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Flora Lau’s debut feature is a beautifully formed, subtle film that focuses on the lives of two people with very different prospects – a wealthy Hong Kong woman and her mainland Chinese chauffeur – both trying to cope with life’s unexpected dramas. Anna (Carina Lau) struggles to maintain appearances with her status-conscious friends after her husband mysteriously vanishes. Fai’s (Chen Kun) wife is heavily pregnant with their second child, has no health care entitlements in Hong Kong and cannot give birth in their homeland without incurring penalties for breaching the one-child policy. While their daily routines intersect, their fates only momentarily converge and Lau elegantly critiques the social contradictions at play by paralleling their predicaments rather than constructing drama between the two protagonists. (Source: LFF programme)
Ken Loach’s 2013 documentary about social change in Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War, including the nationalisation of industries and the formation of the welfare state. Made almost entirely in black & white, so B&W archive footage from the 1940s blend in with interviews made today.
A grieving defense attorney gets caught in a twisted game of who-done-it when he takes on the case of a beautiful socialite who is accused of murder.
Niamh is the lone survivor of a bloody massacre after the furniture and objects in her family’s isolated house take on a monstrous life of their own. The police ignore her wild stories and the family friends and social worker who take her in try to introduce a new life. But in this psychological thriller, Niamh is unable to leave her violent past behind her, endangering everyone who crosses her path.
The series centers on Ryan Atwood, a troubled youth from a broken home who is adopted by the wealthy and philanthropic Sandy and Kirsten Cohen. Ryan and his surrogate brother Seth, a socially awkward yet quick-witted teenager, deal with life as outsiders in the high-class world of Newport Beach. Ryan and Seth spend much time navigating their relationships with girl-next-door Marissa Cooper, Seth’s childhood crush Summer Roberts, and the fast-talking loner Taylor Townsend. Story lines deal with the culture clash between the idealistic Cohen family and the shallow, materialistic, and closed-minded community in which they reside. The series includes elements of postmodernism, and functions as a mixture of melodrama and comedy.
When teenager Cami Winters falls in love, she falls hard. Her single mother, Tori, has no idea that Cami has fallen in love with a boy named ‘Jake’ she met on a social networking website. Although Cami believes Jake’s a 23 year-old college student, everything he’s told her online is a lie.
The film explores the role of photography, since its rudimentary beginnings in the 1840s, in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present. The dramatic arch is developed as a visual narrative that flows through the past 160 years to reveal black photography as an instrument for social change, an African American point-of-view on American history, and a particularized aesthetic vision.
A chronicle of the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants in the post-Edwardian era—with great events in history having an effect on their lives and on the British social hierarchy.
The very sad tale of socialite & Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971) who effectively plays herself in a film that follows her life in a large part from the time she left Warhol’s ‘factory’ and what the life of excess drugs did to her sanity. Edie was such a beautiful fragile girl – who finally got her head together and got married (her wedding day video is edited into the end of the movie) but it was too late, her husband woke up on a morning in November 1971, only weeks after filming wrapped, and found her dead beside him. She had died in her sleep from overdosing on her medication she was 28.
It revolves around Glory (Angel), a 52-year-old woman who falls in love with Niko (Tony), a guy 30 years her junior. They start a risqué May-December love affair, but will struggle to keep their relationship intact amidst social disapproval and judgment.
The Legend of Korra is an American animated television series that premiered on the Nickelodeon television network in 2012. It was created by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino as a sequel to their series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which aired on Nickelodeon from 2005 to 2008. Several people involved with creating Avatar, including designer Joaquim Dos Santos and composers Jeremy Zuckerman and Benjamin Wynn, returned to work on The Legend of Korra.
The series is set in a fictional universe where some people can manipulate, or “bend”, the elements of water, earth, fire, or air. Only one person, the “Avatar”, can bend all four elements, and is responsible for maintaining balance in the world. The series follows Avatar Korra, the successor of Aang from the previous series, as she faces political and spiritual unrest in a modernizing world.
The series, whose style is strongly influenced by Japanese animation, has been a critical and commercial success. It obtained the highest audience total for an animated series in the United States in 2012. The series was praised by reviewers for its high production values and for addressing difficult sociopolitical issues such as social unrest and terrorism. It was initially conceived as a miniseries of 12 episodes, but it is now set to run for 52 episodes separated into four seasons, each of which tells a separate story.
The Big Bang Theory is centered on five characters living in Pasadena, California: roommates Leonard Hofstadter and Sheldon Cooper; Penny, a waitress and aspiring actress who lives across the hall; and Leonard and Sheldon’s equally geeky and socially awkward friends and co-workers, mechanical engineer Howard Wolowitz and astrophysicist Raj Koothrappali. The geekiness and intellect of the four guys is contrasted for comic effect with Penny’s social skills and common sense.
Glee is an American teen musical comedy-drama television series that airs on the Fox network in the United States. It focuses on the reconstituted William McKinley High School glee club, New Directions, which competes on the show choir competition circuit while its disparate members deal with relationships, sexuality, social issues, and learning to become an effective team.
“Heidi 4 Paws” is a live-action re-telling of Johanna Spyri’s 1880 children’s classic, “HEIDI”, but with fully mouth-articulated dogs in all of the roles. “Heidi 4 PAWS” tells the story of the young orphan (this time as seen through the eyes of a yellow lab puppy) who is sent to live with her reclusive Grandfather (in this case an old sheepdog). Just as Heidi adjusts to her new life in the mountains, she is taken away by her social worker (a scrappy beagle). Heidi finds herself living in the big city with Clara Sesehound (a cockapoo mix), who has been made an invalid after a debilitating illness. Although Heidi comes to love Clara, her quest to return to the mountains dominates her stay. In the end, she is able to reunite with her beloved Grandfather. When Clara later comes to visit, the final miracle of Heidi’s story is revealed when Clara regains her ability to walk.
Mad Men is set in the 1960s, initially at the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on Madison Avenue in New York City, and later at the newly created firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, located nearby in the Time-Life Building, at 1271 Avenue of the Americas. According to the show’s pilot, the phrase “mad men” was a slang term coined in the 1950s by advertisers working on Madison Avenue to refer to themselves. The focal point of the series is Don Draper, creative director at Sterling Cooper and a founding partner at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, and the people in his life, both in and out of the office. The plot focuses on the business of the agencies as well as the personal lives of the characters, regularly depicting the changing moods and social mores of the United States in the 1960s.
A contemporary and culturally resonant drama about a young programmer, Elliot, who suffers from a debilitating anti-social disorder and decides that he can only connect to people by hacking them. He wields his skills as a weapon to protect the people that he cares about. Elliot will find himself in the intersection between a cybersecurity firm he works for and the underworld organizations that are recruiting him to bring down corporate America.
From director Andrew Rossi (PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY) comes an electrifying portrait of writer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili and her acclaimed one-woman show, BRONX GOTHIC. Rooted in memories of her childhood, Okwui – who’s worked with conceptual artists like Ralph Lemon and Julie Taymor – fuses dance, song, drama, and comedy to create a mesmerizing space in which audiences can engage with a story about two 12-year-old black girls coming of age in the 1980s. With intimate vérité access to Okwui and her audiences off the stage, BRONX GOTHIC allows for unparalleled insight into her creative process as well as the complex social issues embodied in it.
In the late eighties, the USSR government enlists Tomas, a devoted member of the Communist Party, to travel back in time to future London and document how Socialism has thrived.
Celebrated conceptual artist Ryan Gander investigates the selfie – the icon of a new kind of self-regard that hardly existed just ten years ago. He discovers the roots of the selfie go back hundreds of years before smartphones. In the age of social media, when we are told to be our best selves and live our best lives, he investigates what that really means and what technology is doing to our sense of self.
