In a Himalayan polyandrous village in Nepal, newly married and pregnant Pema tries to make the best of her new life. But soon, her first husband Tashi vanishes on the trade route to Lhasa. Accompanied by her monk de facto husband, Karma, she embarks on a journey into the unforgiving wilderness to find him, evolving into a quest of self discovery and liberation.
Filmmakers from all over the world provide short films – each of which is eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame of film in length – that offer differing perspectives on the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Rithy Panh uses clay figures, archival footage, and his narration to recreate the atrocities Cambodia's Khmer Rouge committed between 1975 and 1979.
Shameless slimeball Eduard "Edik" Letov - clad in an everpresent Hawaiian shirt - puts the sting on alien travelers hoping to connect with their roots, by having local phonies pose as the visitors' long-lost relatives. Complications abound when Letov attempts to pass off an entire village under the guise of a community wiped out during the Second World War. The arrival of a group of trouble-causing misfits, among them mobster Barukh - who wishes to bury his mother's remains, only to discover that someone keeps exhuming them - and the lech Simon - a Canadian with an insatiable fetish for his sexy translator - turn Letov's latest scheme into a veritable cat's cradle.
ComiBaran, a protestant blacksmith arrives in the little village of Lakotice to kill Sekal, a cruel Nazi collaborator.
Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) - 1978. Three French journalists are invited by the Khmer Rouge to conduct an exclusive interview of the regime's leader, Pol Pot. The country seems ideal. But behind the Potemkin village, the Khmer Rouge regime is declining and the war with Vietnam threatens to invade the country. The regime is looking for culprits, secretly carrying out a large scale genocide. Under the eyes of the journalists, the beautiful picture cracks, revealing the horror. Their journey progressively turns into a nightmare. Freely inspired by journalist Elizabeth Becker's account in When the war was over.
In the near future, writer Victor Banev gets himself on a UN commission to investigate what's going on in the remote town of Tashlinsk, where reports tell of a virus-created race of brainiac mutants. Banev's tween daughter Ira is enrolled at a school for gifted children which has been taken over by the mutants, who have grown to despise ordinary humanity.
Araf is the story of Zehra and Olgun whose lives are caught in a vacuum. The world in which they live and work is a place of throwaway culture and constant change. They too are waiting for a chance to change and escape from their empty, monotonous lives.
During the Gorbachev years, Platon Makovski and his four buddies are university students who jump on the private capitalism movement. Fast-forward 20 years, Platon finds himself the richest man in Russia, having sacrificed his friends to get to the top. But with this cynical rise, comes a brutal fall.
At the end of WWII, Japanese doctor Akagi searches for the cure for hepatitis in the prisoner-of-war camp.
After studying literature at Cairo University, Dunia, 23 years old, wants to become a professional dancer. She attends audition for an oriental dance contest where she recites Arabian poetry without any body movement. She explain to the perplexed jury that a woman can't move her body or evoke act of love when society ask women to hide their femininity. She is selected and meet Beshir, an intellectual and activist who will supervise her thesis on ecstasy in Sufi love poetry. Their attraction is mutual. This could be liberation for Dunia but the constraints on women in Egyptian society goes deeper than she suspects.
While Jonaki, an 80-year-old woman, searches for love in a strange world of decaying memories, her lover, now old and grey, returns to a world she is leaving behind.
Under the Khmer Rouge regime, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, directed the M13 prison for four years, before becoming the head of S21, the terrifying death machine that eliminated Khmer Rouge opponents. Some 12,280 Cambodians met their deaths here. In July 2010, Duch was the first Khmer leader to appear before an international court, which sentenced him to 35 years in prison. He appealed the sentence. While Duch waited for his new trial, Rithy Panh questioned him in depth.
The film centers on a young French widow and her two adolescent children as they attempt to carve out a meager life for themselves by farming rice fields alongside the ocean in French Indo-China in the 1930s. Their efforts are hampered each year by the presence of the sea, which invariably floods the fields with saltwater and wipes out the crops. In desperation, the mother realizes that their only hope lies in the construction of a sea wall to prevent continued flooding, but the mother must cut a swath through the local bureaucracy in an almost Sisyphean attempt to make this happen. Meanwhile, her obstinate daughter, Suzanne, draws the romantic obsessions of a well-to-do Chinese gentleman, Monsieur Jo. Though he could easily provide a way out, the possibility of a romantic relationship between Jo and Suzanne could just as easily fall prey to local racial prejudices that would damage or ruin the lives of both.
During the last half-century, Cambodia has witnessed genocide, decades of war and the collapse of social order. Now, documentary filmmaker Rithy Panh looks at an irreparable tragedy that is less visible, yet no less pervasive: the spiritual death that results when young women are forced into prostitution. Angry and impassioned, PAPER CANNOT WRAP UP EMBERS presents the searing stories of poor Asian women whose lives were violated and their destinies destroyed when their bodies were turned into items of sexual commerce.
We are in the year 2001, a temporary ceasefire brings a much-needed break to a small war-torn village in Northern Nepal, bringing much joy among the residents. Prakash and Kiran, two young close friends, are also starting to feel the change in the air. Though they are divided by caste and social creed, they remain inseparable, and start raising a hen given to Prakash by his sister, with hopes to save money by selling her eggs. However, the hen goes missing. To find it, they embark on a journey, innocently unaware of the tyranny brought by the fragile ceasefire.
The beautiful Tanya returns to her small mining town, after supposedly working as a model in Moscow. She decides to marry her shy school sweetheart Mishka, who now works in the mine. The miners finally receive some pay, but Mishka still ends up with no money to buy his bride a gift, so he seeks the help of his perpetually drunk buddy Garkusha. Mishka's poor working-class family all help to put on a fine wedding with copious amounts of vodka, even though they are suspicious of Tanya's occupation in Moscow, and of her connection with her Mafia ex-boyfriend Borodin.
After The Missing Picture (Un Certain Regard winner 2013 and Oscar nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film in 2013) and Exile, Rithy Panh continues his personal and spiritual exploration. S21 the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell analyzed the mechanisms of the crime. Graves Without a Name searches for a path to peace. When a thirteen-year-old child, who lost the greater part of his family under the Khmer rouge, embarks on a search for their graves, whether clay or on spiritual ground, what does he find there? And above all, what is he looking for? Spectral trees? Villages defaced beyond recognition? Witnesses who are reluctant to speak? The ethereal touch of a brother or sister’s body as the night approaches? A cinematic movie that reaches well beyond the story of a country for that which is universal.
In 1889, mounted on a small gray horse named Serko, Dimitri leaves his garrison on the Asian borders of the Russian Empire on the banks of the Amur River. After extraordinary adventures, they both arrive in St. Petersburg, at the court of the Tsar. Having covered more than 9000 kilometers in less than 200 days, this young rider has achieved the most fantastic equestrian feat of all time.
The 27-year-old sculptor Constantin Brancusi walked from Bucharest to Paris in 1903 and 1904 as a preparation and prelude to becoming the most important sculptor of the twentieth century.
