City Life

Part-time model Valentine meets a retired judge who lives in her neighborhood after she runs over his dog. At first the judge gifts Valentine with the dog, but her possessive boyfriend won't allow her to keep it. When she returns with the dog to the judge's house, she discovers him listening in on his neighbors' phone conversations. At first Valentine is outraged, but her debates with the judge over his behavior soon leads them to form a strange bond.

Witek runs after a train. Three variations follow on how such a seemingly banal incident could influence the rest of Witek's life.

A young man in his twenties leaves prison after a three-year sentence. He wants to start a new life in a place where he is not known and dreams only of a job, a wife and a family. He succeeds partially in fulfilling these dreams, but then runs into a conflict on a construction job between the corrupt boss and fellow workers secretly planning a strike. He becomes a pawn in one camp while remaining true to his ideals in the other. Filmed in 1976 and shelved for five years.

A boy shyly watches a girl on a tram. Only when he exits the tram, and its too late, does he realize that he must meet her.

A former partisan now 38 years old remembers his childhood in the war.

A collection of short films by 16 European directors.

A documentary revolving around the Polish situation on an industrial level at the tail-end of the 1960s: it alternates between stark images at a metallurgic foundry and a board-room meeting among the various executives involved in its management.

A group of veterans recount a horrifying experience when trapped in a minefield, resulting in each losing their sight.

Krzysztof Kieslowski asks Poles of various ages who they are and what they want in life.

Dorota Geller, a married woman, faces a dilemma involving her sick husband's prognosis. Her husband's doctor, who believes in God, sweared about it in vain.

Futuristic view of life in Pankow, East Berlin. What if the reunion never happened? GDR has turned into a madhouse with serious economic problems.

A Soviet sailor travels to the West for the first time. In Hamburg, he hopes to find his missing brother. But German secret service agents, inquisitive reporters and even his own countrymen are hot on his heels.

A mage steals a book from a stranger and becomes very famous.

A Hollywood actor grows tired of making the same corporate movies, so he moves to Argentina to find more experimental and meaningful work.

Soledad, a girl tired of being a taxi driver in Buenos Aires, travels with her car to Patagonia. She stops in a village whose inhabitants live in isolation and their only contact with the outside world is a cinema where old films are projected.

Valentin, a 9-year-old boy living with his grandmother in late-1960s Buenos Aires, believes his family has problems that only he can solve. The youngster dreams of being reunited with his mother, who's separated from Valentin's abusive father.

An anthology film centering around the worldwide adventures of the Nissan Figaro.

In Curuguazu, located in the Argentinian countryside, seventeen year-old Daniel Montero has been raised by his grandmother for three years since the death of his parents in a car accident. Daniel has a boring life, working in a poultry processing plant and meeting his friends in the square to make small talk. He saves some money from his salary and buys an old television, where he watches late night porn shows of Sabrina Love.

A woman reunites with her husband, who vanished on her years ago.

As an anonymous man, Fermin leaves his underground hideout in the subway. The dictatorship in the country is followed by democracy, but the bright light of it blinds Fermin: he is displaced. At the police station, his anonymity is complete and he doesn't remember his own name. He is fitted with a past of 13 years of illegal political opposition from the police archives. When he keeps silent about the crimes of the dictator regime, he will be a free man. The woman he promised to marry, doesn't recognize him anymore, and thinks he is dead.

This is Buenos Aires, its characters, its history, its reality. A complex movie for a complex city, depicted in the character's language, and in their relationship with the present and the past

One day, Tim (Roy Ward) stops to speak with one of those men with no apparent income and no apparent place of residence who can be seen on the streets of Amsterdam and who are ready to speak of profundities and mock-profundities at the drop of a hat. This particular man tells him that "people don't die, they get killed." For some reason, this strikes the lonely television repairman as profound. He has been building a ham radio at home out of spare parts so that he will have someone to talk to. Shortly after talking to the street person, his circle of friends is diminished by one when his friend Alex is reported to have killed himself. This in itself is a bit of a mystery, and Tim attempts to make sense of it by talking to a lawyer, Alex's girlfriend, and others.

A young boy plays an accordion in a shopping mall. Béla Tarr picks up the camera one more time to shoot his very last scene. It is his anger about how refugees are treated in Europe, and especially in Hungary, that drove him to make a statement.

A monumental windstorm and an abused horse's refusal to work or eat signal the beginning of the end for a poor farmer and his daughter.

Revisits of locations on the Great Hungarian Plain - the puszta - that were used in Tarr's Sátántangó and Werckmeister harmóniák. Recitations of short lyric poems by Hungary's national poet Sándor Petofi.

Karrer plods his way through life in quiet desperation. His environment is drab and rainy and muddy. Eaten up with solitude, his hopelessness would be incurable but for the existence of the Titanik Bar and its beautiful, haunting singer. But the lady is married and Karrer is determined to keep her husband away...

Early short film by Béla Tarr.

Presents moving images of society’s outsiders, the impoverished and oppressed, whose lives are contrasted with the opulent surroundings of contemporary Vienna.

Using verite conventions, a young couple with a baby and a child are worn away by the monotony of their lives.

Családi tüzfészek (aka Family Nest) is an intimate portrayal of a family slowly disintegrating under various pressures in late 1970s communist Hungary. The plot of the film is deceptively simple, with the occasional momentous event--including one that's relatively shocking, but plot in a conventional sense is not the focus here.

The last ship (Utolsó hajó) is leaving the quay. Sirens are sounding.

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

Utilizing the impressionistic techniques of IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (if SYLVIA was a riff on the “city film,” the more miniaturized MEMORIES might be termed a “street-corner film”), Guerín uses a disturbing incident in his Barcelona neighborhood to thread together a rich tapestry on music, culture, community, the fragility of life, and the tenacity of life.

A man returns to a city to try to track down a lovely woman he met six years earlier.

On returning from class, a teacher is questioned by his wife, who distrusts his pedagogic project: an “Academy of the Muses” inspired by classical references, which is supposed to contribute to regenerating the world through poetry. The controversial project triggers a series of situations dominated by words and desire.

José Luis Guerín's great short film from 1986.

In the Mediterranean port of Barcelona two young unemployed girls living in a renovation area drift around the city desperately looking for a job.

A series of video letters between José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas.

Filmmaker José Luis Guerin documents his experience during a year of traveling as a guest of film festivals to present his previous film. What emerges is a wonderfully humane and sincere portrayal of the people that he meets when he goes off the beaten track in some of the world's major cities.

A poetic approach to the island of Lanzarote.

Philosophical road movie with Max Rüdlinger and Polo Hofer. First they go hiking in the Swiss mountains, then Max is off to Italy where he meets two lovely ladies, one of which accompanies him to Egypt, where they meet Polo Hofer.

A group of actors making their way to Rome ends up losing its way due to the fog, the darkness, the ice and their own feelings of guilt, suddenly getting completely lost in the hills.

An experimental conclusion to Klopfensteins trilogy of walk-and-talk philosophical films, presented mostly in negative black-and-white pictures

In Bern, a confluence of events forces Max, a radio commentator, to face the personal sense of frustration he feels in politics, his job and his relationship. A veteran of the ’68 generation, he confronts the demise of that utopian dream, breaking the bonds of his dreary existence during one night.

A daft road movie about two aging thesps in search of Klopfenstein himself.

Heavily improvised fairy-tale voyage in Italy involving a bickering Swiss couple and a magic liqueur.

Max and Chrige, a married couple of Swiss linguists, hike the Alps searching for rare words still uttered by the rural population. While on his way to a conference, the husband's plane disappears over the sea. Chrige is advised to give up hope of ever seeing him alive, but her heart tells her otherwise. Max comes ashore on a tropical island with another survivor, the plane's pilot. But where are they in reality?

A contemplation on night travelling in various weather conditions through seemingly endless landscapes in Europe, only briefly disrupted by shreds of conversation in a foreign language.

A sequel to Klopfenstein's movie "E nachtlang Füürland" (1981).

A free flight of memory, instinct, expressions and sensations. The unrevealed city is seen through the eyes of caged animals.

Aurélia, a young black woman who works at a factory and lives in a working-class neighborhood in São Paulo, is seeing Fábio Tavares, who gets involved with a racist neo-nazi group.

Young executive woman returns to small town of Dois Córregos and remembers the time, in the late 1960s, when she met her uncle there, a man who was running away from the military dictatorship ruling Brazil at the time.

The lives of three teachers in the outskirts of São Paulo, their love lives, their interaction with the poor surroundings, their family problems.

Luiz Antônio, a sociologist, had his political rights suppressed, during the Brazilian military dictatorship. Also, his wife Ruth had been tortured and killed. So he decides to hide in his niece Natércia and her husband Felipe's country house for a while. But she invites the intellectual Marcela and broker Ricardo for a weekend together. Luiz's world is upset and the existential problems of all get entangled, with unexpected results.

Two factory workers from the outskirts of São Paulo make a trip to a bathhouse close to the city.

A short film made for City Life (1990)

A short film about the meeting of a Trappist monk and a Zen Buddhist master.

Celso Felix, a successful radio broadcaster in the metropolis, is disillusioned with his everyday life and leaves his wife and children to live in a small beach town on the brazilian coast.

A couple of friends get fired from their job and end up at a bar.

The comings and goings in a small-town service station in Texas.

Lloyd and Frank, two lifelong friends and self-styled entrepreneurs in Austin, try to find the get-rich-quick scheme that will actually get them rich. Lloyd has developed a new invention that he's sure will finally lead to the success he and Frank have been chasing their whole lives. Their golden ticket is a combination mop, vacuum cleaner and floor polisher, but before prosperity arrives, reality intrudes on their plans.

The events on the last night in the existence of a little suburban Houston pub. It has to be closed down for development reasons but one of the regular customers, Cowboy, seems to have friends in high places.

Tired of the hellhole of modern urban life, a hard-boiled crime reporter goes home to small town Texas to visit his estranged brother.

Pake has left a good paying job working in the oil fields of Texas in order to give the music business a try. Eventually he finds himself alone and with no money in a hotel room in Los Angeles. He sets up a meeting with his old girlfriend Kay. When he meets her, she is with her fiancee. He is a Greek immigrant who desperately needs to marry Kay in order to become a permanent resident in this country. However his plans are in trouble because of Pake trying to convince Kay to go back to Texas with him and get married.

In Houston, a young manager loses his well-paid and status oriented job with an oil company. He roams through the city, realizing that his life of luxury is over and that his credit cards may soon become overheated.

In 1980 film writer Ruud den Drijver goes head to head with two notorious Dutch film directors, Paul Verhoeven and Wim Verstappen, passionate film makers, competitors and colleagues in a free for all heated discussion ranging (among other subjects) from oral sex to the art of motion pictures. 25 years later the confrontation is continued during the Cannes Film Festival. In the meantime Wim Verstappen has died a year earlier and Paul Verhoeven has returned from a brilliant career in the States. Paul is still very outspoken. He talks freely about the present-day neo-conservative policies of America, and about the situation in Hollywood and his work. THAT'S IT!!(English title)(1980-2005) is a retrospective view on the careers of two driven film directors and is a hilarious time document larded with passionate statements.

Ranjit is a young man who has been assured a lucrative job in an Indo-British firm by a family friend. All he has to do is turn up for the interview dressed in a western style suit. As luck would have it, all city laundries are on strike that morning, and his only suit is dirty. The film is a frantic search for a new suit to be borrowed from any of his friends, to make it in time for the interview.

Shasanka (Sreeram Lgoo) is a retired teacher who lives with his wife and two daughters. The family is thrown into an uproar after he goes out for a walk and disappears from their lives. Each member of the family reviews her final hours and days with him to try and discover what, if anything led to his disappearance. The only clue anyone is able to discover is an envelope on which is written the name of one of his former students. When they visit her, however, she is unable (or unwilling) to enlighten them. Why did he go for a walk during a heavy rainstorm? Where did he go? Bengali filmmaker Mrinal Sen isn't saying.

Subhash is a photographer from the city, who has come to take pictures of some old temples and ruins in a village. Ruins fascinate him. While in the village, he gets acquainted with a young woman, Jamini, who has had her heart broken in the past, by another visitor from the big city. Will history repeat itself, or will she find a way out of the ruins at last?

The Indian entry in the BFI’s Century of Cinema series of documentaries

A pre-teen ager servant boy dies of carbon monoxide poisoning on a cold winter night. He was employed by a young working Calcutta couple (Anjan and Mamata) with a small boy of their own. Taking money from a neighbor's friendly daughter, he slipped away to watch a movie on a cold winter night. Finding his usual sleeping corner below the stairs too cold, he bolts himself inside the kitchen, where a fire was burning. The next morning we witness a powerful discovery scene like on the morning after Macbeth's murder. The door is forced open and we see the commotion in the apartment block which is the stage of the drama. Who is responsible?

7 September, 1980. A film crew comes to a village to make a film about a famine, which killed five million Bengalees in 1943. It was a man made famine, a side- product of the war, and the film crew will create the tragedy of those millions who died of starvation. The film documents the convivial life among the film crew and the hazards, problems and tension of film making on location. The actors live a double life, and the villagers, both simple and not-so-simple folk watch their work with wonder and suspicion. But as the film progresses, the recreated past begins to confront the present. The uneasy coexistence of 1943 and 1980 reveals bizarre connection, involving a village woman whose visions add a further dimension of time—that of future. A disturbing situation, indeed, for the “famine-seekers”! —mrinalsen.org

Burning with a desire to be a journalist, a young man gets his chance when a publisher -- the father of a friend -- suggests that he write a story on the daily life of the people in his house (several families worth of people). The material turns out to be too incohesive and abundant to work into a pointed, thematic article, and just when he is about to give up, his younger brother asks him a simple question: "How many coal burners are there in Calcutta?" This triggers an idea for a story about Calcutta's pollution -- and the aspiring journalist dreams of myriads of burner-toting citizens invading the publisher's home demanding redress. Maybe he is finally on the way to a story that matters.

The bread-winning daughter in a middle-class family fails to return from work one evening. The saga begins with worries at home, followed by midnight searches and finally a deepening crisis arising out of economic and moral constraints prevalent in the society. Yet the film speaks of hope and of strength hidden behind despair.

Bhuvan Shome is a lonely widower, a proud old man and a strict disciplinarian. Looking back on the trodden path, strewn with staunch determination and drab attitudes, Bhuvan Shome, a throughtly unenchanted man, seeks escape in a holiday.

In 1980 film writer Ruud den Drijver goes head to head with two notorious Dutch film directors, Paul Verhoeven and Wim Verstappen, passionate film makers, competitors and colleagues in a free for all heated discussion ranging (among other subjects) from oral sex to the art of motion pictures. 25 years later the confrontation is continued during the Cannes Film Festival. In the meantime Wim Verstappen has died a year earlier and Paul Verhoeven has returned from a brilliant career in the States. Paul is still very outspoken. He talks freely about the present-day neo-conservative policies of America, and about the situation in Hollywood and his work. THAT'S IT!!(English title)(1980-2005) is a retrospective view on the careers of two driven film directors and is a hilarious time document larded with passionate statements.

The story of the cultural life in Rotterdam around 1980. In particular, the punk scene does not go unnoticed. The television broadcasting (VPRO) during that time led to strong reactions and severe criticism. Now it is a unique document of a turbulent time, with a direct movie style.