History

Asja, a 40-year-old single woman, lives in Sarajevo. In order to meet new people, she ends up spending her Saturday in a speed dating event. She’s matched with Zoran, a 43-year-old banker. However, Zoran is not looking for love but forgiveness. More

The 1960s in Indonesia were a period of dramatic political change and turmoil, with Suharto’s coup ousting Sukarno and leading to a violent anti-communist purge. Nana, a gentle, beautiful young woman, has been badly affected by the conflict. Her husband was kidnapped and taken into the forest. Although she managed to escape from the gang leader who wanted to force her to marry him, the incident cost her father his life and drove her into poverty. More

Gilles Caron, at the peak of a dazzling career as a photojournalist, suddenly disappeared in Cambodia in 1970. He was barely 30 years old. In the space of 6 years, he was one of the major witnesses of his time, covering for the greatest magazines the Six Day War, May 68, the North Irish conflict or the Vietnam War. When director Mariana Otero discovered Gilles Caron's work, a photograph caught her attention, echoing his own story, the disappearance of a loved one who left behind only images to be deciphered. More

After Patricio Guzmán had travelled to the Atacama Desert in the north of Chile for «Nostalgia de la luz» and to the deepest south for «El botón de nácar» in Patagonia, he deals in the last part of the trilogy on his homeland with the central chain of Andes and the memory of the moving images. All his films are personal, but in some respects «La cordillera de los sueños» is the most intimate, leading the artist back to the ruins of the house of his childhood. X More

Guatemala, 2018. The country is riveted on the trial of the military officers who started the civil war. The victims’ testimonials keep pouring in. Ernesto, a young anthropologist at the Forensic Foundation, identifies people who have gone missing. One day, through an old lady’s story, Ernesto thinks he has found a lead that will allow him to find his father, a guerillero who disappeared during the war. More

Peru, at the height of the political crisis of the 1980’s. Georgina is a young woman from the Andes whose newborn daughter is stolen at a fake health clinic. Her desperate search for the child leads her to the headquarters of a major newspaper, where she meets Pedro Campos, a lonely journalist who takes on the investigation. Based on a true story. More

Sudan, province of Aljazira, nowadays - When Muzamil was born, a prophecy by the holy man of the village predicts that he will die when he is 20 years old. Muzamil’s father cannot stand the doom and travels away from home. Sakina, as a single mother, raises her son with over protection. One day, Muzamil turns 19. More

‘We’re waiting to grow old’. This sentence briefly sums up Yaoyun and his wife Liyun’s bitter realisation about their lives. They were once a happy family – until their son drowned playing by a reservoir. And so Yaojun and Liyun leave their home and plunge into the big city, although nobody knows them there and they cannot even understand the local dialect. Their adopted son Liu Xing does not offer them the comfort they had hoped for either. Defiantly rejecting his ‘foreign’ parents, he one day disappears altogether. More

A film that pays tribute to the history of cinema, via six episodes inspired by the different forms of cinematic art. Each episode has a genre. The first episode could be regarded as a B movie, the kind that Americans used to shoot with their eyes closed and now just can’t shoot anymore. The second episode is a sort of musical with a touch of mystery. The third episode is a spy movie. The fourth episode is difficult to describe. The fifth one is inspired by an old French film. More

Zama, an officer of the Spanish Crown born in South America, waits for a letter from the King granting him a transfer from the town in which he is stagnating, to a better place. His situation is delicate. He must ensure that nothing overshadows his transfer. He is forced to accept submissively every task entrusted to him by successive Governors who come and go as he stays behind. The years go by and the letter from the King never arrives. When Zama notices everything is lost, he joins a party of soldiers that go after a dangerous bandit. More

While editing her last film in Toronto, filmmaker Maria Teresa Larraín starts to lose her sight. She decides to experience her pain alone and close the doors to her past, convinced she’ll never be able to work as an artist again. However, the news of her mother’s passing means she returns to her native Chile, which she left behind 30 years back. Walking the streets of Santiago she gets to know a new world which inspires her: that of the blind street vendors of La Alameda, the city’s main avenue. More

Mozambique is in the midst of civil war. A single train connects Nampula to Malawi. No civilians are allowed and yet hundreds risk their lives through 700km of sabotaged tracks. Salomão and Taiar are two soldiers who don’t get along. Rosa is a young nurse on her way to her first job, who soon becomes an object of desire. Mariamu, her close friend, only hopes to trade salt for sugar. Amongst bullets and laughter, life goes on and stories unfold as the train advances under attack, ever so slowly, towards the next stop. More

An orange Chevrolet Impala drives across a cemetery towards an abandoned shipwreck in the middle of a desert landscape. It is the 22nd of January, 1965. The day before, the Iranian prime minister was shot dead in front of the parliament building. Inside the wreck, a banished political prisoner has hung himself. The walls are covered in diary entries, literary quotes and strange symbols. More

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. More

Set in modern day Greece, ”Worlds Apart” is comprised of three separate narratives each following a love story between a foreigner and a Greek. Each story represents a different generation falling in love during a time of socioeconomic turmoil that dominates Southern Europe as a whole,only to connect as a single story in the end. Almost like a triptych work of art where each painting stands alone,yet its true impact lies when viewed as a whole. “Worlds Apart”, follows the characters difficult path to love and the complications that their world has. More

Two different stories during the riots after the presidential elections in Kenya in 2007/2008: The Kenyan Anne (Susan Wanjiru) got it particularly badly. Her husband is dead and her son is in a coma. In addition, she was raped and her farm burned to the ground. She stands before the ruins of her existence. But Anne gives everything to rehabilitate herself and slowly get her life back under control. Anne is determined to forgive her tormentors, who have brought so much suffering to her and her loved ones. More

Arash is an Iranian academic who lives in the West. He returns to teach classes in Shiraz, where his mother lives, far from Tehran. Trapped in a whirlwind of family and financial intrigues, he plunges back into the difficult hours of his childhood at the beginning of the Iraq-Iran war in 1981. Following the death of his father and discovering what has become of his "respectable family", he is forced to make choices. More

A nocturnal drive along a rural highway into a city at dawn that is somehow moving in the wrong direction. It is only after a while that you notice that the vehicles are travelling backwards, receding back into the dusk of reality. This mysterious metaphor forms the starting point for a journey into the unknown history of Cambodian film. Nearly 400 films were made in Phnom Penh between 1960 and 1975, only 30 of which survive today. The Khmer Rouge burnt them or allowed them to decay along with many of the country’s studios and cinemas. More

Between 1947 and 1950, more than 80 000 Greek citizens were imprisoned on the isle of Makronisos (Greece) in reeducation camps created to ‘fight the spread of communism’. Among these exiles were a number of writers and poets, including Yannis Ritsos and Tassos Livaditis. Despite the deprivation and torture, these prisoners succeeded in composing poems, which describe their struggle for survival in this world of internment. These texts, some of them buried in the camps, were later found. More

The young Jewish woman Sulamit Löwenstein grows up with her parents in Argentina in the 1950s and falls in love with her German neighbor Friedrich, whose father was a Nazi henchman. In the 1950s, Argentina is the most popular refuge for old Nazis fleeing responsibility for their horrific crimes. There the young Jew Sulamit Löwenstein grows up, whose parents don't like their daughter spending time with her German neighbour Friedrich Burg. After all, it is rumored that his strict father was a submerged Nazi. Sulamit and Friedrich fall in love and move to Germany to study. More

In his documentary essay film, Chilean Patricio Guzmán takes a double look at the past: On the one hand there are the astronomers who look up to the sky in the Atacama Desert and explore the origin of the universe, on the other there are the women who search in the desert sand around the observatories for the mortal remains of their loved ones who have become victims of the military dictatorship. A journey into the light. More

Little is known of the childhood and youth of the great 19th-century Cuban liberator, José Martí. This robust biopic imagines his early years. The son of a magistrate, the precocious Martí — “Pepe” to family and friends — takes an early interest in justice. Gradually he enters the nascent independence movement and, not yet 18, is arrested for sedition. Respectful, yet not worshipful, this is a portrait of the revolutionary as a young man, and a stirring historical drama besides. More

This documentary by Tristan Bauer took 12 years to complete.  It is a unique and invaluable historical document—a jewel not to be missed—that offers us a different, more intimate and personal, perspective on the life of Ernesto Che Guevara than other films about him that have emerged recently. More

Soraya, 28, born and raised in Brooklyn, decides to return to live in Palestine, a country that her family was exiled from in 1948. On arriving in Ramallah, Soraya tries to recover the money left in an account by her grandparents but meets with refusal from the bank. Her path then crosses that of Emad, a young Palestinian whose ambition, unlike hers, is to leave the country for good. To escape the constraints linked to the situation in Palestine but also to earn their freedom, Soraya and Emad take things into their own hands, even if this means breaking the law. More

Travelling up and down the majestic river Congo on a disheveled boat, the young orphan Antoine Kolosoy composed his first songs on a beat up old guitar. As he gained renown, the young “Wendo,” as he was now known, was persecuted by the church and his music banned by the Belgian Colonial authorities, who feared his joyful rhythms would stir unrest. Wendo became a professional boxer for a time, but he never put down his guitar for long, and when his first album was released in 1948 he became the first superstar of Congolese Rumba. More

Esma (Mirjana Karanovic) is living with her 12-year-old daughter Sara (Luna Mijovic) in Grbavica, a quarter of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. Saras class plans to go on a school trip. Since children of fallen warriors in the last war are not supposed to pay, Sara thinks that she is one of them (because her mother told her that her father got killed in war). Esma has two things to deal with and that is the explanation to her only child that she was raped and that Sara's father is not a fallen warrior, and she has to collect the money for her daughter to go to the school trip. More

More than 4 000 km through the immense forest équatorial... Beyond the technical and human performance (seven months of turning under extreme conditions), it is with a diving in the heart of a bloodless but splendid country that the film delivers throughout course of this majestic river. More

The beautiful woman Melé is a bar singer, her husband Chaka is out of work. The couple that lives in Bamako, the capital of Mali, is on the verge of breaking up... In the courtyard of the house, where they live together with other families, a trial court has been set up. African civil society spokesmen have taken proceedings against the World Bank and the IMF, whom they blame for Africa's woes... Amidst the pleas and the testimonies, life goes on in the courtyard. Chaka does not seem to be concerned by this novel Africa's desire to fight for its rights. More

Madeinusa is a girl aged 14 who lives in an isolated village in the Cordillera Blanca Mountain range of Peru. This strange place is characterized by its religious fervor. From Good Friday at three o'clock in the afternoon (the time of day when Christ died on the cross) to Easter Sunday, the whole village can do whatever it feels like. During the two holy days sin does not exist: God is dead and can't see what is happening. Everything is accepted and allowed, without remorse. More

The recent Rumanian cinema delights the screenland The current Rumanian cinema is very exciting, which could also be seen at the Festival in Cannes: In 2006, the gentle feature film "Comment j'ai fêté la fin du monde" (Cum mi-am petrecut sfârsiful lumil) by Catalin Mitulescu was honoured with the award "Un certain regard" for the actress. A brilliant Dorotheea Petre represents the young woman Eva at the time, when the Iron Curtain disintegrated. More

This film examines the creation and exhibition of the propaganda film I Am Cuba, a Soviet/Cuban collaboration. It follows Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Kalatosov as he travels to Cuba in the early 1960s to make his film, a vignette drama which failed in both countries and was ressurrected in the West in the 1990s when Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese endorsed Milestone Films' 1993 ancillary release. First-time Brazilian director Vicente Ferraz arrives in Havana to track Kalatosov's ambitious 14-month shoot. More

Discontentment reigns in a Kyrgyzian village: money is not flowing as expected, everyone is trying to arrange his own business, if necessary secretly, communism is still finding adherents and the rustler Taschmat is at work, pursued by the village police man Salamat. The villagers belief in better times is weak, as well as their belief in a fair God. Be it Allah or Jehova, they prefer devoting themselves to terrestrial joy. While some are managing to profit from the situation, others are getting nothing. More

While much of Cambodia's cultural heritage was eradicated through the deaths of many artists during the Khmer Rouge era, the country's main theatrical structure, Preah Suramarit National Theatre remained standing throughout the Cambodian Civil War, even occasionally being used by the communist regime for official visits and propaganda pageants. Ironically, it was while the theatre was undergoing repairs in 1994 that it caught fire, was heavily damaged and has never been restored. More

After the fall of the military dictatorship in 1983, successive democratic governments launched a series of reforms purporting to turn Argentina into the world's most liberal and prosperous economy. Less than twenty years later, the Argentinians have lost literally everything: major national companies have been sold well below value to foreign corporations; the proceeds of privatizations have been diverted into the pockets of corrupt officials; revised labour laws have taken away all rights from employees; in a country that is traditionally an important exporter of foodstuffs, malnutrition More

One from the heart, “Salvador Allende” is the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s plaintive look back at the rise and violent fall of the world’s first democratically elected Marxist president. Mr. Guzmán, who went into exile after the Sept. 11, 1973, coup that led to Allende’s death, has returned to the country of his birth with a camera in hand and a storehouse of passionate memories. Alas, little of that passion informs the filmmaking in this documentary dirge, a memento mori about “the other Sept. More

The film is set entirely in Greece between 1919 and 1949. It begins with the entry of the Red Army into Odessa and the flight of the Greek community there and ends in 1949 with the end of the Greek civil war. More

This film directed by Pjer Zalica was the best shown at the 2005 Global Lens Film Festival. It is now available on dvd in the USA courtesy of First Run Features. It includes a video introduction by the director. Fuse is set in Tesanj, a Bosnian town close to the Serbian border, two years after the civil war officially ended. Corruption and hatred are palpable and most townfolk are engaged in one type of illegal activity or another. More

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1981 - Morocco – The month of Ramadan. With her seven-year-old son, Mehdi, Amina moves in with her father-in-law, Ahmed. Mehdi’s father is in prison but the boy believes that he has gone to work in France: his mother and grandfather maintain this illusion for his sake. At school, Mehdi has the privileged task of looking after the teacher’s chair. His relationship with the village, his friends and the world revolves around this object. More

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A film shot in on shot with no break. On a winter's day, a small party of men and women arrive by horse-drawn carriage to a minor, side entrance of the Winter Palace. The narrator meets another spectral but visible outsider, "the European", and follows him through numerous rooms of the palace. Each room manifests a different period of Russian history, but the periods are not in chronological order. More

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«Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony» shows how music was used in the fight for freedom. In the South African liberation struggle against apartheid, it was not least the songs that united those who were being oppressed and gave those fighting a way to express their plight. The music also consoled the incarcerated people and created a form of communication inside the prisons. When the first victims of apartheid brutality died protesting against the pass laws in the 1960s, they were singing. More

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In 1979, in a China undergoing rapid changes, it is still forbidden to listen to pop music. Platform is a record young people listen to in secret. Minliang and his friends, an official theatre company, present a play in praise of Mao Zedong. With the 1980s, the theatrical troupe’s life changes: pop music, permed hair, cigarettes… This feature film follows the artistic and emotional tribulations of the young artistes over a ten-year period against a backdrop of revolutionary disappointment, a bygone past and privatisation. More

"El entusiasmo" is set in Chile in 1980. Three young people, Guillermo, Fernando and Isabel meet and become friends during the dictatorship years. Ten years later, Fernando and Isabel are married and have a baby, and, enjoying the new political freedom, they move to another part of the country where they meet Guillermo again. It is the story of the chilean society right after Pinochets military dictatorship. More

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An eclectic group of actors struggle to save their theater from being demolished and replaced with a shopping mall. Max, the leader of the troupe, is a workaholic director who abandoned his family to build his career and is forced to confront the daughter he deserted. Then there is Enrique, the playwright-poet who is reduced to pawning his belongings to sustain his livelihood when his state pension is severed. Finally, there is Fulo who is driven to succeed so that she can bring her daughter from Rio de Janeiro. (L. Wong) More

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An intoxicating, time-bending experience bathed in the golden glow of oil lamps and wreathed in an opium haze, this gorgeous period reverie by Hou Hsiao-hsien traces the romantic intrigue, jealousies, and tensions swirling around four late-nineteenth-century Shanghai “flower houses,” where courtesans live confined to a gilded cage, ensconced in opulent splendor but forced to work to buy back their freedom. More

The long-awaited, much-anticipated first feature film by a black South African director. Adapted from Njabulo S. Ndebele's novella of the same name but set a decade later during the final years of the apartheid regime, FOOLS tells the story of a disgraced middle-aged schoolteacher who is confronted by an 18-year-old activist whose sister he raped. According to Mr. More

This movie gives us a glimpse at life in northern Taiwan. The main person is Kao, a 37-years-old man who has constantly to solve problems created by his younger brother Flat Head and his girlfriend Pretzel. As a non-stop schemer, Kao devises a plan to raise money by trading subsidized pigs to the government for cash. The ruse works, but when the temperamental Flat Head antagonizes the wrong people, the two find themselves caught up in a dangerous game of corrupt politics. More

When a group of former high school pals who came of age during a brutal Argentinean dictatorship reunite 25 years after their graduation, old bonds are reexamined and old wounds are reopened in this poetic comedy drama. Among other issues, Ernesto must deal with his former love’s (marriage to his onetime best buddy Ricardo. A series of flashbacks explore the intertwining stories of these old friends. A film with a lot of music, that provokes nostalgic feelings, for sure among viewers of the same age as the main characters. More

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A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film. His real reason for coming back, however, is to track down three long-missing reels of film by Greece's pioneering Manakia brothers who in the early years of cinema traveled through the Balkans, ignoring national and ethnic strife and recording ordinary people, especially craftsmen, on film. More

The news that Prince Sid'Ali has died suddenly confronts 25-year-old Ali with her past again. During the funeral she visits the palace where she spent her childhood and adolescence and where her mother was a servant. She never knew her father - he may even have been the prince. As she wanders the deserted corridors, the images of her youth return, such as her forbidden friendship with Sarra, daughter of one of the princes, who taught Alia to love the lute. More

As in Alice in Wonder Village, Díaz Torres creates a world of his own, where fantasy and reality intermingle. Alice was banned from Cuba three years ago after winning the Silver Bear in Berlin. It resembled reality too much. Despite this, Díaz Torres is one of the few directors who have been able to make a film in his country since the political crisis. In Love Me and You’ll See . . . , Juventino and two of his friends are robbing a bank when the Cuban revolution explodes. More

Gohar is fifty years old and teaches history and philosophy at university. One day he decides to leave this place and to live as a beggar, just like his friend, a poet, who owns nothing and wants nothing and as such feels absolutely free. All he needs is a little bit of hash as well as some peace of mind. In a moment when he has neither of that he strangles a prostitute without any real reason. Nour el Din, who is commissioned to investigate the case, is groping in the dark with the solution of the murder. More

A great day for Joe: he has graduated from his bachelor degree with honors. He wants to study medicine in France. At the Ministry of Education in Ouagadougou, unable to satisfy his request, he is advised to address the ministry. This is followed by a string of administrative proceedings, leading to delays, anomalies. And also, the fact that in Burkina Faso – as anywhere else in the world – it’s connections that set the bureaucratic machine in motion. More

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In this last film Ritwik Ghatak himself plays Nilkantha Bagchi, an alcoholic, in the character's own words «a broken intellectual». His wife leaves him taking away his books and records which were his only properties left. When Bagchi insisted she shouldn't, Durga replied that she is taking this away so that his son grows up with these books and music, but he managed to keep a fan which he sells to buy country liquor to start his unusual and abstract ride. More

Mohamed Malas was born in 1945 in Syria's Kuneitra, not far from the border with present-day Israel, which destroyed the important Kuneitra traffic junction in the Six-Day War. Now Malas flashes back to the time between 1936 and 1967. In Al Leil he depicts the childhood of a boy who, as an adult, reconstructs the footsteps of his father, the times of constant absence. One day he hadn't appeared at all after having fought for democracy for years and hardly found time for his family, for his private life. The boy grew up with his mother. More

This film is an homage to the rich an complex history of Latin America. Without any narrative sequence, but with a serie of images, music and sounds, the spectator gets transported through Mexico's history. More

Sebastian Mamani returns to his Aymara community from which he was expelled long ago. He is carrying the great mask of death, he must dance until he died, in a kind of atonement for the sins that caused his exile and as a way to be reborn in his lost cultural identity. More

Karen Shakhnazarov, the director of Anna Karenina (2017) belonged to the young talents of the cinema of change in the former Soviet Union during the 1980's. The comedy Gorod Zero (Zerograd) is one of the best examples of those years. The film is refreshing in that it thinks through the absurdities of the Soviet everyday life and it shows that the path that was called perestroika back then, has to be a long one. More

Norbu is a nomad who lives with his wife and his child in the mountainous highland of tibet as a shepherd. He belongs to an ethnic minority and from time to time he sees himself compelled to act as a horse thief in order to provide his family with food. But the day Norbu tries to steal some treasures of a temple the community excludes and banishes him. Living in exile, he loses his son. After his last theft of a horse he sacrifices himself in order to save his wife and his second child. More

1983. Alicia, the mother of an adopted 5-year-old girl, teaches history in a Buenos Aires high school. Both in her profession and in her private life she has always accepted the "official version," until one day when the regime's façade and that of it surroundings begin to fall to pieces around her. In the crevices of this enormous lie Alicia suspects that Gabi, the girl she has adopted, might be the daughter of a "desaparecido." It is then that she begins a painful and inexorable journey towards truth - a journey in which she might lose everything. More

Cythera, in Greek mythology, is the isle of dreams where one can dedicate oneself to happiness (or the pursuit thereof). In this quest within a quest, the tale of the father's return is told as if from the point of view of his son Telemachus and as if Telemachus were a filmmaker, as well as a middle-aged man with a son of his own. A film director, tired of the illusions and fictions of his profession, searches for a story of substance by attaching himself to an old man, a recently returned political exile. More

Angelopoulos was born and grew up in Athens. The Athens that starts from the Acropolis and extends to the small Byzantine churches of the old quarter, the remains of the neo-classical homes, the quiet squares, the apartment buildings, the narrow streets, the vehicles, the pedestrians. It is not a city but the stage on which a drama is being played out, as, of course, is the rest of Greece in the films of Angelopoulos. More specifically, a tragedy made up of treasured memories, stories and personal experience. More

Vivid social satire with overtones of Romeo and Juliet, Finye (The Wind) tackles the generation gap in post-colonial West Africa. Its heroine is the pot smoking daughter of a provincial military governor who falls in love with a fellow university student, the descendent of one of Mali's chiefs of an earlier age. Both families object to the union and to the lover's growing involvement in student strikes against the corrupt government. A mix of politics, romance and social commentary, Finye casts a critical eye on both the ancient and modern values. More

First presented and highly debated at the 1980 Venice Film Festival, this film became the legacy of the late Glauber Rocha, who noted: "A idade da terra (The Age of the Earth) is the decomposition of the narrative sequence without losing the infrastructural discourse that is supposed to materialize the most representative signs of the Third World. The film offers a symphony of images and sound or is an anti-symphony that puts the essential problems into the background. This film can only be classified in this way: He is my portrait next to the portrait of Brazil." More

It is New Year's Eve. 1976. On a Greek island a party of bourgeois hunters comes upon a body, buried in the snow and miraculously preserved by the cold. By his uniform, he appears to be one of the thousands of partisans killed during the civil war and the hunting party, a group of the ruling elite, must now decide what to do with the body. When they disinter it, blood begins to flow from the wounds in the partisan's body and they carry it back to the lodge where the inquest begins. More

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THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS is a film of epic proportions. The action takes place during the years 1939-52 and is seen as a series of individual, often inexplicable events or tableaux, commentated by monologues, by slogans written on the walls, or by songs. It reveals the period's turbulent history while focusing on a travelling company of actors who spend those fourteen years wandering through provinces, cities and villages, performing, in increasingly threadbare circumstances, a 19th century pastoral melodrama, Persiadis' Golfo the Shepherdess. More

During World War II, Antonio (Nino Manfredi), Gianni (Vittorio Gassman) and Nicola (Stefania Sandrelli) are activists fighting for Italy's liberation from Nazi occupation. When the war ends and their ideals must change, the three men take different life paths. Antonio and Nicola incorporate their beliefs into adulthood, whereas Gianni takes a more affluent job as a lawyer's assistant. When the group reunites after several decades, their discourse unearths hostility and unsettling realizations. More

A trade unionist is assassinated at a workers' rally and a former police informer, Sofianos, is arrested and charged with the murder. The accused, a greatly troubled personage, currently out on probation, an ex drug-trafficker is being used to infiltrate and bring down his old accomplices. He is visited in prison by a Conservative Member of Parliament with whom he has a homosexual relationship. Using a smuggled gun, the prisoner takes the politician hostage creating an embarrassing and increasingly absurd scandal for the authorities. The government find themselves in a delicate predicament. More

The Sparrow fascinates with its parallel strands of action. The various ways of encountering a criminal trader, namely by a police officer and a journalist, are ultimately only traces that lead to the tip of an iceberg: the corruption of Egyptian society on the eve of the Six-Day War. More

Youssef Chahine’s adaptation of Marxist writer Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s 1953 novel, set in the 1930s, is an epic chronicle of life in a rural Egyptian village. The main plot concerns the unsuccessful attempts of the villagers to retain their access to water. Told that they can only irrigate their land a few days a month, several of the villagers are arrested for overwatering. Although the outside threat originally seems to unite the villagers, divisions resurface, and one of them is bought off by the local bey, representative of the ruling class in general. More

Larks on a String is a Czech film directed by Jiří Menzel. The movie was banned by the Czechoslovak government. It saw release in 1990 after the fall of the Communist regime. Menzel tells the stories of various characters considered bourgeois by Czechoslovakia's communist government in the 1950s, who have been forced to work in a junkyard for the purposes of re-education. More

An absorbing portrait of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova which is brimming with metaphors and dreams. Parajanov created a melting pot based on the Armenian and Georgian cultural traditions with their rich religious symbolism and the expressive powers of cinema, the modernist folk art of the 20th century. This classic by Parajanov is not a dramatised portrait of the poet Arutyun Sayadyan, better known as Sayat-Nova (the ‘King of Songs’), but an associative portrait full of metaphors and dreams, arabesques and still lifes. More

Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism, Violence and Liberation” is one of the symbols of cultural and political resistence in the 60-70s generation. The film is a reflection essay on the socio-political situation of Argentina between 1945 and 1968. It was filmed clandestinely in Cold War times in a Latin America rules by pro-American oligarchies and military dictatorships. The work is a four-hours-long trilogy divided in chapters and united by the themes of dependence and liberation. More

In Lucía, Humberto Solás has interpreted the theme of the hundred years' struggle in an entirely novel way to create an epic in three separate episodes: each centred around a woman called Lucía, which takes place in a different period of Cuban history, corresponding to the three stages of Colonialism, Neocolonialism and Socialist Revolution. The three episodes also present us with "Lucías" of different social classes. More

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The young Miloš Hrma, who speaks with misplaced pride of his family of misfits and malingerers, is engaged as a newly trained station guard in a small railway station during the Second World War and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He admires himself in his new uniform, and looks forward, like his prematurely-retired railwayman father, to avoiding real work. The sometimes pompous stationmaster is an enthusiastic pigeon-breeder with a kind wife, but is envious of the train dispatcher Hubička's success with women. More

The film tells the story of Ishwar Chakraborty, a Hindu refugee from East Pakistan after the 1947 partition of India. He goes to West Bengal with his little sister Sita where he tries to start a new life. In a refugee camp, they see the abduction of a low-caste woman and Ishwar takes her little son Abhiram with him. He gets a job at a factory in the province, near the Subarnarekha River, courtesy his college friend Rambilas. Ishwar, Sita and Abhiram arrive at Chatimpur, a small settlement near Ghatshila where they meet Mukherjee, foreman of the foundry workshop, who greets them with love. More

A few years before the War of the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868, a group of young progressives, weary of the corruption rampant in their clan, appear before the chief steward to ask for justice. But the steward, aware of the prevailing condition, is helpless to do anything, for he is merely being controlled. Disappointed, the group visit the chief inspector of their clan and present their case to him. After consideration, the inspector, who is in reality one of the most corrupt, agrees to their leader. More

Komal Gandhar, also known as A Soft Note on a Sharp Scale, refers in its title to the Hindustani equivalent of "E-flat". It was part of the trilogy composed of «Meghe Dhaka Tara» (1960), «Komal Gandhar» and «Subarnarekha» (1962), all dealing with the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947 and the refugees coping with it, though this was the most optimistic film of his oeuvre. More

The film tells the story of Nita, a beautiful young woman who lives with her family, refugees from East Pakistan, in the suburbs of Calcutta. Nita is a self-sacrificing person who is constantly exploited by everyone around her, even her own family, who take her goodness for granted. Her life is ridden with personal tragedy: she loses first her fiancé, then her job and finally her health by contracting tuberculosis. It is only when she collapses that her family begins to realize what they have done to her. More

It happened in the age of civil wars. Feudal Lord Yamana defeats his rival, Akizuki, holding the neighboring province. But Lady Yukihime, heiress to the Akizukis, survives and hides within her dead father’s fief and the whereabouts of Akizuki clan’s war funds consisting of some 170 pounds of gold bars are unknown. Feeling uneasy at the thought that Lady Yukihime may escape with the gold into the neighboring province held by Hayakawa who is friendly to Akizuki, Yamana orders a thorough search for Yukihime and the gold and places a strict guard along the border. More

This is a story which happened during the era of civil wars in Japan when there were constant feuds among the war lords. Taketoki Washizu is a captain under Kuniharu Tsuzuki, Lord of Kumonosu-Djo or Cobweb Castle. He is in command of Fort No. 1. When Fujimaki, in charge of the North Mansion, revolts unexpectedly, Taketoki and Yoshiaki Miki, who commands Fort No. 2, joins forces and distinguish themselves in battle by quelling the insurgents, thereby averting a crisis for their lord. More

Emperor Huan Tsung is grieving over the death of his wife. The Yang family wants to provide him with a consort so that they may consolidate their influence over the court. General An Lushan finds a distant relative working in their kitchen whom they groom to present to the Emperor. And he falls in love with her and she becomes the Princess Yang Kwei-fei. More

Sansho Dayu is a film about a couple of children from a rich house at the end of the 12th century who fall into the hands of the bailiff. He owes his reputation as an exemplary feudal lord to the merciless exploitation of his slave army. Mizoguchi fluently tells this old legend of need and revenge in beautiful pictures. More

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Shiraz is based on the true story of the 17th-century Mughal ruler Shah Jahan, his queen and the building of the world’s most beautiful monument to love, the Taj Mahal. Shot entirely in India, it features lavish costumes and gorgeous settings, including the extraordinary fort at Agra. Himansu Rai (also the film’s producer) stars as the humble potter Shiraz, who follows his childhood sweetheart Selima (Enakshi Rama Rau) when she is sold by slave traders to the future emperor. More

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The revolution film par excellence, here in the German needle-tone version of 1930: The film presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers. Battleship Potemkin was named the greatest film of all time at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958. In 2012, the British Film Institute named it the eleventh greatest film of all time. More