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What is art and how does it relate to society? Is its value determined by its popularity or originality? Is the goal profit or expressing one’s personal vision? These are some of the questions raised as we follow fiercely independent New York artist Robert Cenedella in his artistic journey through decades of struggling for creative expression. A student, protégé and friend of German artist George Grosz, Cenedella is now passing on the legacy of Grosz’s approach to art, in the very same room where Grosz taught. In portraying Cenedella’s determination to buck the system of what’s popular while critiquing that popularity in his attempt to turn the art world upside down, ART BASTARD is a funny, touching, and insightful look inside the maverick mind of a true original.
Even in modern-day Taipei, women feel the societal pressure to get married and have children before the clock runs out. Thankfully, there is a solution: freeze your eggs and prolong your fertility until the right one comes along! Starring Ariel Lin, the film is a glimpse of what millions of working women struggle with: finding the balance between pursuing a career and marriage.
The story of Nicholas Sand and Tim Scully, the unlikely duo at the heart of 1960s American drug counter-culture.
Jack, an unappreciated American writer in his sixties, comes to the off-season peninsula of Hel in the north of Poland and isolates himself to write a script. He meets Kail, a local who earns money by making lie-detector tests. Jack doesn’t find any inspiration until some tourists mysteriously disappear – one of them found dead with his tongue cut off. Kail, persuaded by his friend Mila that Jack is the murderer, begins an investigation. The truth turns out to be more twisted when he discovers that Jack is writing about him.
Anger, guilt, resentment, rage, innocence, closure, peace are all explored in 10 people’s last words from the gurney on death row. Based on true events.
Day breaks on the eighth floor in a suburban neighbourhood of Lisbon and 14-year-old Bruno’s grandfather is still in hospital. Doctors give him only a few days to live. The imminence of death and the void that it will leave force Bruno to become the man of the house, where he lives with his mother Mónica, who is in her 30s, and his three-year-old sister Érica.
Donald Trump has become a beloved cult figure for many Russians. The short film uses found footage, fake news and state-controlled political programming to reveal the variety of ways Trump’s newfound Russian supporters express their devotion.
Dark Night enigmatically unfolds over the course of a lazy summer day, as it traces the events leading up to a mass shooting in a suburban multiplex. Abandoning the narrative confines of the true crime genre, the story is told through fragmented moments from the lives of several characters, whose fates are tragically intertwined. As the sky grows darker, the placid surface of daily life becomes disturbed by a lurking and inevitable horror.
Karukan, a ronin samurai, travels to the old west after his clan fails to stop a beast that has escaped Japan. He hires Langdon, to accompany him to stop the beast from killing.
After his family falls apart Joshua (writer/co-director/star Aaron Ellis) is forced to move to Canada. It is there he meets Jay (Justin Liles), a local tattoo artist who fled the violent actions of his parents back home in Alabama. Both young men, abandoned and lonely in their own way, find themselves falling for one another… until a pair of high school brats intrude on the boys’ growing relationship. This LGBT film has won numerous awards at film festivals, including Best LGBT Feature Film at the Accolade Competition and the Independent Filmmakers Showcase IFS Film Festival, as well as Best Leading Actor and Narrative Feature at the IndieFEST Film Awards.
A teenage girl must commit horror movie sins such as drink alcohol, do drugs, and have sex to lure a killer and finish him off.
Declassified FBI and CIA documents help director Paul Davids unravel the puzzle of Marilyn Monroe’s demise, which was officially ruled a “probable suicide,” while providing detailed evidence supporting the conclusion that Marilyn was murdered.
Rihito Sajo, an honor student with a perfect score on the entrance exam and Hikaru Kusakabe, in a band and popular among girls, would have never crossed paths. Until one day they started talking at the practice for their school’s upcoming chorus festival. After school, the two meet regularly, as Hikaru helps Rihito to improve his singing skills. While they listen to each other’s voice and harmonize, their hearts start to beat together.
In a near future, the world order has changed. With its 10 millions of unemployed citizens, France has now become a poor country. Its people wavers between rebellion and resignation and find an outlet in the shape of TV broadcast ultra brutal fights in which the players are legally doped and unscrupulous.
In 20 years’ time, there will be nearly 1.6 billion smokers around the world. Approximately 70% of smokers want to quit. The United Nations’ World Health Organisation expects a billion people will die prematurely from smoking this century. The products their doctors recommend are rarely effective and many are trapped. A new vapour technology was invented to give smokers a successful way to quit. But it was quickly demonised, and even banned in many countries. A perfect storm is brewing between smokers trying to quit, government regulators, and health charities funded by the powerful pharmaceutical industry. Director Aaron Biebert travelled across four continents interviewing doctors, scientists, and others working to save a billion lives. What he found was profound government failure, widespread corruption in the public health community and powerful subversion by big business.
After a heavy decision, Anna and Juhan are unable to move on with their lives. They take time off at their friends’ fancy summer house and once there, are forced to offer shelter to another couple caught in the storm.The couple assumes that the house belongs to Anna and Juhan and they do nothing to correct the mistake. Instead, they seize their new roles and start taking their mutual bitterness out on the strangers. Pretenders is a psychological drama about the truths and illusions of a relationship
The film adapts and expands the Planetarian visual novel by Key. The story is set in a dystopian future where biological and nuclear warfare has left a once prosperous civilization in complete ruin. The film tells the story of an old man travelling around with a mobile planetarium projector to show people the stars.
After her mother decided that the eighteen-year-old mentally disabled Dora no longer has to take psychotherapeutic drugs, the young woman begins to blossom. The sedated teenager was never a problem for her surroundings – but new challenges arise when the pleasure-loving young woman discovers her sexuality. The family is threatened to fall apart.
Stelios Dimitrakopoulos has 32 hours left before he loses everything. From the jazz bar he painstakingly keeps running for years, to his own family. The Romanian gangster who lent him money, now demands the debt to be paid. The middle-man and former friend, makes Stelios take care of illegal errands. His wife is seriously thinking of abandoning him, and a night club owner, not thinking about the consequences, finally starts to stand up for himself. Christmas is coming, the clock is ticking, and the tree in Stelios’ house must be decorated.
The time: 1814. The place: Edo, now known as Tokyo. A much accomplished artist of his time and now in his mid-fifties, Tetsuzo can boast clients from all over Japan, and tirelessly works in the garbage-loaded chaos of his house-atelier. He spends his days creating astounding pieces of art, from a giant-size Bodhidharma portrayed on a 180 square meter-wide sheet of paper, to a pair of sparrows painted on a tiny rice grain. Third of Tetsuzo’s four daughters and born out of his second marriage, outspoken 23-year-old O-Ei has inherited her father’s talent and stubbornness, and very often she would paint instead of him, though uncredited. Her art is so powerful that sometimes leads to trouble. “We’re father and daughter; with two brushes and four chopsticks, I guess we can always manage, in a way or another.”
Artist and life-long nerd Johannes Grenzfurthner is taking us on a personal road trip from the West Coast to the East Coast of the USA, to introduce us to places and people that shaped and inspired his art and politics. Traceroute wants to chase and question the ghosts of nerddom’s past, present and future. An exhilarating tour de farce into the guts of trauma, obsession and cognitive capitalism. Features interviews with Matt Winston, Sandy Stone, Bruce Sterling, Jason Scott, Christina Agapakis, Trevor Paglen, Ryan Finnigan, Kit Stubbs, V. Vale, Sean Bonner, Allison Cameron, Josh Ellingson, Maggie Mayhem, Paolo Pedercini, Steve Tolin, Dan Wilcox, Jon Lebkowsky, Jan “Varka” Mulders, Adam Flynn, Abie Hadjitarkhani, Kelly Poots…
Two new female police officers struggle to survive a force filled with corrupt superiors and the brutal world of the criminal mafia.
Two professional con artist sisters go on the run and assume the identities of The Wilding Sisters, guest stars of a poetry retreat in the depths of the Black Mountains. A romantic comedy drama about love, crime, spirituality, and soul
A serial murder case rocks a small town in China’s semi-rural Hebei province. The film explores the case from the viewpoint of a teenage schoolgirl, Jing (Su Xiaotong), who becomes entangled with the case while struggling with her own burgeoning sexuality. In the face of police ineptitude and authoritarianism, and the restrictive, conservative mentality of the town’s locals, Jing begins to develop her own theory about the case.
In a country famous for its success in international beauty pageants, three young women are fighting to participate in their nation’s most celebrated cultural institution. But obtaining a place in the Miss Venezuela contest is no easy task. Women must endure grueling diets, consent to intensive plastic surgery, and find the resources necessary to transform themselves from ordinary citizens into famous and illustrious Misses. To Be a Miss is a character-driven documentary that takes the viewer through the inner workings of Venezuela’s renowned beauty factory, revealing the risks and rewards associated with this multi-billion dollar industry while exposing what nationalism, personal ambition, and the influence of mass media has meant for women in the country.
A.I. guru Ben Goertzel grew up in a hippie community in Oregon during the Vietnam War. Inspired by science fiction, he imagined a perfect rational world that would transcend 1970s’ America. Ben has dedicated his life to developing OpenCog, a software that models the human mind. If Ben’s design works, OpenCog will become a human-like general intelligence. But for OpenCog to work, it needs a body.
In 1920 the last of a band of traveling gypsies are killed to make way for the development of St. George Island. Now after 96 years, life is breathed back into an ancient terror. With only vengeance in mind, all trespassers on St. George Island are murdered in gruesome fashion .
A pained cry pierces the heart of a rustic mountain town in Larry Yang’s remarkable second feature Mountain Cry. When La Hong (Yu Ailei) dies in an accident involving an explosive badger trap, naïve Han Chong (Wang Ziyi) obeys village decree and takes the responsibility of caring for La Hong’s mute widow Hong Xia (Lang Yueting) and their children. But as they start to form an emotional bond, suspicions arise concerning La Hong’s death. A melodrama condemning intolerance, it is also a love story of remarkable credibility and emotional depth.
A young man challenges the web to offer money for a sex tape of him and his girlfriend to finance his work and finally be able to afford having a child. Is it really wrong to sell our own intimacy in order to be able to afford making our dreams come true?
In the midst of the wedding princess Miroslava is kidnapped by a dragon and carried away into his castle on the remote island. Mira left everything behind in the past – family, friends and groom. Now the only things she had were a stone cage and a mysterious young man named Arman … but who is he and what is he doing on that island? Miroslava will know the truth too late: loving a dragon will reveal the bitter truth – love is scary.
J. Kessels is the story of the bizarre road trip taken by a French literary pulp writer with his favourite character J. Kessels. The journey takes them from Tilburg to the Hamburg Reeperbahn in Kessels’ old American ‘Kamikaze’ clunker as they seek out cheating dealer. When they get there they find a corpse in the trunk of the Kamikaze: easy to find, but how do you get rid of it?
Music and politics collide when international music star, Pras Michel of the Fugees, returns to his homeland of Haiti following the devastating earthquake of 2010 to mobilize a presidential campaign for Haiti’s most controversial musician: Michel Martelly aka Sweet Micky. The politically inexperienced pair set out against a corrupted government, civil unrest, and a fixed election. When Pras’s former bandmate, superstar Wyclef Jean, also enters the presidential race, their chances seem further doomed. But with the help of a few friends, including Ben Stiller and former president Bill Clinton, they never give up on their honest dream of changing the course of Haiti’s future forever
In a country of 1.2 billion people and in a sport with billions of fans worldwide, there has yet to be a single Indian-born player drafted in the NBA. One in a Billion follows the global journey of Satnam Singh Bhamara from his home of Ballo Ke, a farming village in rural India, to the bright lights of New York City as he attempts to change history. Building up to a climactic draft night after years of hard work, Satnam hopes to finally create the long-awaited connection between India and the NBA.
The remarkable true story of Darius McCollum, a man with Asperger’s syndrome whose overwhelming love of transit has landed him in jail 32 times for the criminal impersonation of NYC subway drivers, conductors, token booth clerks, and track repairmen.
A family man being held captive in his own home by a psychotic homeless man he has befriended, struggles to free himself before his family is threatened.
On a night of April 1957, Albertine, a brillant and rebel 19-year-old girl, jumps from the wall of the prison where she’s serving a sentence for a holdup. In her fall, a bone from her ankle breaks: the astragal. She is rescued by Julien, a justice fugitive, and so is born a burning passion between them. He takes her to Paris and hides her. But while he leads his gangster life here and there, the young woman struggles for her freedom and against the wounds inflicted by Julien’s absence, and writes poetry.
Yallah! Underground follows some of today’s most influential and progressive artists in Arab underground culture from 2009 to 2013 and documents their work, dreams and fears in a time of great change for Arab societies. In a region full of tension, young Arab artists in the Middle East have struggled for years to express themselves freely and to promote more liberal attitudes within their societies. During the Arab Spring, like many others of this new generation, local artists had high hopes for the future and took part in the protests. However, after years of turmoil and instability, young Arabs now have to challenge both old and new problems, being torn between feelings of disillusion and a vague hope for a better future.
Poet Ross Sutherland takes fragments of old films and TV shows and rebuilds them into an audiovisual meditation on memory, death and reruns.
For the thirtysomething Sheng Ruxi, whose surname unmistakably echoes the slang term “sheng nu” (leftover women), the wait for a perfect partner is growing more despairing by the day. With an ultra-anxious mother who would rather die than see her daughter stay single, Ruxi is further annoyed by the doctor she’s fixed up with. Could her new colleague, the dashing 25-year-old Ma Sai, offer last-minute salvation?
