Previous Films

Over the span of a week, twenty-two souls arrive at a way station (which looks like an old junior high school) between life and death, where they are asked to choose just one memory to take into the afterlife.  The new arrivals include an elderly woman, a rebellious dropout, a teenage girl and a 70-year-old war veteran.  Once they have chosen a memory, it is recreated and filmed by the staff of the way station, using all the tricks and illusions of cinema: cotton balls are used to mimic clouds, a fan is used for a summer breeze.

In the spring of 1940, following the invasion of Poland by Russia’s Red Army in 1939, up to 20,000 Polish officers and soldiers were executed by Stalin’s secret police.  The men were imprisoned in three POW camps, one of which was based in the Katyn forest.  Working from a novel by Andrzej Mularczyk and real life accounts, Katyn tells the story of four fictional families, forever separated from one another. A brutal and devastating work.

There is something dark and mysterious occurring in a small Hungarian village, but exactly what that is remains a secret, barely perceptible among the rhythms of everyday life.  A youth drives the milk cart and spies a young woman sunbathing.  An old woman plows her field, and a farmer’s sow is fertilized.  But there is also a strange ritual that involves the villagers and the mailman, who presents items to every new widow when her husband dies – something that happens with regular frequency.

Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) is an American ex-GI who stays in post-war Paris to become a painter, and falls for the gamine charms of Lise Bouvier (Leslie Caron). However, his paintings come to the attention of Milo Roberts, a rich American heiress, who is interested in more than just art. MGM executive Arthur Freed bought the entire Gershwin musical catalogue and some of his music was included in the movie, such as “I Got Rhythm” and “Love Is Here To Stay”. Other songs in the movie include “I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise” and “S’Wonderful”. The climax of the film is “The American in Paris” ballet, a 17-minute dialogue-free dance featuring Kelly and Caron set to Gershwin’s famous work.

With bills to pay and a daughter to support, Juan Villegas is desperately in need of a job.  Unfortunately, at age 52, and without any marketable skills, gainful employment seems unlikely.  His luck changes when he helps a woman repair her car and she repays his kindness by giving him a pure-bred puppy.  Convinced of his future in the competitive dog circuit, Villegas seeks out the help of dog trainer Walter Donado and the two take their fortunes on the road.

In October 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Alex Kerner (Daniel Brühl) is living with his mother, Christiane (Kathrin Sass), and sister, Ariane (Maria Simon).  But when the mother, a loyal party member, sees Alex participating in an anti-communist rally, she falls into a coma and misses the revolution.  After she wakes, doctors say any jarring event could make her have a heart attack, meaning the family must go to great lengths to pretend communism still reigns in Berlin.

Arguably Luchino Visconti’s best film and certainly the most personal of his historical epics, The Leopard chronicles the fortunes of Prince Fabrizio Salina and his family during the unification of Italy in the 1860s.  Based on the acclaimed novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the picture opens as Salina (Burt Lancaster) learns that Garibaldi’s troops have embarked in Sicily.  While the Prince sees the event as an obvious threat to his current social status, his opportunistic nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) becomes an officer in Garibaldi’s army and returns home a war hero and begins courting the beautiful Angelica (Claudia Cardinale).

Magic tricks can’t compete with rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, so a French illusionist finds himself touring Scotland’s shabby pubs and run-down restaurants.  But things brighten for him when he meets Alice, a girl who believes his powers are real.  Together they travel to Edinburgh for a performance, but he doesn’t have the heart to reveal that his feats are merely tricks, and risks financial ruin by giving her gifts supplied by his “magic.”  Superb animated feature based on an unproduced script by Jacques Tati.

In this visually and conceptually impressive film, two-bit Berlin criminal Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) delivers some smuggled loot for his boss, Ronnie (Heino Ferch), but accidentally leaves the 100,000 Deutschmark payment in a subway car.  Given twenty minutes to come up with the money, he calls his girlfriend, Lola (Franka Potente), who sprints through the streets of the city to try to beg the money out of her bank manager father (Herbert Knaup) and get to Manni before he does something desperate.

An order of Trappist monks whose members include Christian (Lambert Wilson) and Luc (Michael Lonsdale) live among the Muslim population in a quiet corner of Algeria.  As the country is plunged into civil war in the mid-1990s, the men of God must decide whether to stay among the impoverished residents who have been their neighbours, or flee the encroaching fundamentalist terrorists.  The situation that unfolds, based on actual events, has tragic consequences.