Greenaway's first feature film is a documentary in which ninety-two persons are interviewed. They are all victims of a mysterious occurrence known as The Violent Unknown Event, or V.U.E. It has caused immortality and disability. A guidebook, published every ten years by the V.U.E. Board of Inquiry, illustrates the stories of the ninety-two persons involved in the catastrophe...
Mandel Baruch was an handsome man, a "Mensch" who had sacrificed everything for business. When he dies, his beloved son, Lionel, gathers some old family friends to organize a funeral to be remembered.
A writer moves into a ground floor apartment with the hope of finding some peace to write his new book. He will soon find out why the previous tenants abandoned the apartment.
A German U-boat is sunk in Hudson Bay. The survived nazi sailors attempt to evade capture by traveling across Canada to the still-neutral United States. An anti-nazi film, which avoids any stereotypes, recalls Hitchcock's dramas and counts several great English actors, as Anton Walbrook, Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard.
Michael Lamb, a young priest who teaches in a Roman Catholic institution for troubled boys on the Atlantic coast of Ireland, becomes responsible for a 10-year-old epileptic boy, Owen Kane. Michael has formed an attachment to Owen and he takes him with him to London when he decides to secretly leave the school. His escape will be seen as a scandalous kidnapping.
Sylvia works as a secretary and lives in the outskirts of London with her intellectually disabled sister, Hilda. Her solitary and bleak existence turns around a small group of people who, like Sylvia, have communication problems. Mike Leigh's debut film is ironic and moving. The director considers it "the mother of all my movies".
Five English nuns are dispatched to establish a new convent far in the Himalayas. They soon establish a school and an infirmary, but the location, the culture and the mountain air begin to have a strange effect on them. A nun begins to plant flowers instead of vegetables. Another one cures a kid of the village, who dies, and so all the locals abandon the hospital. The beauti...
After her father's death, Amelia follows her mother's strenuous path back to a normal life. A television, a camera and an hamster are the tools which will accompany a nine years old girl towards a world which is suffocating and imaginary.
A night in the life of Isaac, a jewish Russian man who survived the nazi holocaust, and Sophie, a catholic Polish woman. They are both refugees. Since thirty years they live in a garret in London, where Isaac has created a sort of maze of doors on which he has engraved and painted the symbols of their past. In this space, trapped in the history and yet in a time-free dimens...
The story concerns three young people who meet in a small village near Canterbury. An American Army Sergeant who hasn't recently received any letter from his girlfriend, a British Army Sergeant, who, used to work as a pianist in a cinema, and a young shopping assistant, who joined the army after having lost her boyfriend in the war. Chaucer is a odd pretext for this pastoral...
In his second feature film, Roman Polanski follows the frightful story of a neurosis. The main character, Carole, interpreted by Catherine Deneuve, left alone in the apartment she shares with her sister, drifts towards a kind of neurosis and can't stand the presence of any men. Polanski said: "Insanity is scaring because you know that it can bring you to yourself". A visiona...
Lermontov, il direttore di una prestigiosa compagnia di balletto classico, ingaggia contemporaneamente Vicky Page, una giovanissima ballerina, e Juilan Craster, un compositore. Lermontov capisce che Vicky può diventare una grande ballerina e tenta di convincerla a sacrificare tutta la sua vita alla danza. Ma Vicky è innamorata di Julian e, dopo essere arrivata ...
Joan Webster, twenty-five years old, knows exactly what she wants from life. She decides to take a ship for the island of Kiloran, in the Hebrides , to marry Sir Robert Bellenger, an old rich man. Because of the fog, the ship stops on the island of Mull, where Joan spends some time with Torquil, a young Marine officer. On the island, Joan gets to know some of the inhabitants...
Dermot Finn loves Pearl. He is about to go to her place to meet her family, but love, as Dermot will soon find out, can turn into a terrible experience, because each of us lives in his/her own world and one's man meat is another man's poison.
End of the 19th century. Hazel is a beautiful and innocent girl who lives in the countryside with her father, a coffin maker. She loves all the creatures around her, especially her pet fox cub. Hazel is wild, she often run barefoot through the woods when harsh life gets too much for her. After having married a young shepherd who loves her sincerely, Hazel is seduced by a ric...
The camera enters a museum of an European capital. There is only a receptionist sitting at a table, reading, and there are 92 drawings hanging on the walls, of small dimensions and of different materials. While the camera gets closer to the drawings, a voice over starts speaking. He is the person who collected those drawings, so that they can be of use after the death of a m...
La trentenne Rinko non ha da anni rapporti con il marito, un uomo molto più anziano di lei con l’ossessione per la pulizia. La donna, che lavora come centralinista in un centro psichiatrico, riceve un giorno una busta con delle fotografie che la ritraggono, nuda, in atteggiamenti intimi. L'uomo che le ha inviato le immagini ordina a Rinko di mettere in ...
The film follows Tome's life from the war to the beginning of the 60s'. Grown up in the north to a family of poor farmers, Tome has always been put upon in working and sexually abused. Nobuko, her daughter, is born from a one-night stand. Following a failed marriage, Tome moves to a city and finds her own independence working first as a worker and maid and after as a prosti...
Hiraoka breaks into Riichi's house, while he is away with his son, and he raped his wife. She decides to commit suicide but not before having seen her son for the last time. When her husband is back, Sadako can't find the courage to tell him what happened. Two days after, while Riichi is visiting his lover and colleague, Hiraoka breaks into his house again and Sadako takes a...
The film tells the confused and complex life of a family of itinerant actors who comes originally from Osaka. The young director, who has abandoned the university for love of the theatre, is secretely in love with his son's wife, but he is tormented by his youngest daughter, still unmarried. During their tournée, they stop in a tiny village where all these relationships will...
