Xiau Wu is a small town pickpocket in crisis. A local cop is out to get him. An old thief friend snobs him since turning entrepreneur. And Mei Mei, the local Karaoke hostess, is stringing him along. A visit to his parents in a neighboring village could push him over the edge. In any case it’s time to Xiao Wu think about his future. The film starts out looking like an exercise in grungy social realism but gradually reveals itself to be something much more surprising. The eponymous protagonist is a scummy-but-likeable petty criminal, a pickpocket preying on visitors to Fengyang, the provincial dirt-town he calls home. But times are hard and getting harder: his best friend is suddenly a model entrepreneur and doesn’t want to know him any more, his family is falling apart, the leggy Mei-Mei from the local karaoke hostess bar seems to be stringing him along, and the cops are launching a crackdown on crime in the streets… The film’s turning-point is a scene in a public bath-house where Xiao Wu, alone, does what he has always refused to do in the karaoke bar: he sings his heart out. From this scene on, the film leaves mere sociology behind.
In a small village of the north called Rey Muerto, a woman runs away from her husband’s violence with her children.
It’s Saturday in a deserted and unrecognizable Buenos Aires. Six young people, hiding their loneliness and complicating their usual movements, search unsuccessfully for something to change or for a new sensation that may reveal them a direction. A couple used to their dull daily life. A girl who decided she wanted to be alone. Her boyfriend who is unable to accept the fact. A famous actor who is feeling uneasy everywhere. A girl who seems to be having fun, unable to see that she is bored in every instant. A melancholic comedy about uneasiness and fear.
Tao is living out her dreams at World Park where visitors can see famous international monuments without ever leaving the Beijing suburbs. The pretty young dancer and her friends perform daily in lavish theme park shows among replicas of the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, St Mark’s Square, Big Ben and the Pyramids. Tao and her boyfriend, security guard Taisheng, moved to the big city from the northern provinces a few years ago. Now their relationship has reached a crossroads. Taisheng becomes attracted to Qun, a fashion designer he meets on a trip back home. Tao’s fellow dancers are on sentimental journeys of their own. Xiaowei questions her future with irresponsible boyfriend Niu. Meanwhile, Youyou uses romance to the advantage of her professional ambitions. Not everyone who comes to Beijing with high hopes can land a job where SMS games are accepted parts of daily life. Many, like manual laborer Erxiao, experience a much harsher reality. But, despite the fun and magic, even theme park microcosms are vulnerable to change. For Tao and those around her, there will be marriage and break-up, loyalty and infidelity, joy and tragedy.
Nineteen years old and jobless best friends Xiao Ji and Bin Bin spend lots of time just hanging around. Xiao Ji puts the move on pretty Qiao Qiao, a dancer-model with a thug boyfriend. Bin Bin is not convinced the army may be his only way out. These young people represents the generation born in the 80’s, during the years of the politics of a son for couple, and that, therefore, never had brothers or sisters. For this nonchalant generation thet sees the future dictated by financial gain, it’s sometimes too difficult to resist the temptation of easy money. Especially when they don’t see the point of living past 30…
Winter. 1979. The political and social changes that swept China during the 80’s are reflected in the musical group of Minliang, his girlfriend and their friends. The influences of the West (pop music, longer hair for men, television) and the adoption of more modern conventions (birth-control, co-habitation, abandonment of arranged mariages) begin to slowly manifest themselves in the group’s small provincial town of Feyang. With the mid-80’s shift in government policy, the future of the goup is as uncertain as the relationships among its members.
After being found in an intimate encounter with another young man, Perry is thrown out of his house and forced to survive on his own. As he struggles to hold on by working in a homeless shelter and trying to maintain a college scholarship, he is haunted by his homosexuality and becomes increasingly withdrawn due to his family’s rejection. As his friend Marcus is performing his new poetry for him, an eldery man, Bruce, appears seemingly out of nowhere and begins reciting verse to them. He disappears just as quickly and elusively as he arrived, before they get a chance to talk to him. In his library research for a class project, Perry finds a book about the Harlem Renaissance and recognizes a poem (Smoke, Lilies and Jade by Bruce Nugent) as the same one that the eldery man was reciting. They encounter eachother again at the homeless shelter where Perry works. He confronts Bruce about who he is and begins to ask him about the Harlem Renaissance. They go on a literal and metaphorical journey to the house that was known as “Niggeratti Manor” and Perry learns about the lives and personalities of Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Aaron Douglas. He sees the pride that Bruce exuded in those times in terms of being black, gay and unashamed. His pride and self-esteem begin to have an empowering effect on Perry as he gains a stronger sense of his identity. We witness the transformative power that they have on each other’s lives through their shared passion for art ans storytelling.
Storybook characters Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Goldilocks, Alice, Dorothy and Red Riding Hood are in group therapy dealing with the issue that life is no fairy tale. When Clara, whose tale is yet to be told, joins them, she finds out that all women are heroes in their own stories.
In a desperate attempt to find his truth, Nick hunts down his deadbeat father for answers.
Un Unidentified Flying Man was broadcast on TV news. A guy disappeared leaving a mysterious world Flying Magic. His four fellows find a mysterious picture book in his room. The title of the picture book is Flying…
In Upstate New York, Irene struggles to raise two sons, keep her stale marriage together and manage a secret cocaine habit. Isolated by the strip malls and dying small towns that define the area, Irene’s not sure when she went from high school partying to skimming off the grocery money to supply her growing habit – but it’s about to end abruptly. Desperate to alter her life, she puts herself in rehab, hoping that she can turn around the world she has made with her husband, Steve. But once she’s back home the distance between them seems to have grown and Irene ends up falling into an incendiary affair with Bob, a nurse and former addict that she met at rehab. His attention and affection awakens her pushed aside life, but all too soon she realizes they have more in common than she bargained for.
Gowanus, Brooklyn: where a 12-year-old girl, who has discovered her teacher’s secret life, is compelled to investigate further.
Based on the true story of a father who takes his son on a fishing trip in the untamed forests of Montreal, Nibbles presents the unvarnished truth about the pleasures of the road, the beauty of nature, and the unbridled desire for food consumption that lies at the heart of every family outing.
Harvie Krumpet is the biography of an ordinary man seemingly cursed with perpetual bad luck. At the age of eighteen his parents are found frozen to death on their bicycles, just as the Germans invade and force Harvie to flee to Australia where he works in a rubbish dump.
By subjecting fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon to a mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinatory scene of woman’s reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities, and a wounded act of disappearance.
In this twisted romantic comedy, Mortie falls in love with the beautiful corpess who pass through his morgue until a woman who is alive.
Sorry, this entry is only available in European Portuguese.
In a peculiar Laundromat, eldery women smoke cigarettes, pass the bottle, and reminisce.
Two men abandon a boring wedding, run away to a parking lot, a strip bar and a motel room.
