Previous Films

Empress Elisabeth of Austria is idolised for her beauty and renowned for inspiring fashion trends. But in 1877, she celebrates her 40th birthday and must fight to maintain her public image by lacing her corset tighter and tighter. While Elisabeth’s role has been reduced against her wishes to purely performative, her hunger for knowledge and zest for life makes her more and more restless in Vienna. She travels to England and Bavaria, visiting former lovers and old friends, seeking the excitement and purpose of her youth. With a future of strictly ceremonial duties laid out in front of her, Elisabeth rebels against the hyperbolised image of herself and comes up with a plan to protect her legacy.

Estrella Arenas (Icíar Bollaín), a rural Spanish teenager with a rich imagination, dreams of her mysterious father Agustín (Omero Antonutti), a man who in recent years has drifted away from her and her mother. Estrella struggles to piece together Agustín’s secret history and recalls her family’s sudden unexplained move from Seville in Spain, to the northern countryside when she was young. Estrella decides to return alone to the South, a place warped by years of her father’s hazy and nostalgic recollections.

When professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) travels to New York for a lecture, he’s stunned to find illegal immigrants Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira) living in his apartment. It turns out that it was fraudulently rented to them by a swindler, and Vale feels sufficiently sorry for them that he invites them to stay. They get on well until Tarek is accused of jumping a subway turnstile and lands in a detention centre. He risks being deported, and Vale does everything he can to prevent it.

Lazzaro (talented newcomer Adriano Tardiolo) is a beautiful peasant whose sweet nature makes people mistake him for simple-minded. He happily does the bidding of anyone in his local village, which is ruled over by the self-centred Marchesa (Nicoletta Braschi). He finds an unlikely friend in the Marchesa’s petulant son Tancredi, who convinces his hapless ally to help him stage a dramatic incident to secure a ransom from his mother. The film follows the adventures of this young man living on the margins of society, who can seemingly travel through time, arriving in the big city and appearing as a fragment of the past lost in the modern world.

Following a banal incident in her local village, eight-year old Shula is accused of witchcraft. After a short trial she is found guilty, taken into state custody and exiled to a witch camp. At the camp she takes part in an initiation ceremony where she is shown the rules surrounding her new life as a witch. Like the other residents, Shula is tied to a ribbon which is attached to a coil that perches on a large truck. She is told that should she ever cut the ribbon, she’ll be cursed and transformed into a goat.  I Am Not a Witch approaches real-life injustices with a beguiling blend of sorrow, anger and humour, marking writer-director Rungano Nyoni as an exciting new talent.

A Bollywood-style update of Jane Austen’s classic tale, in which Mrs. Bakshi is eager to find suitable husbands for her four unmarried daughters. When the rich single gentlemen Balraj and Darcy come to visit, the Bakshis have high hopes, though circumstance and boorish opinions threaten to get in the way of romance.

The blossoming romance between well-off widow (Jane Wyman) and her handsome, younger gardener (Rock Hudson) prompts the scorn of her children and country club friends. She must decide whether to pursue her own happiness or continue in a lonely, hemmed-in existence for the sake of the approval of others. With the help of master cinematographer Russell Metty, director Douglas Sirk imbues nearly every shot with a vivid and distinct emotional tenor. A profoundly felt film about class and conformity in small-town America, All That Heaven Allows is a pinnacle of expressionistic Hollywood melodrama.

Adam, the son of a fisherman, is offered the ultimate privilege to study at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the epicentre of power of Sunni Islam. Shortly after his arrival in Cairo, the University’s highest-ranking religious leader, the Grand Imam, suddenly dies and Adam becomes a pawn in a ruthless power struggle between Egypt’s religious and political elite over who will replace him.

In pre-First World War Paris, two friends, Jules (Austrian) and Jim (French), fall in love with the same woman, Catherine. But Catherine loves and marries Jules. When they meet again in Germany after the war, Catherine starts to love Jim – This is the story of three people in love, a love that doesn’t affect their friendship, and about how their relationship evolves with the years. Starring Jeanne Moreau, Henri Serre and Oskar Werner.

Performed by the arresting trio of Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott Thomas, each of them playing characters with demons to face up to, this film exudes Gallic charm, brocante and beaucoup du vin. Kline’s dishevelled Mathias, a failed playwright, arrives in Paris to claim an apartment left to him by his much-loathed late father. He is soon embroiled in archaic French law when he realises the opulent home he has inherited comes complete with an elderly woman, Mathilde (Smith) and her daughter (Scott Thomas), to whom he must pay a monthly fee while they remain there until the old woman dies.