Festival films

The film depicts a day in the life of a block of residential flats in Singapore. All the action occurs within or around this block, within a 24-hour period. The film opens with an early morning suicide, and the audience subsequently sees the action from the point of view of the dead man, whose spirit drifts from unit to unit, quietly observing. Three main story lines are interwoven: Ah Gu, a middle-aged tofu-soup hawker has brought home a sexy young wife from China; San San, an overweight, single woman lives alone, with only the memory of her nagging mother to keep her company; with his parents away, upright, politically correct, but overbearing eldest brother Meng takes the opportunity to lord it over his younger siblings, Trixie and Tee.

The film follows a group of Greek civilian prisoners of war who are forced to march from the Aegean coast of Turkey into the hinterlands, where they were placed in labour camps. The story begins with the siege of Smyrna. A young schoolteacher is giving one last lesson to 17-year-old Ilias. Soon, both Antigone and Ilias will be added to the unending rows of nameless, numbered people, forced to walk through the deserts and over the mountains of Anatolia, from where very few will come out alive. Antigone will be killed by a Turk, and only the young Ilias will survive to the end of the march.

1986. In a time of increasing confusion and instability, 19-year-old computer hacker Karl Koch sees his world in disorder. Fascinated and inspired by the fictitious rebel Hagbard Celine, protagonist of the cult novel Illuminatus!, the sensitive young man embarks upon a quest to reveal the underlying reasons for political mechanisms. His discoveries lead him to believe in a world conspiracy. While the powers of evil are connected by global networks, Karl and his friends are left behind, frustrated by the slowness of their own home computers. Dependent on pills and cocaine, Karl begins to lose control of his life. The closer the end of his search appears, the harder it becomes to turn back.

A young Siscilian aristocrat, Francesco Montelepre, is swindled out of his fortune by Rizzardi, a gangster who has spent many years in America. Rizzardi wants to be the new master of the young man's land, and because of an age-old hatred against the Montelepre family, he will stop at nothing. Francesco escapes an attempt on his life and fleess to Greece, after first sscarring Rizzardi's face. Dissgraced, the older man goes after Francesco with a hatred so implacable, that only the young man's death will succeed in assuaging it.

«A corner of paradise», for the great writer Alexandros Papadiamantis, is not the island of Skiathos, which he yearns for, nor Athens in 1896 which suffocates him. It is the place where the dead travel, where children forgive the father that tried to drown them, and where barren women give birth. There, in the hands of the Moslem, a ney is not a ney, but the creaking of the door to Paradise, a humble room containing the whole world, and Saints holding up the Acropolis. It is, in other words, any place on which a saintly glance has fallen. His glance.

An intimimate film, Actresses "speaks of a world I have a great love for, the theater, but I' ve treated it as a metaphor for life: the confrontation between the different attitudes we can adopt towards work; also, absence as a feeling, that grows inside us as we lose our loved ones, one by one... On the other hand, it was a real pleasure to bring together four monsters of the theater". The film receives unanimous recognition by the critics and appeared in numerous festivals in all continents, obtaining the Jury' s Special Prize and the Prize for the Best Script at the Festival of Cartagena de las Indias in Colombia.

Billy Scully dies of cancer, leaving behind a wife and two sons. While preparing for the funeral, the whole family gets together and reminisces, sometimes sadly and sometimes with a laugh, about Billy's life. His younger son, who is on the dole, learns from his uncle that his father was a leading figure in the General Strike of 1926 and many others as well. Talking with his relatives, he discovers more about his father's activities as a union man, and blames himself for not hearing all this directly from his father, having always thought that his father had wasted his life without really amounting to anything. The father's ideals inspire both his sons, and his legacy is passed on.

The film unfolds on the island of Ikaria, in the late forties. It is the end of the civil war, and a small group of mountain guerillas puts a different interpretation on the Party line to «lay down their arms». This triggers a series of dramatic events which will cover the following six years. The guerillas' daily life; the crises they have to face; the solidarity as well as the conflicts that arise among them; their relationship with the people of the island (a cultured people, who, despite the directive of those in power and the political strategies of the times, succeed in maintaining their power and independence): all these events are recorded in this film, the aim of which is to reconstruct a period of modern Greek history which could be seen as critical in the formation of the political and social status quo of the decades that followed.

The play by Sophocles, as it was presented by Nikos Koundouros on January 29, 1994, at the Greek-Yugoslav border, as part of the "Cry for Peace" cultural events, dedicated to the tragedy of Sarajevo.

Incredibly, the film was shot right in the middle of a besieged Sarajevo, in the summer of 1993, by the actor Senad Basic and director Francois Lunel. In July of 1994, the film negative was transported with great difficulty to Zagreb for processing, then returned to Sarajevo for post-production. Twenty months later, the film had its world premiere at the Goteborg Film Festival. Yearning for his girlfriend Senka, Senad comes out of a hospital into a besieged city. His apartment has been bombed in the war, and so he stays with his best friend. Soon, Senad finds Senka working in another hospital, where sh

I was never much of a fan of composite films, made up of several different, unconnected stories. It all started with a secret desire to adapt for the screen a strange play by Helder Prista Monteiro called The Immortals. But I soon realized that the result would be much too short. It was then that I remembered two tales that I had been longing to adapt and which I had not done because they were too short. It so happened that Antonio Patricio' s story "Suzy" began in a theater, and that suggested the notion that all three tales could be connected so that they would form a single entity. And so it happened that "Suzy" became the central element of a triptych involving The Immortals and "The Mother of the River" by Augustina Bessa-Luis, the last being told in flash-back. I gave this triptych the title Anxiety because it occurred to me that there was cause for anxiety, to a greater or lesser degree, in each". Manoel de Oliveira, Port, May 1998

The summer before finishing high school, 16-year-old Gena's life suddenly shifts when her mother falls into a coma. Gena spends her summer days drifting between a circle of friends, and her part-time job at a local beauty salon. But with the arrival of Jane Freeman, Gena's life changes. Jane is wanted by the authorities, and is on the search for her brother, Sonny, who is also hiding from the law. Gena is immediately drawn to the wilful, thrill-seeking Jane, whose free spirit masks a life shorn of love and human connection. As Gena accompanies Jane, the girls soon find themselves in the midst of Sonny's dangerous machinations with a local gang leader. And then, without warning or explanation, Jane simply disappears. Gena decides to piece together the puzzle behind Jane's diappearance, and in so doing enters a dangerous world - but a new world too, from which she will emerge with a new understanding of intimacy, separation, and her own potential.

At a night club, a timid young man watches the pretty young girls. He envies the courage of the other boys, and tries to hide his embarassment. Suddenly, a wedding party arrives, and the place is turned into a carnival. The young man then puts on a mask and asks the bride to dance. After his act of bravery, he departs.

Walking around the forty acres of the Pere Lachaise cemetery, one discovers the socio-economic hierarchy of Parisian society during the second half of the 19th century. The film is a tribute to the supporters of the Paris Commune who were shot, an event which is commemorated by a plain tombstone, disgracefully dwarfed by the arrogant monuments of the families of the bourgeoisie.

Inspired by the tragedy of the German Occupation of Greece during the war, Tallas made Barefoot Battalion. Set in an occupied country racked by suffering and starvation, the film tells the story of 160 children, who, having been kicked out of their reformatory by the Germans, are transformed into a kind-hearted band of heroes, stealing from the Germans and the black-marketeers, in order to keep themselves and those around them alive. Tallas achieved a wonderful neorealist film, avoiding the traps of melodrama with which the topic was rife, and reproducing the atmosphere of sheer desperation that had taken possession of Thessaloniki, a city surrendered to a harsh winter with no hope in sight. The editing and rhythm of the film bear out Rene Claire, who placed Tallas among the great film editors of the world. The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award, ant it won first prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

Bassae is located in Arcadia and is the site of the temple of Epicurian Apollo, designed by Ictinus, and one of the best preserved Ancient Greek temples. The film endeavours to answer two questions: where do the traces of the past take us to? Do we still know how to look at them?

An old house in the center of Rome, a refuge for two lonely people. He' s English, middle-aged, withdrawn and eccentric while she' s a young African woman in her early 20s, burdened with worries and hopes. Kinsky hides behind his piano, with music as his only companion. Shandurai comes from far away and finds refuge in Kinsky's house, which she cleans, in exchange for a room. Their lives interlink in a game of attractions and refusals, of secrets and allusions, appearance and truth, doubt and certainty. An old house, a man, a woman, and a piano. And through the window, a glimpse of a stormy springtime at the end of the century.

York, 1750. A French sailor known as Black Jack and accused of murder, is executed by hanging. A woman who sells dead boodies to doctors asks for the corpse, and has her young apprentice Tolly guard the coffin. However, Tolly discovers that Black Jack has escaped death by swallowing a spoon. The Frenchman escapes, taking Tolly with him to cover his tracks. Travelling east, Black Jack takes a coach hostage, planning to ask for ransom in order to let it go. Meanwhile, Belle Carter, the slightly mad daughter of a very wealthy family, who is being kept in a lunatic asylum, escapes into the woods. Tolly finds the girl but cannot turn her in to her captors. At a country fair, Tolly and Belle meet a doctor and his wife who sell a miraculous elixir....

Christos, an Air Force pilot is declared missing over the Aegean Sea. Meanwhile, mysterious tape recordings of Christos' voice are being sent to Maria, his ex-girlfriend, desribing their stormy love affair. An old boyfriend of Maria's, Stavros, shows up to offer his support, but in fact, unbeknown to Maria, he is the sender of the tapes. Stavros' undermining of the couple's relationship had resulted in a serious crisis, inflaming Christos' jealousy and making Maria run away. Taking advantage of Christos' despair, Stavros then convinced him of Maria's fickle character and talked him into disappearing. Thus, Stavros ends up controlling the life of the dead pilot, while at the same time, through the use of the pilot's voice, he has a complete hold on Maria as well. From this moment on, no one can be trusted as an ally...

Set in contemporary Taiwan, the film's characters are young, mainly lower middle-class people, attempting to deal with the pressures of urban life. The film is named after the belief that special opportunities are granted following the appearance of two full moons in a month. This second moon is called a blue moon. If a person sees a blue moon and prays sicerely, he is given a second chance in life. Blue Moon is organized in five 20-minute reels, but the film has been made so that these reels can be projected in any order or sequence. In other words, the story line and character developments are determined by chance, thus providing its characters with countless possibilities or second chances.

rete, 1897. The Greek are demanding that the Great Powers recognize the end of Turkish domination of the island. An allied fleet of French, English, Italian and Russian warships arrives in the port of Chania, and along with it Rosa Bonaparte, accompanied by twelve girls and all the equipment of a Marseilles brothel. They install themselves in a wing of the enormous half-ruined former Town Hall, where the officers of the Allied fleet fraternise and entertain themselves in the evenings, surrounded by secret and not so secret agents, army contractors, profiteers and camp followers