Strass (2002)
Genre : Comedy, Drama
Runtime : 1H 10M
Director : Vincent Lannoo
Synopsis
A despicable teacher uses his prestigious reputation to verbally and sexually abuse his students.
A grandiose party to celebrate a sixtieth birthday unleashes a family drama with all the lies that conceal horrendous secrets. The eldest son, Christian, stages a showdown with the popular pater familias; his provocative, moving after-dinner speech dislodges all the masks, which finally fall completely as the father-son conflict intensifies and the bewildered guests look on.
Undiagnosed, untreated and generally untethered schizophrenic Julien lives with his pregnant younger sister Pearl, would-be wrestler brother Chris, sympathetic grandmother, and severely depressed German father.
With his first Dogma-95 film director Lars von Trier opens up a completely new film platform. With a mix of home-video and documentary styles the film tells the story of a group of young people who have decided to get to know their “inner-idiots” and thus not only facing and breaking their outer appearance but also their inner.
Cecilie and Joachim are about to get married when a freak car accident leaves Joachim disabled, throwing their lives into a spin. The driver of the other car, Marie, and her family don’t get off lightly, either. Her husband Niels works in the hospital where he meets Cecilie and falls madly in love with her.
A group of strangers find friendship, family and love within an Italian beginners’ course.
Stranded in the heat of a barren African desert, eleven bus-passengers shelter in the remnants of an abandoned town. As rescue grows more remote by the day and anxiety deepens, an idea emerges: why not stage a play. However the choice of King Lear only manages to plunge this disparate group of travelers into turmoil as they struggle to overcome both nature's wrath and their own morality.
Kresten, newly wed, is on the threshold of a great career success in his father-in-law´s company. But when the death of his own father takes him back to his poverty-stricken childhood home, far out in the country, his career plans fall apart. For one thing he has to deal with his loveable, backward brother, who is now all alone; for another, he meets a stunning woman who comes to the farm as a housekeeper, in disguise of her real profession as a call-girl.
P. is a little girl's imaginary friend who lives inside the wall of her room. But one day he magically materialises and so must learn to live in the world like everyone else - a world where he is met with suspicion and hate but also with wonder and love.
Katrine is to be married. Her fiancé is gorgeous, their appartment is luxurious and her future in-laws are wealthy. Katrine only has one problem: she sometimes finds it difficult to tell the truth, and this sends her on a round-about jaunt with an old friend, Thomsen, who has just barged in unannounced from Kenya and who wants to return a favour and help Katrine with her wedding preparations. A labyrinthal excursion takes place. Tomorrow is another day, the wedding day!
Kira and Mads try to work out their marriage, after Kira has been two years in a mental institution, but is she really ready for the real world?
Anna, a young theology graduate, starts work as a prison chaplain. She becomes especially concerned about one inmate, Kate, regarded as difficult and withdrawn, but whom the other inmates credit with mysterious healing powers.
A story of a filmmaker who falls in love with a woman he interviews for his film. The film presents the evolution of a relationship which shifts from the objective to the subjective, and from lies to truth.
Gypo is the story of a working class family in Margate, Kent, a town where immigrants have become the focus of most of the public's discontent. The film tells the story of the a couple of weeks in this family's life, beginning when a young Czech girl, Tash, comes to visit. The film is made in the Dogme95 tradition, so no costumes, no lighting, no props or sets, which gives the film a gritty texture appropriate to the story.
A French woman falls in love with a Yugoslavian man, not realizing that he is an illegal immigrant.
First-ever Spanish Dogma Film. An acid psychosocial-sexual comedy tells the story of a group of friends from university who, ten years after finishing their journalism studies, decide to meet up again in one of their friends' homes to revisit past times. Up until now, they have all done well in life and should be happy, but they aren't. A weekend will be more than enough to bring out the best and the worst in each of them and to create conflict.
Peter and Chris, two young American friends in their late 20s, go from South Dakota to California on a scooter, and as they travel across the American landscape they see their country through different eyes, ranging from Peter's cynically nihilistic point of view, to Chris' high expectations and romantic notions of the United States.
Sonia, the daughter of a prominent publisher, is about to fulfill her lifelong dream of marrying Rosendo, a promising writer with homosexual tendencies, who pines for his fiancee far less than he does for the brand new literary award launched by his future father-in-law. The wedding shindig will bring its share of unexpected surprises. This is a film is part of the DOGME 95 Movement, described as follows: 'the goal of the Dogme collective is to purify film-making by refusing expensive and spectacular special effects, post-production modifications and other gimmicks. The emphasis on purity forces the filmmakers to focus on the actual story and on the actors' performances. Given these restrictions the story and the action of DIAS DE BODA ('WEDDING DAYS') seem much more immediate and the lapses in fluidity of the story can be forgiven - to a point.
A bittersweet and heartfelt story about going back. In the twenty-four hours before their 20th high school reunion, five friends, a younger brother and a mysterious photojournalist are reunited by determined Mayor Margaret to remember the good times of 1981
A drug dealer, after getting arrested, beat-up in jail and his first felony conviction, vows to make one final score and a fresh start; but instead winds up in a showdown with a malicious legal system threatening to steal his most valued posessions: his freedom and his life.
Fabián, a magician from Buenos Aires, saves his money from weddings, birthdays, and bar mitzvahs, and uses a hidden camera to document a week-long trip to the Falkland Islands where he has a patriotic plan: to impregnate a British woman. If 500 Argies do this annually, the islands will soon be overrun with children belonging to both cultures. He spends his first couple of days in Stanley doing reconnaissance, setting his sights on Camila, whom he's first seen in church. He chats her up at an Internet café. They go out for drinks, then dinner, then to the see the King penguins and a 1982 battlefield. Back home, editing his Dogma 95 film, he receives a final message from Camila.
A comedy based on NBC's "People Are Funny" radio (and later television) program with Art Linkletter with a fictional story of how the program came to be on a national network from its humble beginning at a Nevada radio station. Jack Haley is a producer with only half-rights to the program while Ozzie Nelson and Helen Walker are the radio writers and supply the romance. Rudy Vallee, always able to burlesque himself intentional and, quite often, unintentional, is the owner of the sought-after sponsoring company. Frances Langford, as herself, sings "I'm in the Mood for Love" while the Vagabonds quartet (billed 12th and last) chimes in on "Angeline" and "The Old Square Dance is Back Again."
At the height of Reign of Terror Maximilien Robespierre orchestrates the trial and execution of several of his fellow leading French revolutionaries including Georges Danton.
Produced in 1943 under the guidance of Army Air Force Lieutenant Clark Gable, this film follows a single 8th Air Force B-17 crew from training through a series of missions over Europe.
Letters, Riddles and Writs is a one act opera for television by Michael Nyman broadcast in 1991.
Iskyss is a strong and poetic love story based on Gunvor Galtung Haavik’s double life through 30 years. During the Cold War, she was employed by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and assigned to the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow. With the information she had access to in the capacity of her position as interpreter and secretary, she frequently fed the KGB secret information.
A girl has to decide who to marry: a poor country boy or a rich nightclub owner.
Moody, atmospheric ghost story starring Mason as a retired tradesman who purchases an old mansion that has been vacant for 40 years because it is believed to be haunted by the spirit of a young woman who had died there. Unaware of the mansion's reputation, Mason and his wife Mullen move in and hire a young woman, Lockwood, to keep house. Soon after Lockwood's arrival, strange things begin to happen in the household, and it becomes apparent that she is possessed by the spirit of the dead girl, though Mason scoffs at the idea. On death's door and bedridden, Lockwood asks for the same doctor who treated the woman who died 40 years ago. He arrives and treats her. The next morning Lockwood is cured, and it is revealed by the police that the doctor's dead body was found in his carriage hours before the time Mason claims he arrived to see Lockwood. Convinced that not only the ghost of the girl but that of the doctor as well entered his home, Mason finally believes in the supernatural.
A loving couple struggle to fend for themselves in modern day Los Angeles, One a loner and down and out, the other a lonely but hardworking secretary. Eventually, as cracks form in their passionate relationship, they resort to robbing an aging actress for money.
A filmmaker returns to Normandy thirty years after a working on a movie based on a local homicide and tries to find the actors who worked on the project.
This is not merely another film about cinema history; it is a film about the love of cinema, a journey of discovery through over a century of German film history. Ten people working in film today remember their favourite films of yesteryear.
The story of the Dassau family, a family of artists: Frau Dassau is a composer, her husband is a writer, and their children are equally gifted as painters, poets and musicians. But unfortunately, no one wants to invest money in their art. The family is about to starve when Nicole comes up with a marvelous idea: She is going to write the "most scandalous book", the sex memoirs of a teenager. For this, she hides under the pseudonym of Eva. The book becomes an enormous success indeed, but Nicole's parents are decent people, and the public interest in their sluttish daughter begins to bother them. Things begin to get even more unpleasant when Nicole falls in love with an American publisher who'd prefer a virgin…
Four nights in Caracas. A documentary essay about chaos and civilization.
On Christmas Eve, Léa and Juliette, a couple, want to rob a supermarket that Juliette knows is empty of surveillance on this festive evening. But, as much for each of them as for Eric, the vigil who is there after all, nothing will happen as planned. Besides, shortly before leaving him alone, the store manager gave Eric a gun, just in case.
While Douglas Coupland works on a grand art project about Canada, the writer recounts his life and his musings about the various aspects of Canadian identity.
I love Vienna is a social comedy that explores the clash of cultures and values.
Based on a story by Vietnam veteran Paul Staples, the film concerns six American Green Berets, held for 17 years in a Vietnamese POW camp. They are finally released in secret, during a delicate trade-talk session between Vietnam and the United States. Captain Tom Watkins, the ex-prisoners' CO, begins to suspect that government-man Adam Roth, who is in charge of the debriefing, may be pursuing a hidden agenda that will result in the early deaths of Watkins and the five men under his command.
A humorous and satirical comedy, which places a man from the year 2222 one day in the (then) present day life in GDR, East Germany under Communist regime. Using a crystal for mind reading he uncovers some improprieties and moral weaknesses in the "Beautiful future" professed by VEB ("Volkseigener Betrieb" – "State Owned Holdings").
The subject of this historical drama is a splintering Berlin in the years of 1948 and 1949. Played against the backdrop of social upheaval, the characters in the drama come to epitomize the best and worst of each pole of the political sphere. A 17-year-old hoodlum by the name of Gladow works hand-in-glove with a local white-collar criminal to rob and pillage every day and night, defying capture. While he and his gang of thugs are terrorizing the people of Berlin, the Soviets are trying to make the blockade of their region of control impermeable. The future casts long shadows over the drama, as Berlin's problems take the shape of times to come.
KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS follows uber myco visionaries Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans (two of the more expert and unforgettably mercurial characters in the community) as they lead us on a hunt for the wild mushroom and the deeper cultural experiences attached to the mysterious fungi.