Secrets & Lies (1996)

Another Year

During a year, a very content couple approaching retirement are visited by friends and family less happy with their lives.

The Image Book

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

As I Open My Eyes

Tunis, summer 2010, a few months before the Revolution: Farah, 18 years old, has just graduated and her family already sees her as a future doctor. But she doesn't have the same idea. She sings in a political rock band, has a passion for life, gets drunk, discovers love and her city by night against the wishes of her mother Hayet, who knows Tunisia and its dangers all too well.

Pola X

A writer leaves his upper-class life and journeys with a woman claiming to be his sister, and her two friends.

The Swan

Princess Beatrice's days of enjoying the regal life are numbered unless her only daughter, Princess Alexandra, makes a good impression on a distant cousin when he pays a surprise visit to their palace. Prince Albert has searched all over Europe for a bride and he's bored by the whole courtship routine. He is more interested in the estate's dairy than Alexandra's rose garden. And then he starts playing football with the tutor and Alexandra's brothers. Invite the tutor to the ball that night and watch how gracefully Alexandra dances with him.

A Sense of History

Jim Broadbent wrote and starred in this short film directed by none other than Mike Leigh. As a member of the landed gentry, the 23rd Earl of Leete has a duty to maintain and expand his lands. Shot in the style and manner of a BBC documentary, Broadbent tells his family history to the crew, who slowly come to realise - as do we - that things are not what they seem.

Avalanche

A team of climbers are preparing for their new mountain climbing expedition. They are brought together by their mutual love for this dangerous sport, for its challenges. They, however, differ in tempers, in problems and notions of honor and dignity. Already up in the mountain, they are expected to pull themselves together to the full, in order to succumb to the will of the leader and forget about the tensions, accumulated among the members of the team. The team of young mountaineers is scaling a difficult summit, but mid-way they are buried by an avalanche. Caught in the deadly vortex, each of the characters relieves the cherished moments of his or her life. Each character illustrates a separate theme. Nayden has to cope with the problems of leadership. Nikifor is his rival, who is destined to be the perennial number two. The Man ho Is Sensitive to Cold is preoccupied with the subject of friendship. Matters that are typically artist absorb the Poet, The Sculptor and the Cameraman.

La Loi de Christophe, la Ligne blanche

Ali's Comeback: The Untold Story

An unusual group of people who came together in the most unlikely location to make it possible for the greatest athlete on the planet to have a career once again.

Donald Cried

Returning home to working class Warwick, Rhode Island, Peter Latang encounters childhood friend Donald Treebeck for what starts as a simple favor and turns into a long van ride into two friends past.

The Paper

Henry Hackett is the workaholic editor of a New York City tabloid. He loves his job, but the long hours and low pay are leading to discontent. Also, publisher Bernie White faces financial straits, and has hatchet-man Alicia Clark—Henry's nemesis—impose unpopular cutbacks.

Zero Day

Two troubled adolescents chronicle the events that ultimately lead up to a terrifying assault on their school.

Naked

An unemployed Brit vents his rage on unsuspecting strangers as he embarks on a nocturnal London odyssey.

The Monitor

Oslo, Norway. After living a traumatic experience, Anna and her son Anders move into a huge apartment building. Feeling constantly terrified and insecure, Anna buys a babycall to monitor Anders while he sleeps.

Steam: The Turkish Bath

Francesco and Marta run a husband-and-wife design company in Rome. When Francesco's aunt dies in Instanbul he travels there to sort out the hamam turkish steam bath that she left him. He finds a love and warmth in his relatives' Instanbul home that is missing from his life in Italy.