Festival films

Hiding behind his glasses, Hlynur, the anti-hero of this mad-cap comedy, is determined to avoid adulthood at all costs. At 28 years old, he still lives with his mother, who nags him every now and then, but generally lets him get away with everything. With his off-centre humour, Hlynur has absolutely no aim in life, and no intention of getting one, either. In the evenings, he meets up with his friends in the trendy bars of Reykjavik's 101 quarter. Despite his numerous sexual conquests, women, as far as Hlynur is concerned, are creatures from a foreign planet best avoided during daylight hours. However, his life won't remain this simple for much longer...

The story revolves around a group of four friends, who have just graduated from high school. All of them are seventeen going on eighteen, and this will be their last carefree summer before their coming of age. Suddenly, their life is transformed into a frenzied chase, when the lady's man of the group, mesmerised by a gorgeous woman, gets mixed up in the grotesque gang of drug dealers that use her as bait. The girl comes onto him pretty strong and passes him the dope, thus initiating an adventure which will have unpredictable consequences, some frightening and others amusing, for the young friends and the gang.

On New Year's Eve of the year 2000, the paths of eight people cross in an unexpected and dramatic way. A businessman, wavering between his wife and his mistress, finds himself being blackmailed. An unemployed man becomes a hired killer in an effort to escape from his misery. A child wanders the streets alone, trying to survive... Will the dawning of the millenium mark the beginning of a new epoch, or could it be that, beneath all the glittering celebrations, people are experiencing a different reality?

Natasha, a Russian refugee, seeks a place in the Greek sun.

Sixteen-year-old Sabine, who fights constantly with her mother's boyfriend, is sent to live with her father in the suburbs of East Berlin. Lost, confused, friendless, she might as well be living in a foreign country. Eventually, she befriends classmate Eddie, who is on the verge of quitting school to become his own man, even though his planned future as a window cleaner seems less than appealing. Eddie's best friend, Mischa, recently released from prison, is in a similar situation. Unemployed, in constant trouble with the police, he takes whatever he can grab from the world. His welcome home party turns ugly when he and Eddie get into a savage fight with a boy from another part of town...

On New Year's Day 1899, a dangerous bandit escapes from prison and rides away on a white horse. The people call him Alexander the Great, since he is perceived as a mythical symbol of popular insurrection. With the help of his men, he kidnaps a group of English diplomats and keeps them hostage in his village, demanding that the government grant him amnesty and give back their land to the peasants. The peasants, who have joined to form a community under the guidance of a socialist teacher, welcome Alexander and his band of men and hail him as the Liberator. However, Alexander does not participate in the life of the community. He lives in seclusion, surrounded only by his comrades and suffering from epileptic fits...

Two teenage boys, Mathieu and Cedric, meet in summertime, feel attracted and unleash their sexual desires. It could have been a mere holiday affair, but their relationship deepens and, as time goes by, transforms into sheer love. Mathieu decides to leave his parents and move in with Cedric. The following winter, nothing is left from their love. Cedric has to learn to live with loneliness and loss.

The film is a brilliant and ultimately damning portrayal of the world of psychiatry. When we first meet Paul, he seems to be living a normal, well-adjusted life with his parents in Reykjavik. He is interested in art and music, and has just begun a relationship with a young woman. But there are hints that there may be something terribly wrong with Paul's world, and when his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, his parents are left with no choice but to have him committed to a psychiatric hospital. There, Paul sets about befriending some of his fellow-inmates. One of them is convinced that he wrote all the Beatles' songs and telepathically sent them to the members of the group. A second, the educated and cultivated Victor, occasionally turns into Hitler. The third insists that he wrote his doctoral thesis on Schiller and defended it at the University of China...

The story centres around a young girl, sometime in the turbulent sixties. Alice comes home from boarding school, to spend her summer holidays with her parents in rural France. They run a sawmill where they employ a young man, Jim. Business isn't going well, although Mr and Mrs Bonnard are too proud to admit it, and Jim's nonchalant attitude when it comes to work doesn't help things. Alice is attracted to Jim, but she's too scared to let him know, believing that as far as he is concerned, she doesn't exist. She constantly hangs around him, but silence becomes a barrier, because the closer she comes, the more impossible she finds it to speak...

The film was written as a sort of personal film diary and shot as a personal documentary. In Angelopoulos's film, there is only room for the places, the words, the memories. Everything he experienced. Everything that can be contained in poetry. A yearning that includes not only Athens and the director himself in the city, but also his work itself.

In Iranian Kurdistan, very near the border with Iraq, five brothers and sisters live at subsistence level. The younger boy has a serious illness. The medicine he takes is expensive, and the doctors say he only has one month to live unless he is operated on immediately. Despite the efforts of the eldest brother, who takes on lots of odd jobs, the family is unable to pay for the operation. Seeing no other choice, the elder sister agrees to marry an Iraqi willing to help them financially. However, at the border, the future spouse's family refuses to let the sick boy come with them. Instead, they give him a horse, which will allow him to earn a living...

Athens, 1966. Greece is wavering between reform and self-destruction. Thirteen-year-old Dimitris unexpectedly loses his father when the new government stops the construction of a 12-story high rise in the centre of Athens. Seeing his pampered mother collapse, Dimitris gets carried away by his prematurely grown-up appearance, and decides to skip adolescence in order to stand by her and continue his father's work. A brutal coming-of-age ritual ensues. But just when he feels ready to shoulder his responsibilities, he is forced to claim his mother from the arms of an up-and-coming star of the political scene... A series of major and minor betrayals will propel Dimitris's revolutionary act of vengeance, which will change the course of Greek history...

A policeman in Vienna interrogates an American psychoanalyst in order to discover the reasons behind his friend's suicide. He is convinced that it's a cover-up for a murder. He is incapable, though, of understanding the actions and behavior of a woman who truly wanted to be free. One of the more complex films by Nikolas Roeg, with a maze of references to psychoanalysis. Keitel as the policeman is a pleasure to watch.

"The accumulation of images of human and ecological disasters from the former Yugoslavia prompted us to look for evidence of pre-existing essential values, which could not possibly not exist. Records of life as it was. Material for a film which celebrates life over conflict and division. History perceived from a private, intimate point of view, history with a small h, starting from the bottom, from details. The 20s, the 30s, the 40s. A work of analysis, based on formats no longer used, no longer even projectable, to make indestructible the memories preserved in the images we have found: films shot by amateurs, by travellers, by Nazi soldiers in the Balkans".

Just before Easter Sunday, Jan Nowicki, a young medical student leaves the student home, and begins an almost dreamlike peregrination through the city of Warsaw. Carrying all his belongings in a suitcase, he visits his father, who lives in a home for retirees. The old man gives him a receipt from a pawn shop and an address. When Jan arrives there, he meets a woman who gives him a saber. With his suitcase and saber in hand, Jan resumes his wanderings, and meets a beautiful young woman who drives a tram... The film received the Grand Prix at the 1966 Bergamo Film Festival.

A black, romantic comedy about a pair of twin brothers who wasted their teenage years pursuing a vendetta. Spanning three generations, this is a tale of lust, lies and misunderstandings. Manos, the "eldest" of the twins, is a mild-mannered schoolteacher, who has been chosen to carry out a 57-year-old vendetta. George, his brother, is haunted by the fact that he was born "three minutes too late", and is desperately seeking a vendetta to prove himself. Pursuing the vendetta in faraway Melbourne, they will both realise that they have forgotten to pursue their lives, and they will discover friendship, love and, above all, brotherhood, thereby teaching their obsessive grandmother a lesson about life.

It's a hot summer on the National Road. Maria lives in a trailer, isolated in her tedious, day to day routine, until a brief encounter with Miltos, who is passing through. Love in a single breath.

On an August night, in an almost deserted Athens... A young man without a past or a future waits for something to happen in the heart of a big city. A beautiful girl at a telephone booth has a terrible argument with her boyfriend over the phone. An old friend, on the verge of an emotional breakdown, longs for his high school sweetheart and screams her name from his balcony. Two incorrigible middle-aged bachelors masterfully set up the "trap of the century" that will finally get them their girl. The owner of a coffee shop recites poetry. A couple's 11-year-old relationship is ludicrously challenged by the presence of a body-builder. An American challenges Mohammed Ali to a boxing match, as a tribute to the boxer whom he considers to be the ultimate dancer. Two mobsters trained in pressure tactics "annul" themselves through the comedy of an absurd defeat...

A place somewhere in the Caucasus, which, like Chechnya, is constantly plagued by war and skirmishes. During a raid on a village, Russian soldiers -little more than boys themselves- were unable to prevent the death of a child killed by a land mine. The distraught child's mother shoots the village policeman and is shot herself by the panicking soldiers, who, by way of punishment, find themselves posted to a checkpoint in a remote area for thirty days. Although they don't actually see the enemy -an intermittently active sniper- the soldiers can certainly sense his presence behind every stone, and soon begin to suspect every farmer they encounter...

Cleo, a beautiful singer, is waiting for the results of a medical test. From superstition to fear, from the rue de Rivoli to the Cafe du Dome, from coquetry to anguish, from her house to the Parc Montsouris, Cleo lives ninety private minutes. Her lover, her musician, a girlfriend and, finally, a soldier, will open her eyes about the world.

Muzzafer returns from Istanbul to the small town in Anatolia, where he grew up and his parents and family still live. He plans to feature them in his new film, and brings with him a video camera with which he tests his elderly father's acting abilities. His father isn't very interested in his son's work, as he is preparing for a legal battle to save a wooded area from being confiscated by the government and the trees cut down. Muzzafer arranges for his cousin, Saffet, who has just failed his college entrance exams, to help in the filming. Saffet is thrilled, and gives up the factory job that had been so difficult for him to find. Muzzafer's nephew Ali is also invited to participate. The little boy has been promised a musical watch if he can keep a hen's egg unbroken in his pocket for 40 days. But although he claims to want to capture the life of the village, Muzzafer's obsession with his film makes him blind to the daily events that matter to the people that live there. Ceylan made the film to repent for his behaviour during the making of his 1998 film, Kasaba.