Cinema goes digital, indie gets loud, and voices from beyond the West conquer festivals - from Hong Kong to Iran, film thrives.

Normal

A prominent moment in Mike Leigh's filmography, who records daily life with unique sensitivity, as defined by the invisible camera and his original characters that are searching for the truth of life through secrets and lies. Awarded in Cannes,1996, with Palme d'Or and two more awards.

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After the death of her wealthy adoptive parents, a young black ophthalmologist searches for and finds her natural mother, a poor white worker from east London, setting off a series of confessions.

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Best Actress (Brenda Blethyn) | Cannes Film Festival | 1996
Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1996
Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture (Brenda Blethyn) | Golden Globes | 1997
Nominated for Best Picture | Oscars | 1997
Nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Brenda Blethyn) | Oscars | 1997
Nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) | Oscars | 1997
Nominated for Best Director | Oscars | 1997
Nominated for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1997
Nominated for Best Motion Picture - Drama | Golden Globes | 1997
Nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) | Golden Globes | 1997

Secrets & Lies

This absurd Kafkaesque nightmare finds its ideal cinematic adaptation in the hands of Michael Haneke, who pulls us into a maelstrom of endless bureaucratic dystopia, with the protagonists of "Funny Games", just before the release of the latter.

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A land surveyor is summoned to a remote village by the local government, housed in ‘the castle’. Upon his arrival, he is unable to persuade the locals of his legitimacy and finds himself sucked into a spiral of provincial bureaucracy and petty social rivalries that soon becomes a surreal nightmare.

The Castle

A journey with the purpose of suicide as an excuse for a film about our choice to live and our choices in life, awarded fairly with Palm d’Or as the culmination of a great filmography that set Iran on the world’s cinematic map.

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A middle-aged man has decided to commit suicide and is desperately looking for someone to help him by burying him under a certain cherry tree. Eventually he finds a taxidermist who, for his own reasons, tells him that he will help him.

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Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1997

Taste of Cherry

Claude Sautet's swan song and his second collaboration with Emmanuelle Béart, was destined to be one of the best French films of the 90s, with an emotional richness that emerges through the professional meetings of 2 people who approach the concept of time in a very different way.

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Nelly is a divorced woman who meets by chance Mr. Arnaud, a mature and wealthy businessman who has just retired. Nelly has a suffocating debt with the apartment she rented with her lazy husband, but Arnaud gifts her 30 thousand francs. Nelly accepts the money and then agrees to type her wealthy friend's memoirs.

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Best Actor Award (Michel Serrault) | César Awards | 1996
Best Director Award | César Awards | 1996
Nomination for Best Foreign Film | BAFTA | 1997

Nelly and Mr. Arnaud

Somewhere between mainstream and Festival-awarded cinema, the ever-unexpected Olivier Assayas ("Personal Shopper") directs Maggie Cheung as a fictional version of herself, in a delightful satire of French cinematography and a bold mix of genres that resists every convention and categorization.

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Director Rene Vidal's career is already in decline when he decides to shoot a remake of "Les Vampires". For the lead role of Irma Veep (which is an anagram of the word “vampire”) he hires the Hong Kong based actress Maggie Cheung who does not speak French at all. In the chaotic set, Maggie, who wears a latex suit similar to Katwoman's, is faced with conspiracy, supernatural egos and erotic downfalls. The project is one step away from complete chaos.

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KNF Award | Rotterdam International Film Festival | 1997

Irma Vep

The third part of the "Four Seasons" cycle is dedicated to summer, the season which became synonymous with Éric Rohmer's work, and is full of youth, carelessness and... emotional confusion.

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An shy indecisive math student takes a holiday in Dinard, waiting for his girlfriend to spend their summer vacation together. However, his meeting with two more girls will complicate things.

A Summer's Tale

One of the greatest moments in the Spanish master's filmography, this colourful, exuberant, totally idiosyncratic melodrama is a must-see for all lovers of the Almodovar universe and for all those who believe in beauty and friendship.

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A single mother watches her only son die on the day of his 17th birthday in an attempt to get an autograph from an actress. Because of the painful loss, the woman decides to track down the child's father, a choice that paves the way for an existential odyssey she could never have imagined.

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Best International Film | Oscars | 2000
Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 1999
FIPRESCI Prize | San Sebastian Film Festival | 1999
Best European Film | European Film Awards | 2000
Best Director | BAFTA | 2000

All About my Mother

In this magical ode to friendship and innocence, Sam Rockwell and Mischa Barton (in her first film appearance) are two outsiders who seek in each other what the outside world denies them.

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Newly arrived in an up-market housing development, quiet ten-year-old Devon doesn't quite fit in. Ignoring the urgings of her social-climbing father, Devon chooses the company of Trent, who mows the estate's lawns, rather than of the girls her own age. Their friendship grows during her visits to his trailer home, but although it is completely innocent it is obvious that it would be unacceptable to the residents if they found out.

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Audience Award | Athens Film Festival | 1997
Best Actor (Sam Rockwell) | Sitges Catalonian Film Festival | 1997
Best Screenplay | Sitges Catalonian Film Festival | 1997

Lawn Dogs

In the best and most well known of the seven films Claude Chabrol and Isabelle Huppert collaborated on, crime is an act of class vengeance that is literally blood-curdling. Not just because of its brutality, but mostly because of its precisely structured inevitability.

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Sophie is an introverted girl, who works as a maid in the house of a wealthy family, in the suburbs of Paris. Hardworking and obedient, Sophie tries to hide from her bosses that she is illiterate. Soon, she will befriend Jean the postwoman, an unconventional, strange woman, who will try to turn her against her employers.

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Best Actress Award (Isabelle Huppert) | César Awards | 1996
Best Actress (Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire) | Venice Film Festival | 1995
Pasinetti Award for Best Actress | Venice Film Festival | 1995
Metro Media Award for Best Film | Toronto Film Festival | 1995

A Judgement in Stone

The film that was destined to be the culmination of Kieslowski's worldview, as well as his swan song, is a hymn to friendship and to anything that inexplicably and almost magically can unite lives and destinies.

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A photo model in Zurich meets a lonely retired judge who spends his hours eavesdropping on his neighbors' phone calls in the last of the 3 films in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Color Trilogy.

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Nominated for Best Director | Oscars | 1995 
Nominated for Best Original Screenplay | Oscars | 1995
Nominated for Best Cinematography | Oscars | 1995
Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1994

Three Colors: Red

Cinobo, drop it. Pantelis Voulgaris and three exceptional actors compose a portrait of modern Greek rural masculinity that is touching, tender and funny, culminating in one of the most cult moments in modern Greek cinema.

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A modular film consisting of three different stories, a triptych shot in Northern Greece, with a common theme of a lonely man at a critical moment in his life.

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Best Actor (Giorgos Armenis) | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1998

It's a Long Road

The first part of the Trilogy of Colors is dedicated to freedom, dipped in a blue metaphysical light that bathes the face of Juliette Binoche. Structured as a redeeming and liberating path from mourning and introversion to creation and self-realization.

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After the death of her husband and child in a car accident, Julie (Juliette Binoche) struggles trying to overcome the initial shock and decides to claim her freedom and start a new life.

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Golden Lion | Venice Film Festival | 1993
Golden Osella | Venice Film Festival | 1993
OCIC Award | Venice Film Festival | 1993

Three Colors: Blue

The great Abbas Kiarostami directed several masterpieces and this is one of them. Ηis art and his steadfast, implicit ethics bloom in all their glory. With his usual surgical precision and compassion, he produces a cinematic treasure that speaks to the heart.

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A jeep runs through the hills of Kurdistan. An engineer and his two assistants are looking for a small village in the mountains. When they arrive, a young boy welcomes them, shows them where to stay and guides the engineer to an old, (sort of) dying woman's house. No one in the village knows what the engineer wants. Is he looking for archaeological finds? Does he want the old lady's property? Meanwhile, he spends his time getting to know the locals.

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CinemAvvenire' Award | Venice Film Festival | 1999
FIPRESCI Prize | Venice Film Festival | 1999
Grand Special Jury Prize | Venice Film Festival | 1999

The Wind will Carry us

A love story full of tension and sensibility, starring the –real life, during filming– couple of Emmanuelle Béart and Daniel Auteuil, whose chemistry is carried on screen and absolutely captivates us. Golden Lion in Venice.

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The effusive Maxim rules the craft of violin making with an iron fist, together with his best friend Stefan, a very lonely and introverted man, but an authority on violin repair. One day Maxim falls deeply in love with a violinist, Camille. And while they are about to move in together, Stefan comes out of his shell and decides to claim the beautiful woman, much to his friend's dismay.

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Best Director | Venice Film Festival | 1992
Pasinetti Award for Best Actress (Emmanuelle Béart) | Venice Film Festival | 1992
Best Director | César Awards | 1993
Best Actor (Daniel Auteuil) | European Film Awards | 1993

A Heart in Winter

The erotic thriller at its finest, with John Dahl ( director of "Red Rock West") finding the ultimate neo-noir femme fatale in Linda Fiorentino who gives a deadly - and BAFTA nominated - performance.

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A doctor's wife steals $700,000 from her husband from selling drugs. She flees to the countryside, seduces a local young man and ensnares him in a dark scheme.

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Nomination for Best Actress (Linda Fiorentino) | BAFTA | 1995

The Last Seduction

In his third film, Haneke explores the arbitrariness of the existence of 71 seemingly unconnected individuals (including 12-year-old Sebastian Stan) at 71 moments, underscoring the vision of a dehumanized world in which emotional alienation can only be broken by the shock of sudden violence.

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1993 Christmas’ eve. A 19-year-old student kills several people—all of whom were complete strangers—for no apparent reason. What brought the victims and their killer together? Starting with the TV newscasts of the event, the lives of those randomly involved in this act of violence are followed.

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Best Film | Chicago Film Festival | 1994

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

Mathieu Kasovitz's iconic film, which for the first time turned its gaze to the margins of the French capital, was awarded for its direction at the Cannes Film Festival and became a reference point for an entire youth culture that to this day finds its voice in it. Thirty years after its first screening, it remains resoundingly relevant.

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After a chaotic night of riots in a marginal suburb of Paris, three young friends, Vinz, Hubert and Saïd, wander around idly waiting for news of the health of a mutual friend who has been seriously injured in a confrontation with the police.

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Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 1995
Best Film | César Awards | 1996
Best European Film | European Film Awards | 1996

Hate

Winner of the Grand Prize at Sundance this film stands as one of the most iconic works of 90s independent American cinema. A fearless and darkly humorous exploration of adolescence, rich with honesty and sardonic sarcasm.

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An awkward and marginalized 11-year-old girl struggles to survive the harsh world of middle school as she confronts bullying, family indifference, and the sting of her first romantic disappointments.

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Grand Jury Prize | Sundance Film Festival | 1996
CICAE Award | Berlin Film Festival | 1996
Best Debut Performance (Heather Matarazzo) | Film Independent Spirit Awards | 1997

Welcome to the Dollhouse

A film that marked a new generation of filmgoers and became one of the most loved movies of contemporary Greek cinema, Renos Haralambidis’ directorial debut is a black and white love letter to cinema, romantic passion, and the undimmed flame of youth.

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A young, disappointed director tries to film an independent, low budget love movie. He’ll raise the interest of an ex porn producer, who will accept to fund his film while trying to persuade him to make it more commercial. The director insists, trying to cast in the leading role a young neighbor of his with whom he’s in love.

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Best Supporting Actor (Giorgos Voultzatis) | Thessaloniki Film Festival | 1997
FIPRESCI Prize | Istanbul International Film Festival | 1998

No Budget Story

If there is anything worth preserving from Dogme 95, Lars von Trier’s manifesto that shook the waters at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, it is this legendary film by Thomas Vinterberg, that depicts familial abuse in a cinematically unparalleled way.

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Thomas Vinterberg directs the story of the sixtieth birthday of a wealthy paterfamilias, when unpleasant truths begin to emerge about the family's tumultuous past, which will quickly turn into an avalanche.

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Jury Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1998
Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 1999
Nominated for Best Film not in the English Language | BAFTA Awards | 2000
Nominated for Best Foreign Film | César Awards | 1999

The Celebration

"At our closest point, we were just 0.01 centimeters away from each other." Wong Kar Wai delivers a filmic nuclear bomb of emotion about lost love, memory, loss, and the places where we move in our cities. With Tony Leung, Faye Wong and "California Dreaming".

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Every day, officer 223 buys a can of pineapple with the expiration date May 1st, symbolizing the day he will finally get over his lost love. At the same time he cannot take his eyes off a mysterious woman with a blonde wig, not knowing that she is a drug dealer. Officer 663 is consumed by grief because of a break up. But when his ex leaves a set of keys for his apartment in a neighbouring café, a waitress will use them to enter his house and brighten up his life.

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Official Selection | Locarno International Film Festival | 1994
Best Picture | Hong Kong Film Awards | 1995
Best Director | Hong Kong Film Awards | 1995
Best Actor (Tony Leung) | Hong Kong Film Awards | 1995
Best Actress (Faye Wong) | Stockholm Film Festival | 1994

Chungking Express

David Bowie and Rosanna Arquette co-star in a delightful comic detective adventure from the early 90s. A hidden gem for Bowie fans and beyond.

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A waitress, a bartender and a lingerie designer plan a daring robbery of a New York restaurant where two of them work.

The Linguini Incident

This BBC TV movie, led many to believe it was a live show, managed to scare the crowds years before the Blair Witch Project and Late Night with the Devil and earned a place in the British Medical Journal as being responsible for causing post-traumatic stress in viewers.

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The BBC gives over a whole evening to an 'investigation into the supernatural'. Four respected presenters and a camera crew attempt to discover the truth behind 'The most haunted house in Britain', expecting a light-hearted scare or two and probably the uncovering of a hoax. They think they are in control of the situation. They think they are safe. Nothing is how it seems.

Ghostwatch

In his most abstract, poetic and mystifying film, Krzysztof Kieslowski creates a masterful riddle-poem and a grand audio-visual composition about art, fate and the duality of existence.

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Two women with the same name, face and characteristics live thousands of miles away from each other. Sharing the same passion for music and the same serious health condition, their lives are connected in an unexpected and metaphysical way.

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Best Actress (Irène Jacob) | Cannes Film Festival | 1991
FIPRESCI Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1991
Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 1991

The Double Life of Veronique

Life and art merge in a wonderful recording of a love story on and off-camera, a rare parallel and two-fold approach to the concept of erotic desire that survives in the wreckage of an earthquake-stricken region.

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The relationship between Abbas Kiarostami and his actors during the filming of his previous film "And Life Goes On", focusing on the film's newly married couple and the actor's attempt to actually marry his co-worker.

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Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1994
Silver Hugo Best Film | Chicago International Film Festival | 1994
Critics Award | São Paulo International Film Festival | 1994

1990s