Cinema Directory

Summary: Abandoned in the early months of her life, Norah, aged 17, lives alone with her father.

Norah feels guilty about all the world's misfortunes and, particularly, about Ayrton Senna's death, which she saw on TV when she was 6. Animated by a tough guilt feeling, Norah keeps up, since then, a privileged relationship with Ayrton Senna and, as a matter of fact, implies herself in humanitarian aid to keep an immaculate conscience.

Comments: Maria, 11 år, är den enda som vågar tycka om Jon, en butter gammal enstöring. Hon upptäcker hans värld och blir hans vän - till allas förskräckelse...

Summary: Painter Jon, a morose hermit, lives in a remote house on the edge of a village. 11 years old Maria meets him by an accident. She discovers the world, in which Jon lives, a world of imaginative, naive painting. [summary by ChildrenInCinema.com]

Languages: Deutsch

Summary: A boy (Max Mauff) in the midst of puberty desires a first kiss from a pretty Turkish girl at his school. Along the way, he stumbles upon masturbation, plays spin-the-bottle, gets drunk, participates in a school play, loses a game of strip-poker and helps a girl avoid her physically abusive father. Bound to become a coming-of-age staple. [from CVMC.net]

Summary: AKA RING A RING O'ROSES. Tragi-comedy concerning the complicated relationship of a woman film director and the unruly girl who plays the leading role in a children's film.

Summary: The story of two friends who while at first enemies, become fast friends at a recreation area. Here, they try to experience youth, friendship and love while trying to avoid the negative influences that society has had on their parents.

Summary: During the height of the tourist season, the rivalry between the manager of a slightly fancy restaurant and the proprietor of a nearby fast-food stand becomes quite heated, and shots are fired. In this comedy, the restaurant is run with an iron hand by its "patronne," (Annie Girardot), and the help eventually have had enough. If that weren't sufficient trouble, the children of the owners of both establishments are romantically entangled, further infuriating the passions of the feuding food fanatics.

Languages: English

Comments: The passionate tale of forbidden secrets!

Summary:

Summary: In Paris, near the end of World War II, crotchety professor Fernand Bonnard maintains a zoo and continues his research. He's a coward, as is his debonair son, Armand, who has one daughter, Philippine. On her eighth birthday, Armand picks her up from her repressive boarding school and takes her to Fernand's to celebrate. Father and son quarrel, and Armand leaves, only to be arrested and shot for violating curfew. In grief, the curmudgeonly Fernand does not tell Philippine, but invents a life for Armand as a captain of the Resistance. Fernand takes her from school to live with him and his sensible wife. Along the way, Philippine finds out the truth and Fernand discovers courage.

Summary: Three couples decide to share a house in the south of France for the holidays. Not only do they have to put up with their own children, but also the offspring of their friends as well.

Languages: French

Summary: A 10 year old girl lives in post WWII rural France with her parents, who are about to divorce. Her older sister leaves home to finish school, and the young girl is left with a mysterious, almost silent housekeeper. Being afraid of the dark, and of other "phenomenoms" including a haunted château nearby, she curiously accepts a stranger she finds in her mansion's barn. This fact contradicts her fearful nature, but fulfills her loneliness. The stranger has run away from a nearby psychiatric clinic, where her father was treating the stranger. She hides the stranger, protects him, and he becomes her best friend. Is this girl searching for true companionship, coming of age, or is she asserting her independence for the first time in her short life?

Languages: French, Unknown

Summary: Famed French director Jean-Luc Godard delivers his most controversial drama with this modern retelling of the birth of Christ. In Godard's version, the Virgin Mary is a Swiss gas station employee and Joseph is her taxi-driving boyfriend. Marie (Myriem Roussel), who also plays basketball for a local team, claims to be a virgin and maintains a chaste relationship with Joseph (Thierry Rode). One day, a passing stranger named Uncle Gabriel (Phillippe Lacoste) informs a confused Marie and an angry Joseph of Marie's impending pregnancy. After the initial shock passes and his prediction comes true, the expectant couple marries and raises their child, Jesus (Malachi Jara Kohan), who eventually abandons his family to pursue "his father's business." All the while, Marie grapples with her sexuality, searching for a link between her individual body and spirit. Picketed and protested during its highly publicized theatrical release, Godard's film isn't the blasphemous outrage religious conservatives deemed it to be. Instead, it is a challenging work that transplants the classic story of the Immaculate Conception into the modern world, asking new questions about femininity in a male-dominated society. Roussel's Marie is a striking invention, a character that works literally, as well as being a symbol of the new woman of the late-20th century.

Comments: "Just Whistle A Little"

Summary: Focuses on the problems that children living in cities are confronted by.

Languages: German

Comments: Über das Leben, die Liebe und den Klang des Schnees.

Summary: Lara's parents are both deaf. Since she is the only member of her family who can hear and speak, she has served as a kind of foreign minister for her family from an early age, translating and negotiating for them in even the most absurd of situations. When Lara's vivacious and temperamental aunt Clarissa gives her a clarinet as a present, the girl begins to discover the wonderful world of music. Her father observes this development with waxing unease, as he fears losing his daughter to a world he has no access to. Torn between her love of music and her love of her parents, the growing Lara finally chooses a life of music. When she decides to go to Berlin and attend the music conservatory, the difficult and painful process of leaving home begins ...

Languages: English, French,

Comments: Forget about who you thought you were, and just accept who you are.

Summary: After his career is sidelined from an unexpected tragedy and a personal blowup, a single man must take care of his precocious daughter.

Summary: With the exception of the short opening scene and the end, I Am (Jestem) is one long flashback. The film begins with the young main character walking up a dark, smart stairway. A door opens and a man asks the character how on earth he got to this point. Then follows the history of an 11 year-old boy called Kundel (a Polish swearword that means mongrel), who escapes from a child’s home, a not to be envied place for a child in the Poland of not too long ago. He returns to his village, where his mother is not exactly pleased to see him. Here too he is teased and tormented by the members of a glue-sniffing street gang. All alone he takes shelter in an abandoned barge on the nearby river. Uncomplaining, he doesn’t give anyone the blame for his desperate situation. He simply tries to see things the way they are and to organize his life as best he can. As timid as he is, he survives his harsh existence believing that somewhere, somehow there must be a better world. One day Kundel meets a rich girl who lives in a big house near his boat and doesn’t get on well with the children at her school. She becomes his only friend and even his first love. This encounter makes him realize he has the right to exist. Kundel’s existential answer to the question at the beginning of the film, ‘I am’, reveals how the young protagonist finds his own answer to the important questions of life. Director Dorota Kedzierzawska found inspiration for this moving story from two newspapers articles about two children: both very poor, the first refused by society, the second with a dream of becoming a poet. Sober, despite using major cinematic tools, Kedzierzawska succeds in portraying the inner world of a small boy. Michael Nyman (The Piano) composed the beautiful music. Kedzierzawska’s film Crows (Wrony) was screened at Dutch Cinekid in 1999 and 2002.

Languages: English, French

Comments: From the visionary mind of director Yann Samuell comes France's hit comedy!

Summary: As adults, best friends Julien and Sophie continue the odd game they started as children -- a fearless competition to outdo one another with daring and outrageous stunts. While they often act out to relieve one another's pain, their game might be a way to avoid the fact that they are truly meant for one another.

Summary: In this eerie, atmospheric tale, a young woman is on a train when she sees some people she thinks she knows from her childhood. On arriving home, her husband tells her that a certain countess has died. At that point, the film cuts to a scene of the countess singing in a mausoleum while the visual image of the graveyard's many tombstones passes before one's eyes. Back home, the husband -- also a "father-figure" -- is looking over his collection of wooden angels. Some time elapses, and he surreptitiously sees a thief come down through the chimney, steal some things, and then leave. To combat any recurrence, he builds an iron, escape-proof cage around the fireplace, and then goes away on a trip. When he comes back, he finds the thief dead in the cage. Thus far, the camera has only shown the husband in profile or from the back. Then there is another story about a young girl, with a spiteful, nasty mother, who is trying to cope with her own attraction to a man. When she grows up, she either commits suicide or manages to leave the past behind her. Is this little girl the same married woman on the train at the beginning of the film? In the final, dramatic scenes, the viewers see the husband full-face for the first time, as he confronts his wife.

Comments: War...and how it affects the lives of our children

Summary: The film recounts the death of five-year-old Paulette's (Brigitte Fossey) parents and of her pet dog while fleeing a Nazi air raid in Paris, France during World War II. In the chaos, the traumatized child meets ten-year-old Michel Dollé (Georges Poujouly) whose peasant family will take her in. She quickly becomes attached to Michel as her big brother and the two attempt to cope with the death and destruction that surrounds them by secretly building a small cemetery where they bury her dog and then start to bury other animals, stealing crosses from the local graveyard.

Summary: This is a vivacious film for children and the whole family about children’s fantasies, joys and bereavements; when the forces of evil destroy the most important creation of nature and God, the family. The film “Hansel and Gretel” is a combination of a crime fiction, a melodrama, a comedy, a horror film, and a fairy-tale.

Summary: Two girls, roughly fifteen and sixteen years old, lure men with their bodies and then rob them. Later on, another lass is arrested for prostituting herself. Yet a cop offers her a way out if she will assist him in catching the aforementioned hustlers. A bit confusing to those unfamiliar with the language, so this synopsis might not be that accurate. Eva Ionesco was roughly fifteen during filming.

Languages: English, Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround

Comments: Unforgettably Undeniably Disney

Summary: In the 1930s, a tomboyish girl runs away from her guardian to join her single father who is 2,000 miles away, because there was work there.

Summary: Luis, a teacher at a mixed school, is finishing his class. Julia and Miguel aren’t paying attention to the teacher. The teenagers are going to finally carry out an incredibly well developed plan; to run away from home.

The teacher realizes everything and there is a strange look in his eyes. Luis is 45 years old, well-off and teaches for pure entertainment. He lives in a huge run-down manor on the outskirts of the city.

With him, living shut up, is Jaime, a young man reaching thirty. That afternoon, Luis collects the young pair on the main road and offers them lodgings in his house for that night.

Summary: Luna, a 30-year-old professional cardplayer, has spent her whole life in the gambling environment. Her mother died in childbirth and her father, whom she rarely saw without a hand of cards, lost all his property and also his life to his passion when Luna was only 10 years old. The only thing he left behind him was a snuff box. In the dramatic atmosphere of high stakes and tragic losses she has learned to "treat life as a game". A game which, in spite of her attractive appearance, has turned her more into a man with a lifestyle characterized by whisky bottles, cigarettes, excitement and a sense of drifting. Luna's obsession with cards turns her into a fearful gambler. Her player's intuition has taken her away from dark gambling dens to the world of luxury residences. No one has any idea, however, what is tortuously feeding her obsession: her one aim in life is to avenge her father's death. Her existence then becomes a drama whose outcome will be determined by freedom of choice.

Languages: English, Spanish, French

Comments: An Adventure For Those Who Seek To Find A Way To Leave Their World Behind.

Summary: When two kids play an old magic board-game they found, they release a man trapped for decades in it and a host of dangers that can only be stopped by finishing the game.

Summary: Der zugelaufene schwarze Hund Nepomuk wird für Ulf und seine Eltern im Neubaugebiet ein großes Problem. Man beschließt, dass er wieder verschwinden soll.

Doch Ulf will ihn um jeden Preis behalten und muss mit großem Einsatz dafür kämpfen.

Comments: The story of two juvenile delinquents.

Summary: The movie opens on Burns' face, as he slumbers in bed. The alarm clock goes off, but not with a ring: The old vaudevillian awakens to applause. Goes downstairs. Fixes breakfast. Drives in his massive car to the supermarket, where he amazes the checkoutcounter staff with his magic trick of the day. And then.. he finds a naked young girl in his car trunk.

The girl is Brooke Shields. He takes her home because he has to: "I'll scream if you don't." Takes her inside, clothes her, questions her, discovers she's on the lam from the cops and from a dopepushing boy friend. The movie then cuts back and forth between Burns' attempts to reason with the girl and help her, and the unconvincingly unsubtle attempt of the boy friend to find her.

Summary: A shady Polish national (Krzysztof Pieczynski) who had just consecrated a business agreement with an equally shady Czech by toasting to their arrangement, begins his journey home only to run over a dog soon thereafter. He discovers that the dog belonged to a 12-year-old runaway (Ola Hamkalo), who recruits the man to help bury the dog's remains. However, they must transport it to a special site that the girl claims the dog told her about before its death. As the man and girl travel to the final resting place of the dog, they bicker and pick at each other -- but also come to recognize each other as kindred souls.