A classic story of love, betrayal and reconciliation.  One of cinema’s great love stories and a pinnacle of the silent era. Murnau chose to use the new Fox Movietone sound-on-film system, making Sunrise one of the first feature films with a synchronised musical score and sound effects soundtrack. The film incorporated Charles Gounod’s 1872 composition Funeral March of a Marionette, which was later used as the theme for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–1965).

It is 1988, and Melo, a Uruguayan town on the Brazilian border, awaits the visit of Pope John Paul II.  Numbers begin circulating: hundreds of people will come, thousands say the media.  To the poor citizens of Melo this means pilgrims in need of food and drink, paper flags, souvenirs, and commemorative medals.  Brimming with enthusiasm, the locals hope not only for divine blessing but also a small share of material happiness.  Petty smuggler Beto is certain that he’s found the best business idea of all, “The Pope’s Toilet”, where the thousands of visiting pilgrims can find relief.

Georges and Anne are in their eighties.  They are cultivated, retired music teachers.  Their daughter, who is also a musician, lives abroad with her family.  One day, Anne has a stroke which paralyses her on the right side of her body. The couple’s bond of love is severely tested.

Acclaimed director Miguel Gomes’ sumptuous, eccentric two-part tale centered on Aurora, shown first as an impulsive, cantankerous elderly woman in present-day Lisbon.  When Aurora is hospitalised, she sends her neighbour to pass word of her grave condition to Gian Luca, a man of which no one has ever heard her speak.  Her quest to fulfill her friend’s wish transports us to Africa fifty years earlier, before the start of the Portuguese Colonial War.  We see Aurora again, this time as the gorgeous, smoldering wife of a wealthy young farmer, involved in a forbidden love affair with Gian Luca, her husband’s best friend.  Their moving, poetic tale is conveyed through the older Gian Luca’s suave voiceover, combined with the lush, melodious sounds of its heady, tropical setting, peppered with a soundtrack of Phil Spector songs.

A family deals with the typical anxieties of a wedding day while also confronting the political turmoil of the Middle East in this drama, a collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers.  Poignant and humorous true story of a Druze woman in Israel determined to marry a Syrian man she has not met.

A simmering, impeccably crafted Cold War thriller, starring Nina Hoss as a Berlin doctor banished to a rural East German hospital as punishment for applying for an exit visa.  As her lover from the West carefully plots her escape, Barbara waits patiently and avoids friendships with her colleagues – except for Andre, the hospital’s head physician – who is warmly attentive to her.  But even as she finds herself falling for him, Barbara still cannot be sure that Andre is not a spy.  As her defensive wall slowly starts to crumble, she is eventually forced to make a profound decision about her future.  A film of glancing moments and dangerous secrets, it paints a haunting picture of a woman being slowly crushed between the irreconcilable needs of desire and survival.

A powerful and inspirational story of an American doctor, Tom (Martin Sheen) who comes to France to collect the remains of his adult son (played by Emilio Estevez), killed in the Pyrenees in a storm while walking the Camino de Santiago, also known as The Way of Saint James.  Rather than return home, Tom decides embark on the historical pilgrimage to honour his son’s desire to finish the journey.  What Tom doesn’t plan on, is the profound impact the journey will have on him and his “California Bubble” Life.

A documentary which addresses the lasting impacts of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.  Guzmán focuses on the similarities between astronomers researching humanity’s past, in an astronomical sense, and the struggle of many Chilean women who still search, after decades, for the remnants of their relatives (“the disappeared”) executed during the dictatorship.  Guzmán narrates the documentary himself and the film includes interviews and commentary from those affected and from astronomers and archeologists.

On the eve of the 1904 St. Louis World Fair the four daughters of the Smith family learn lessons of life and love.  The film was directed by Vincente Minnelli, who met star Judy Garland on the set and later married her. In this film she premieres “The Trolley Song“, “The Boy Next Door” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas“. Upon its release, Meet Me in St. Louis was both a critical and a commercial success. It became the second-highest-grossing film of 1944 and was also MGM’s most successful musical of the 1940s. In 1994, the film was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.