
Young Ruslan rows for a team coached by his father Ali, who places many demands upon his son and is continually dissatisfied by his performance. But when tragedy strikes, his father is overcome with emotions he doesn’t know how to deal with. Debut director Asif Rustamov treats the heavy topic with remarkable subtlety and discretion, emphasizing the characters’ carefully elaborated psychology.

Polish Girl
Ruslan
Ilgar

Young Ruslan rows for a team coached by his father Ali, who places many demands upon his son and is continually dissatisfied by his performance. But when tragedy strikes, his father is overcome with emotions he doesn’t know how to deal with. Debut director Asif Rustamov treats the heavy topic with remarkable subtlety and discretion, emphasizing the characters’ carefully elaborated psychology.
2014-12-19
8.5
6.7A man reflects on the lost love of his youth and his long-ago journey from Taiwan to America as he begins to reconnect with his estranged daughter.
6.4Fourteen-year-old Mo is a lonely, sensitive boy whose hunger for the rant and banter of buddies makes him prone to tread dangerous territories. He idolizes his handsome older brother, Rashid, a charismatic, well-respected member of a local gang, whose drug dealing enables “Rash” to provide for his family. Aching to be seen as a tough guy himself, Mo takes a job that unlocks a fateful turn of events and forces the brothers to confront their inner demons. It turns out that hate is easy. It is love and understanding that take real courage.
6.3Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.
6.2While serving life in prison, a young man looks back at the people, the circumstances and the system that set him on the path toward his crime.
6.7During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.
6.8Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.
6.2Based on the writer/director's childhood, FARMING tells the story of a young Nigerian boy, 'farmed out' by his parents to a white British family in the hope of a better future. Instead, he becomes the feared leader of a white skinhead gang.
6.6Four siblings' lives change drastically when their ailing mother takes a turn for the worse over the holiday season.
7.1In New York City, a young girl is caught in the middle of her parents' bitter custody battle.
6.6A sweeping drama set in the chaotic aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, where the life of top UN diplomat Brazilian Sérgio Vieira de Mello hangs in the balance during the most treacherous mission of his career.
7.2A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.
6.7When household tensions and a sense of worthlessness overcome Evan, he finds escape when he clings with the orphans of a throw-away society. The runaways hold on to each other like a family until a tragedy tears them apart.
6.5An aimless young man who is scalping tickets, gambling and drinking, agrees to coach a Little League team from the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago as a condition of getting a loan from a friend.
6.6A 21-year-old reformed gangster's devotion to his family and his future is put to the test when he is released from prison and returns to his old stomping grounds in Watts, Los Angeles.
6.5In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.
7.0While out to avoid spending time with her narcissistic and promiscuous mother, sixteen-year-old Jo has a brief affair that leaves her pregnant and abandoned. When her mother remarries, Jo's only support becomes her friend Geoffrey, a homosexual.
7.3Middle-aged widow Beatrice Hunsdorfer and her daughters Ruth and Matilda are struggling to survive in a society they barely understand. Beatrice dreams of opening an elegant tea room but does not have the wherewithal to achieve her lofty goal. Epileptic Ruth is a rebellious adolescent, while shy but highly intelligent and idealistic Matilda seeks solace in her pets and school projects, including one designed to show how small amounts of radium affect marigolds.
6.7Early morning silence is broken by screeching tires as a helicopter bears down on a speeding vehicle. Taking a quick corner, the team tumbles out into the woods as their car pulls away. Now they must make their way through the thick of nature and thick gunfire to accomplish their mission. Not a single word of dialogue is spoken throughout the entire film. Instead, the music, sounds, images and deeply truthful acting turn a simple plot into an intense experience. Passion and intrigue keep building to the very end.
5.9When motocross and heavy metal obsessed, 13-year-old Jacob's delinquent behavior forces CPS to place his little brother Wes with his aunt, Jacob and his emotionally absent father must finally take responsibility for their actions and each other in order to bring Wes home.
6.4Back from a tour of duty, Kelli struggles to find her place in her family and the rust-belt town she no longer recognizes.
7.3The investigator Seyfi Ganiyev runs the case of an illegal mercery shop's head Murad Abiyev, who confessed in embezzlement of one million rubles from public funds. Abiyev is also accused of the murder of an underage girls that occurred in Riga shortly after Abiyev saw her. He denies his guilt, but does not name the perpetrators though he knows them, despite the fact that he is facing the death penalty. The investigator understands that some high-ranking officials stand behind Abiyev, but he has no proof. Ganiyev seeks to obtain from the prisoner the whole truth to bring the criminals to justice.
6.0This Azerbaijani romantic drama depicts the love affair between Zaur, a man from an affluent family, and Tahmina, a divorced woman doing her best to survive in a conservative society.
9.0Psychological drama about a university dean who leads a double life.
1.0Based on a novel by Farman Karimzade, the movie shows the life in an Azerbaijani village under the Soviet rule in 1930s. Here two former "beys" (land owners) are opposing each other. One is loyal to the ideology of the past and can't reconcile himself to the new power, to second rejects the past and accepts the power of the Bolsheviks, believing that it will establish justice.
5.6Film exposes the corruption and the decadence of the late Soviet bureaucracy in Azerbaijan SSR through the eyes of a naive Azerbaijani adult man, Hatem.
In Soviet Azerbaijan, a divorced Armenian couple fights over the custody of their daughter, Ashen. Stolen from one parent to another, Ashen's guardians are tragically killed in the bloody war surrounding them. Will the arrival of a new savior finally bring Ashen freedom? Official selection of the Global Lens Collection presented by the Global Film Initiative.
6.0The film portrays the life of the legendary Azerbaijani guerrilla of the Second World War Mehdi Huseynzadeh, who fought the Nazi forces in the present-day Italy and Slovenia, hence the film's name On distant shores referring to the Adriatic Sea.
9.5The film is about famous Chechen ballet and folk dancer Mahmud Essembayev's life.
0.0Matteo Falcone is an Azerbaijani short drama film based on Prosper Merimée's like-named story from 1829. Matteo Falcone is a successful Corsican, who lives with his wife Giuseppa and 10-year-old son Fortunato. One day he leaves home with Giuseppa, leaving Fortunato alone.
5.0War breaks out in the Caucasus. 75-year-old Maria loses her son in the war. She and her daughter-in-law Sofia have been living in the Caucasus for 12 years. When famine strikes, they want to move to Russia. The women decide that they must go to Moscow. Maria takes her little dog and Sofia her small suitcase, gets on the train and sets off. In the next compartment, photojournalist Alexander is also traveling. Sofia and Alexander love each other. Maria realizes at one of the stations near Volgograd that she cannot live without the Caucasus. She writes a letter to Sofia and leaves the train with her dog...
6.3In a Azerbaijan, in the beginning of this century, the first films made in the history of cinema are shown.The characters meet each other in a room. Three characters who will witness the linking up of their destinies through their common love for this new captivating art.
4.7Murad, a young man fails the entrance exam to the Institute and starts working at the meat factory. His cousin Rustam, a worker on a building site, fights with him against the dishonest people who sell pieces of meat from the factory. After a series of dramatic situations, Murad and Rustam manage to uncover the thieves.
7.7Childhood friends Ahmet and Nuri, the sons of poor farmers, grew up together, studied together, and worked together in a factory. Together, they publish the magazine Light, which opposes the colonial policies of foreign capital and military pacts. After their first imprisonment, the friends' paths diverge: Nuri betrays his convictions and joins a reactionary newspaper. His life is now safe, but he finds no joy or peace. Meanwhile, Ahmet, having become one of the main enemies of the reactionaries, attracts more and more patriots to his side.
4.7Murad, a young man, lives by the old ethical norms that are still valid in the suburbs of his city. He had promised Tofig, his childhood friend, to give him his sister as a wife, but Tofig is in love with another girl. He forgets the promise and takes the girl home. Murad is offended. According to the code of honor, he must take revenge. One of the first films ever produced in the Soviet Union to challenge the sociopolitical establishment.
6.3A historical revolutionary film depicting the struggle of peasants and the Baku proletariat against landowners and Musavatists in 1919.
5.8While there is famine during WW2, a boy with mom far away, tries to stay strong.
4.2This film was based on Samad Vurgun's "Komsomol poem". Seven sons, like seven samurai become the seven komsomols (communist leaders) who were sent to a village to establish Soviet power. Seven sons become the romanticized images of people's heroes ready to take revenge.
5.0During the late 1980s and early 1990s the Armenian minority in Nagorono-Karabakh attempted to break away from Azerbaijan, one of the former Soviet republics. Overnight these former neighbors became enemies, and simple village folk were suddenly made hostages in a complex power game. One of the Azerbaijani villages right on the border is home to the family of the peasant farmer Kerim, who has just been captured by the Armenians. The village council decides to take an Armenian in order to arrange a hostage exchange. They imprison the wounded man in the barn next to Kerim's house, where his wife and three children desperately await the husband's return. The captive from the other side of the border finds himself in exactly the same situation - he, too, has three children, he finds it hard to scrape a living together, he has never done anything to harm anyone and, like Kerim, he just wants to go back home. But life in Karabakh is far more complex now. Blood calls for blood.
9.0Biopic about general Hazi Aslanov, who died fighting Germans in WW2.