later found it back again, bearing away the little tease to the valley. While she suffered the qualms of broken faith, her father passed through a like struggle, for he felt the precepts of the "beloved book" had failed him. He closed the door of his cabin upon the world and the light from his window, lighting the wayfarer over the mountain path, disappeared. The struggle over, it came hack in its place in time to beckon the little tease as she left the valley behind.
Based on the novel The Star Rover by Jack London (New York, 1915).
DOWN HOME is a rural drama set in New England and stars Leatrice Joy as Nancy Pelot, daughter of the town drunk. He was once a businessman and still owns a local farm, but Nancy now supports her father and herself with a mysterious job in a nearby town.
“Music Forward!” is the order given by a lady in Colonial costume, and in march a group of five musicians, working industriously at their instruments. The directress stands them in a row, and taking the head off each, throws it onto a huge music staff and each becomes a note of the scale. The whole bodies appear again, after which the manipulator seems to wrap them up in a large sheet of music, which is then shown to contain nothing. The paper is rolled up again, and a cane is held, perpendicularly, in a horizontal position to the sheet.
Falacha is the captain of a fishing boat, who loses his men in a shipwreck. Among them was the husband of Aurélia, who holds Falacha responsible for the tragedy. Maria, Falacha's daughter, falls in love with Manuel, Aurélia's son, a situation that their mothers refuse to accept.
The Bread Peddler is a 1923 French silent drama film directed by René Le Somptier and starring Suzanne Desprès, Gabriel Signoret and Geneviève Félix. It is based on Xavier de Montépin's novel of the same title.
A city girl revenuer spies on illegal whiskey making in the hills.
John Logan leaves his parents and sweetheart in bucolic Happy Valley to make his fortune in the city. Those he left behind become miserable and beleaguered in his absence, but after several years he returns, a wealthy man. But his embittered father, not recognizing him for who he is, plans to murder the newly-arrived "stranger" for his money.
A reconstruction, made from still photographs, of the lost 1927 Tod Browning film London After Midnight (1927) starring Lon Chaney.
It's Christmas, and a young woman is on her way to celebrate the holidays with her parents. A group of drunk cowboys startle her horses making her wagon, with the woman on it, speed off. By chance Broncho Billy saves her life and the grateful girl invites him over for Christmas dinner. Little does he know that the young lady is the Sheriff's daughter…
Pialat's first film was the short Isabelle aux Dombes, shot in 1951 when the director was 26 years old. The film is an entirely silent montage of documentary footage, ragged experimental techniques — mainly some negative-image inserts — and symbolic psychodrama that's surprisingly not too different from the work that Stan Brakhage would begin making just a year or two later. Images of death proliferate throughout the film, and what started as a loose documentary soon becomes an eerie psuedo-horror piece that's obsessed with death and decay.