The Lesson (2023)

Luna Magica, a professional Lucha Libre wrestling star in Mexico, dreams of becoming world wrestling champion while fighting to make ends meet as a single mom in Mexico City.

The Business of DisEase is an upcoming documentary exploring the hypnosis of marketing, belief systems and the body’s ability to heal. The film explores conflicts and distortions in the medical research studies; the misleading and deceptive agreements between drug companies and government, and the futility of most medical tests and interventions to prolong lifespan.

Two ex-friends from East Germany meet up after many years. One was a dissident, the other spied on him for the Stasi. One went to prison. One did not. A unsettling story of how a dictatorship spun so strong it could completely control its population.

Night... is about glamour and the process of victimisation. The tape shifts texture as it shifts tone from pleasure to disgust, celebration to critique, anxiety to sympathy, analysis to vapidity.

Elza lives in a small town in the Republic of Kalmykia on the Caspian Sea. Another year comes to an end, it’s cold and the steppe is covered in a thin layer of snow. When her husband, who makes a living from illegal fishing, asks her one night what she did during the day, she lies. She wasn’t at her mother’s, but at the bus stop. She thought of leaving – to find out what it might be to escape the infinite expanse of her dreary small world. But she didn’t dare; instead she stays and withdraws into herself, unconcerned by who might see. One day, her husband doesn’t return from a dangerous boat trip. It is said that a fisherman only returns if he has a woman waiting for him and that seagulls are the souls of the missing. At the start of a somewhat unplanned pregnancy, widowed and alone, Elza wanders ever further through the city, plotting a path between tradition and the contemporary until she’s no longer on familiar ground.

"This is a nice fruit tree here. Why don't you eat from it? " Working from about 2,500 images, all painstakingly drawn and painted and textured onto clear 70mm film leader, Nina Paley’s brilliant, camera-less short film paints the proverbial "Fall from Grace" as a labyrinthine trip through Pandora's box. It is a mad race, a dance with death and a rollicking good time in this raucous, vibrant set of color images shimmering and shimmying over a black background, all to the driving insouciance of Scottish punk rockers the Revillos' "Yeah Yeah."

You don't need to be a cat lover to appreciate Nina Paley's gorgeous animated short (though it will be a dose of nip to you if you are). A loving set of color-treated, drawn-over images of the titular cat, seen playing and staring back at the camera to a suitably bright and bouncy score by Nik Phelps and the Sprocket Ensemble.

"Mitzi and Spanko run amok in a colorful world where reason is overrated, featuring the thumping, riotously fun music of the Asylum Street Spankers." A beautiful hand-animated short inspired by and done to the song "Monkey Rag" by Asylum Street Spankers. You can find the full short on YouTube at http://youtu.be/HqJQAgBPBSA

The film 1933 made between 1967 and 1968 offers a street scene shot in New York City in the late 1960s from a loft window on the second floor.

Patriotism, Part One depicts an army of phallic, bun-clad wieners marching on a vulnerable sleeping white male body, naked save for a sheet.

In a way a portrait of Dave Shackman with the American flag. The ending is a stop-motion animation of a set table with food moving and swirling and finally gathering together in a ball. Looking back at the film, the animation sequence seems to foreshadow Dave Shackman’s early death.

Rocio, a Maya Mam girl, lives in the mountains with her mother, who is pregnant and her granny. Due to an early delivery from her mother, Rocio is stuck with caring for a herd of sheep, the first time she has done it on her own. Playing in the mountains she loses one of the sheep. Looking for it, she will lose the rest of the herd. In the midst of this tragedy, Rocio will have to face her innocence, conquer her fear of fog and learn that freedom entails responsibility. Nature will teach her that you do not have to defeat your fears, you just have to experience them. The Greatest House in the World is a story of children -which we all are- when facing fears, the unknown, the uncertain... the fog.

Camp Belvidere is a lesbian romance set in the 1950s about the coming of age of Camp Leader Rose and her forbidden encounter with Nurse Gin. It depicts the journey and evolution of a friendship into a romance between two women when their rapport would have been unlikely.

The North of Cauca is the region of Colombia most affected by the internal armed conflict since 1940. There is an orchestra of ancestral music composed of young indigenous people of the Nasa ethnic group who, with their instruments, their voice and their poetry, remember Maryi Vanessa Coicue, Sebastian Ul and Ingrid Guejia, three of the hundreds of indigenous children who have died because of this eternal and useless war between leftist guerrillas, armed groups of the extreme right, drug traffickers and the Colombian State.

It's never too late to relive your childhood, at least that's what two former childhood friends set out to do after they reunite at their ten year high school reunion. Todd (the boy that stayed) and Allison (the girl that left) are struggling with the harsh realities of adulthood and a return to their youth seems like the perfect escape. Unfortunately, it's really about time they grow up. Or is it? Allison's old childhood home is for rent.

The story is about a young girl, Kaya (Udita Goswami) , living in the beautifully serene valley of Spiti, waiting to join a Buddhist monastery, an idea which has been fed to her all her life by her father (Mohan Agashe) and one which she has never questioned. When Lama Norbu, a senior lama from the monastery has a dream that the Buddhist teacher, the Rinpoche has been reborn as a young child, he sends Kaya to Delhi on a mission to bring him back to the monastery.

The only film from female director Park Nam Ok, the melodrama The Widow offers a different perspective of the female experience in postwar Korea, and a woman's struggle between duty and desire. Raising a daughter alone after the war, widow Shin (Lee Min Ja) is much indebted to her late husband's friend Seong Jin (Shin Dong Hun) but resists his romantic advances. Instead, she falls for Taek (Lee Taek Kyun), who is carrying on an affair with Seong Jin's jealous wife (Park Yeong Suk). Shin is willing to give up everything for Taek, but his heart changes again when his girlfriend returns.

In the Warsau ghetto of 1943, one man's struggle to keep his family together leads him to the ultimate crisis of faith and one final chance at redemption.

"Last year my father asked me to go on the road with him. As my sister was going along as his back-up singer and his wife Maebh, and my new baby brother Isaac, were also travelling with him, I decided to pick up my camera and go along. This is the Growing UP Tour 2002." - Anna Gabriel An inventive and intimate portrait of family life on the road during Peter Gabriel's recent Growing Up Tour; the highs, the lows, the sublime, the ridiculous, the fathers, sisters, brothers, band members and road crew, in short...The Family...captured and revealed like you've rarely ever seen before by the knowing eye of Anna Gabriel, a family member in every sense of the word.