2001-2010

Summary
Joachim “Blacky” Fuchsberger provided the starting point for “Overgames”: In 2005, he stated in a talk show that the content of his TV game show “Nur nicht nervös werden”, which first aired in 1960, was originally developed in US-American psychiatric institutions with the aim to re-educate the Germans, a “psychologically disturbed nation”. Director Lutz Dammbeck sets out on a global research that leads to important questions: In which regard may games change the world? Can a person be re-educated? And what is the idea of a permanent revolution?Read More »

For nearly 20 years a civil war raged in northern Uganda – The rebels of the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) were waging a bloody guerilla campaign. They abducted children and conscripted them as soldiers, forcing them to kill their own people. The film Lost Children documents the lives of four children, from 8 to 14 years old, who successfully escaped the LRA.Read More »

Plot
Ah-Zhou, who is about to be honorably discharged from the military service, has a surreal dream. In the dream he sees the dead body of Shing-Shing Chen, a classmate in elementary school from years back. Is this dream implying that Shing-Shing Chen might have died? Soon afterwards, Ah-Zhou gets an unexpected five-day vacation and decides to look for Shing-Shing Chen. Nevertheless, he quickly learns that the special vacation is for him and another soon-to-be-discharged solider, Xiao-Gui, to go after a deserter, Kuen-He, who ran away with weapons two days ago. Both of them are worried about this assignment because they, the old birds, used to pick on Kuen-He, a spring chicken. And Kuen-He is now a deserter, armed and dangerous.Read More »

Synopsis:
Award-winning director Fatih Akin takes us on a journey through Istanbul, the city that bridges Europe and Asia, and challenges familiar notions of east and west. He looks at the vibrant musical scene which includes traditional Turkish music plus rock and hip-hop.Read More »

A sexually unexperienced teenager, decides one night to pay a visit to Cristina, one of his classmates, with whom he is madly in love. On the way, he goes through a series of adventures that change him completely.Read More »

Director Michael Winterbottom (Northam) attempts to shoot the adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s essentially unfilmable novel, “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.”Read More »

Madly in love with Monica, a neighbor of his, Andrei, a shy teenager, calls an erotic phone line to find out how he could seduce a girl in the elevator.Read More »

Synopsis

A FILM ABOUT PEOPLE LIKE YOU AND ME

“Master” is the name of a 12-story apartment building in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro’s neighborhood for nightlife. Over the course of four weeks in 2001, Eduardo Coutinho’s film crew rented one of the 276 apartments and used it as home base to make a film about the building’s residents. We get to know the building manager, who succeeded in turning the troubled residence into a family complex within just a few years. Using interviews and a few stolen moments in the corridors of the building, Coutinho explores this world. Most of the building’s residents come from the lower middle class and are just getting by, but that’s just about the only thing they have in common – so many people, so many stories, sometimes told in a self-confident tone, sometimes with averted eyes. The fact that a film crew is interested in their stories puzzles some of them. Hope, fear, dreams, memories, love and loneliness all appear from behind the doors of this average apartment building.Read More »

Quote:
Charles Ferguson’s “Inside Job” is strong, fair, and rational. The director tries mightily to untangle the complex architecture of the financial meltdown that has cost millions their jobs, their homes, and their savings. If you consider skipping it because it sounds boring, please think again. My blood is still boiling.Read More »