Pol Cruchten

After ten years abroad, Catherine returns to Luxembourg, to catch up with her daughter Alba, brought up by Catherine’s mother Elisabeth. Alba is cold and distant with this stranger showing up unexpectedly in her life, so is Elisabeth, keen to keep her protégée to herself. One day, Catherine cannot take it anymore. She kidnaps Alba and takes her on a trip to a lake up North. Begins an unsettling journey into the puzzling world of motherly love, only to find out that sometimes the true opponent is yourself.

This film does not deal with Chernobyl, but rather with the world of Chernobyl, about which we know very little. Eyewitness reports have survived: scientists, teachers, journalists, couples, children... They tell of their old daily lives, then of the catastrophe. Their voices form a long, terrible but necessary supplication which traverses borders and stimulates us to question our status quo.

A haunting docudrama hybrid, Luxembourg’s submission for Academy Awards consideration conveys a transcendent tragedy that director Cruchten (BOYS ON THE RUN) underlines unforgettably with a striking use of masks and eerie puppet figures. An unnamed man (Stévenin) narrates the downward trajectory of his life from beyond the grave, from delinquency to the string of fateful decisions and foolhardy moves that tied him inextricably to the opiate that was the elusive love of his life. (Gene Siskel Film Center)

Elodie and Elias have been living by themselves ever since most of the human race has disappeared from the face of the earth. However, with the unexpected arrival of Gabriel, a boy a bit older than themselves, their harmonic relationship is about to come to an end.

The story beginns on 24 October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. The Second World War with its hardships and bombs...

When Jessy burns down his adoptive parents garage he is put into a youth prison. There he meets Roark another troublemake with whom he escapes and ends up in deserted woodlands. On their way they meet Rain, a girl that flees from her militia-captain Father. Together and with the Militia on their trail they try to escape in the hope of finding somewhere to make a new start of their lives.

This standard slice-of-life drama is about Dju Dibonga (Richard Courcet), a young man who leaves his home on Cabo Verde, an island of Portuguese dependency off the coast of Africa, to go to Luxembourg and search for his father. Far from his home village and unfamiliar with the large city, the young black man forms an unlikely friendship with a down-and-out white policeman whose only consolation in life is found at the bottom of a bottle. Their developing companionship forms the main focus of this movie directed by Pol Cruchten.

For most people, a wedding signifies a hopeful beginning, but then, Catherine and Christian aren't most people. She is a spoiled rich girl with an insatiable desire for the low and degraded side of life. Christian is without any resources, inner or outer, and caters to Catherine's every whim, even when she sends him out in the middle of their wedding reception to score some heroin for her. Their wedding is the starting point for their relentless downward spiral into the most brutally senseless lives imaginable, in this stylishly filmed exploration of the dark netherworld of the human spirit.

A bar, somewhere in Europe. A young nocturnal man thinks about death and tries to make sense of his life.