Festival films

1994: Rome and Sarajevo. What very different things can happen in two different places within the same ten minutes!

The film is set in the 30s Sicily and tells the story of an 11-year-old boy, Acla, who is sold to a digger, Caramazza, at the Floristella sulphur mine. For five years, from Monday to Saturday, the boy becomes the property of Caramazza and spends the whole week living down the mine, like all the other miners. He only goes home on Saturday and Sunday. Acla experiences the hellish world of the sulphur mines, the stifling, choking galleries, the physical and sexual violence that everybody indulges in by tacit agreement. Acla decides to escape...

1950s Athens. Prince, a self-made impresario and the owner of the "Acropole" review theater, fires one of his leading ladies when she shows up drunk on opening night. In order to replace her, he turns to Lakis Loizos, an expert at comic female roles and an ex-wonder-child of movies, who now runs an agency for extras. At first, Lakis is surprised by the prince's proposal, but finally decides to try his luck on the stage of the legendary theater.

Mauro, a magistrate, lives with his emotionally fragile sister, Marta. Their life together is difficult, marked by instances of psychotic, erratic and masochistic behavior on both their parts. One day, in order either to distract or to get rid of his sister, Mauro introduces her to Giovanni, an actor who is accused of having driven his girlfriend to suicide. Meeting and getting to know Giovanni rejuvenates Marta, giving her a taste for independence. Mauro is not at all happy about these changes that he himself has brought about

"Alexandria" is a film about love amid lies and truths. Elena and Nina, mother and daughter, two Greek women who live abroad, take a trip together to Alexandria, the city where Elena grew up and was forced to leave in 1956. While Nina discovers her mother's city, she meets Yusri who fascinates her, Yusri whom she tries to avoid as though she is afraid of her own feelings. The trip becomes a journey into the past, when Nina learns that when Elena was a young girl she had experienced the great love of her life in the cosmopolitan Alexandria of the 1950s with the French writer Albert Janowski, and asks her mother to tell her the story. For the first time mother and daughter grow close, but a few days later Nina discovers that her mother hadn't told her the whole truth...

Hedi, a wealthy, elderly woman, lives with her son, Janos, who only shows up to ask for his allowance, and Anna, who acts as a nurse, housekeeper and confidante. Miklos, Anna's lover, moves in with them and becomes determined to charm the old lady and win her favor. Janos, meanwhile, brings home a "lodger", his friend Pal. An unemployed, indigent teacher, Pal will also try and seduce Hedi in his own, awkward way. In a poisonous, suffocating atmosphere, alliances are formed only to be broken and re-established within moments. The only thing which is certain is that everyone is in dire need of money. Everyone, that is, except Heidi...

From the film's very first shots, we find ourselves in Philippe Grandrieux's unique universe, as a hand-held, grainy image moves and flickers towards a a group of people looking expectantly upwards. We don't know what it is they are looking at, and we have no idea where we are. The burnt out, war-ravaged landscape, with bombed-out buildings standing in the middle of empty fields, is reminiscent of Bosnia or Chechnya. A young woman is picked out of a line of captives. Her long hair is cut, and she ends up working as a prostitute in a strip club. A young American sees her and begins to pursue her, seeking her out for a sexual encounter, a fact which marks the beginning of his obsession with her...

For the past ten years, Anna, a poor girl from a Greek village, has been working as a maid for a middle class Athenian family. When the family sees that Anna is of a marrying age, they pick out a young man for her and invite his to the house one Sunday. That same evening, they allow Anna to go out with her prospective bridegroom. During their brief time together, Anna feels emotions which, until then, she had kept locked inside her. However, when she returns home, she discovers that the family have changed their mind.

A collaboration with American composer Philip Glass, this is an allegorical work, focused and succinct in its 11-minute delivery, that may be interpreted in many ways. It's evident that the ritualistic "passage" of the title is between old and new, darkness and light, death and rebirth.

Cut in half and mirrored, images by Alain Resnais and Ingmar Bergman blossom into Freudian palindromes of narcissism in which attraction increases, the closer you come to disappearing up your own body.

"As long as there's alcohol"... shows us a side of modern Italy that is not normally seen, where fear, loneliness and crime prevail. Following a secret impulse and in search of this dark Italy, Michalis, the film's main hero, arrives in Milan on a rainy morning and roams every corner, every building, every street of the city nostalgically as they jog his memory and take him way back to the old days. A chance encounter will lead him to the outskirts of the city to a gigantic apartment building complex that everyone calls the "nightmare". A block full of filth, poverty and squalor where Andreas and Christina live in an ice-cold apartment on the 17th floor. They are Greeks, former students forgotten there by the world but also by their own selves, expecting nothing, hoping for nothing. For a few days Michalis will share their empty life, divided between meaningless nights out, dilapidated Alfa Romeos, glossy television shows and lots of whiskey. He will fall madly in love with Christina's eyes - as sad as they are magnificent. The power of their love will overcome the invisible walls of the tyrannical block, will lead them to a wild flight only to wither and fade a few days later having almost immediately lost its glow and its intensity.

On the occasion of the millennium, the concept of time has become a major topic of debate within the entertainment and computer industries. But who is it that administers time today, and who is it that determines «landmark-dates»? «It is the stockmarket which measures time, and it is that time which passes and is measured by watches», is the answer of the films narrator. This is an invisible hero, whom we perceive through the films narration, and who inhabits the bodies of children, passers-by, the elderly, inhabitants of urban and rural areas, and also actors, who play out various rhythms of the human body. The hero of the film is born like a firework, together with the explosion of the millennium. Growing up, he experiences everything in haste: games, knowledge, writing, work, food, travel, love. From video games to fast food to phone sex, his life is built upon an alienated management of time. At the same time, ordinary people confess their need for the safeguarding of values that exist in slowness, in the durability of human actions. Finally, images from the variety of Natures rhythms and the art of Rodins sculptures restore the measure of a lost balance.

The year is 1949 and Pasolini is in his late twenties, a teacher in the village of Ramuscello in Friuli. Charged with committing sexual acts with three male minors, he is suspended from teaching and expelled from the Communist Party. Friends advise him to go to Rome, and thus begins a future filmmaker's journey into a strange new world: the unemployed Pasolini goes to Rome's huge Cinecitta movie studio to find work as an extra and comes face to face with the medium that will make his reputation

Continuing his experiments with a stationary camera explored in his original video $La tarea$, Hermosillo placed the camera "behind a mirror" and chronicled the lives of and tormented relationships of his characters through their actions in the bathroom. The camera never blinks as the young married couple and her parents reveal their secrets in that most secret and sacrosanct of rooms.

The story begins when fifteen-year-old Maria is pulled from a beauty pageant because her mother has falsified her age in the entry forms. This is the first of many episodes in Maria's accelerated maturation, due in part to her physical beauty and precocity, but also to the ruthless ambition of her overbearing mother, who is obsessed by the idea of her daughter becoming a supermodel and entering the world of show business. Maria's career is meant to make up for her mother's unfulfilled dreams of the past. The girl's beautiful long hair may be the key to her success, just as it was in the case of pop star Violetta Villas, who is her mother's idol. However, Maria will rebel against her mother's misguided love, and ultimately it will be she who will assume the maternal role in their relationship.

In west London, 18-year-old Jess Bharma dreams of playing professional football like her idol David Beckham, but her Punjabi Sikh parents have more conventional plans for her: a law degree and marriage. Jules, a blond tomboy, spots Jess playing football in the park and invites her to join the local team. Meanwhile, Jess is forced to help with the preparations for the wedding of her older sister, and is then banned from playing football for shaming the family by exposing her legs in shorts. Jess resorts to playing in secret...

A young but lonely female Justice Department agent gets suspicious about what appears to be a pattern of deaths and picks up the trail of a cool, calculating and beautiful murderess, who marries wealthy men and then kills them to collect their wills. At first, the federal agent goes after the suspect for professional reasons, feigning friendship in hope of getting some evidence, but she quickly falls under the killer's potent spell herself, starting to feel a barely submerged sexual jealousy for the utterly confident seductress

Gladki runs away from the hospital where he is being treated for drug addiction, and phones his friend Lupa for help. She finds him semi-conscious and decides to help him kick his heroin habit. She puts his legs in plaster casts and locks him up in a room she has rented. She does all she can do to brighten up their life in this little room. Rejecting all outside help, she devotes herself entirely to her friend. But inside the confined space, there is no telling who is really the prisoner...

In a small town on the Burmese-Thai border, Roong longs for the day when she can be in the arms of her Burmese lover, Min, who has immigrated to Thailand illegally. She pays Orn, an older woman, to take care of Min while she looks for a place for them to share their happiness. One afternoon, Min takes Roong on a picnic in the jungle, where they feel free to express their love. Meanwhile though, Orn has also gone into the jungle with Tommy, a colleague of her husband's. Will an overdose of happiness have after-effects?

Although Alex appears to be a successful wine-maker, his life is falling apart. He doesn't get along with his ex-wife and his stepson, and he is also deep in debt. He teams up with his mistress and an ageing thief to steal a priceless necklace. They succeed, but then the real problems begin. As Alex packs to go to New York to fence the necklace, his ex-wife returns unexpectedly. They struggle, she leaves him unconscious and unknowingly takes the necklace with her...