Trying to Describe Oneself (2005)
Genre : Documentary
Runtime : 2H 45M
Director : Boris Lehman
Synopsis
Trying to describe oneself is a movie about representation. How it is possible, through film, to describe oneself and describe others. With the camera as mirror and third eye. At first, a collage-like combination of letter-writing, investigation and journey, something between documentary and feature film. Finally, a portrait of Boris Lehman from 1989 to 1995, part II of BABEL.
Two small-town hell-raisers get so out of hand the authorities have to step in to rein them in.
Louise, literary advisor to the Cercle Editions, receives a large manuscript from the United States. Upset by the reading of this book, she begins an epistolary relationship with Paul, the author.
Gregorio Martinez Sierra's classic play about nuns finding an abandoned baby girl, in a version directed by the author.
1862. Commodore Sir Francis and inventor Douglas initiated on behalf of the Royal Society of London Geography of a balloon ride under the command of Dr. Ferguson, who plans to cross Africa from east to west. But to accomplish this feat will have to overcome numerous adventures in which their lives are at serious risk.
Called by the Mexican President himself, and in spite of a heart condition, young teacher Rosaura Salazar travels to the deserted town of Rio Escondido to accomplish the mission of bringing education to the poorest people. Being there, Salazar has to fight Regino Sandoval the evil landlord of the town. He has transformed the town into his own property, imposing his will and spreading death everywhere.
Two Malian teenagers, Bah and Batrou, from different backgrounds, meet at secondary school. Bah is the descendent of a great tribal chieftain. Batrous father, a provincial military governor, represents the new ruling power. The two teenagers are part of a generation that rejects the established order and challenges the society in which they live.
Low-rent vaudeville entertainers lose their venue and try to find mainstream jobs to support the foundling child they're raising.
The legendary life of Mexican singer Lucha Reyes is the basis of this fictionalized biography ( or as director Arturo Ripstein puts it "an imaginary biography"). Lucha Reyes was an unconventional, and sexually liberated woman, most famous for her "cancion ranchera" style singing. Her story begins in 1939, where at 33 she still lived at home with her mother, Dona Victora, the madame of a renowned Mexico City whorehouse. Lucha marries the liberal Pedro Calderon and then buys a beggar's daughter. She becomes the mother to this child, Luzma. Lucha craves lasting love like junkies crave heroin. But for her loyal daughter, she never finds it and in the end no one can help her.
Comical mix-up in the operating room: by mistake, a notorious gangster's arm is grafted onto an accident-victim's stump.
This drama attempts to be a film within a film. In the outer story, Andre Dussolier stars as a film director working with drama students at the Paris Conservatory, making a film (the inner story) about a woman's obsession with a foreign desert. Wallowing in maudlin sentimentality, this feature fails to live up to the promise of its probable inspiration, Fame (1980), and was not well-received at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. However, as a medium for instructing director Francis Girod's actual students at the Paris Conservatory about the art and perils of filmmaking, it was undoubtedly a good deal more successful.
Explores the relationship between Ake, a young man who is paralyzed from the waist down after an accident, and Pun, the male nurse who takes care of him, and of course Ake's father. Ake is at first cold towards his nurse Pun, but as Pun continues to earnestly take care of him he starts to open up his heart through candid conversations. The physical contact with Pun makes him rethink physical desires that he wants to forget. The grudge he held against his father slowly abates. All of this slowly becomes the motivating factor to confirm that he is alive, albeit with physical problems.
Playboy bachelor poses as a woman's husband to protect her daughter's reputation at a private school. Remake of El Mil Amores (1955).
Maura Monti (Mireya), Amedee Chabot (Adriana), Isela Vega (Dalila) and Elizabeth Campbell (Patricia), are hit women who kill men in cold blood. But not everybody, only men who don't comply with their 'godmother' (Tamara Garina)
A severely traumatized World War I veteran, believing that he's living on borrowed time, comes upon a peaceful little village and meets an old man called Bee Master and his protégé, Little Scout, who try to convince him that he has more to live for than he thinks he does.
Cowboy-justice guy breaks up a criminal gang who are terrorizing a small town with the appearance of vampire activity.
In order to stop a vampire from terrorizing the countryside, some locals decide to break into his coffin at night and steal his ashes. Complications ensue.
Monsieur Feydeau has writer's block, and he needs a new play. But he takes an opportunity to observe the upper class of 1900 Paris - Monsieur Boniface with a domineering wife, and the next-door neglectful husband Henri with a beautiful but ignored wife Marcelle. Henri traces architectural anomalies (most ghost sounds are drains), and plans a night at the Hotel Paradiso; but this hotel is the assignation spot of Marcelle and Boniface. One wife, two husbands, a nephew, and the perky Boniface maid, all at this 'by the hour' hotel, and consummation of the affair is, to say the least, severely compromised (not the least by a police raid). All of this under Feydeau's eye, and his play is the 'success fou' of the next season.
Bad-hats operating a mine kidnap men from neighboring towns to work as slave labor. Cowboy hero puts a stop to all that mess.
Based on the musical by Javier Munoz and Diego Izola. In a quiet fishing village, all adults have to put to sea. When parents go, a whole series of terrors and monsters attack children. To add to the confusion appears the terrible unicorn whose breeding is gone and blames plunging fishermen in seabed.
Friends become enemies after one of them is accused of committing a hate crime against a gay teenager during a weekend camping trip.