Rudolfo Wedeles

The last 7 hours of former President of Chile Salvador Allende, and his closest collaborators inside the Palace of La Moneda, during the brutal military coup d'etat on Sept. 11, 1973, the day democracy in Chile ended. Based on true events.

April 1974 saw the fall of a long lasting dictatorship. The young democracy developed in the midst of much social and political turmoil. The armed wing of a leftist group changed the future of one family - the father disappears without trace, the mother denies their past, and the son grows up with unanswered questions. As a young man, Pedro is determined to reach for answers, aided by his apparently batty grandmother. Collecting clues and meeting people who would rather prefer to remain forgotten. His inner journey leads him Portugal to Spanish through the deserted roads of Alentejo. Pedro will find himself, but there is a price to pay.

In oPorto there is a club, Imperatriz, where everything is permitted. A moment in which all intersect in the dark night.

Palestine 1914. One morning in July, Soliman, a young Palestinian and Jacob, his Jewish friend, begin to build a house in Beit-Sajour, in the hills of Judea, with stones brought from Beit-Jala, while the apparent stillness of the place is interrupted by bursts of violence that anticipate the future days of the war.

Twenty-five years after leaving school, a group of former students decide to organise a reunion. But, contrary to expectations, these "old boys" realise that time has accentuated their differences. The atmosphere is tense, the conversation taut and the old grudges resurface in no time.

Vicente goes to Egypt to cover some news for his newspaper, but then he decides to take the investigation further, along the Tropic of Cancer, further and further away (in time and space) from home, and his difficult love life. Therefore he revisits the lands explored 500 years before by the seafarers from his own people: Egypt, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Nepal, Laos, China... Eventually he must come back.

A philosophy-obsessed serial rapist stalks a university campus in broad daylight.

Anne Laugel, a young divorced woman, mother of a ten-year-old girl, Sophie, travels to China to adopt a baby. She is convinced, as a good Westerner, to carry out this adventure for the happiness of the new born, her daughter and hers.

Young Jesus is taken on a vacation by his parents (Rita Blanco, Adriano Luz) to a deserted beach resort. They accidentally fall into overnight wealth after Jesus digs in the sand, uncovering a large drug stash. Others characters intersecting here include an alcoholic actress, a philandering banker, a general trafficking in arms, priests who close their church and head north as hitchhikers, politicians who watch an all-girl production of Julius Caesar, and beggars who recite a children's story in a huge heap of trash.

A Reality Show TV host tired of the sensationalist routine of this kind of programs and confident in his powerful Imagination, dreams in writing the most original story in the world

Madeleine is with her lover, Jean-Paul, when her husband arrives home and catches the two together. Madeleine kills her husband and tells Jean-Paul to flee before the police arrive. After Jean-Paul drives away, he picks up a hitchhiker. When the car, stolen by the hitchhiker, explodes, police believe the dead hitchhiker is Jean-Paul. Madeleine takes up with Jean-Paul's brother, Bastien, while Jean-Paul, arriving in Strasbourg, is mistaken for the heir to a fortune. The detective on the case spends more time writing crime novels than investigating real-life crimes.

In today's Alentejo, a story of love and death based in a real criminal case.

In this French-Portuguese film -- directed by Jacques Rivette's screenplay collaborator Christine Laurent -- French vocalist Laure Constant (Laurence Cote) goes to Montevideo, Uruguay, to see her old lover Colossus (Jose Olivera), but when he's a no-show, she becomes involved with several other men, while listening to advice from some older French women who are costume designers. Shown at the 1997 Locarno Film Festival.

The story of a neurotic bachelor who, after marrying a beautiful woman, submits her to increasingly deranged accusations of infidelity and pleas for forgiveness.

Four intertwining stories of bizarre occurrences in Paris featuring a man who was stolen away by fairies, a professor who becomes a tramp, the lovers who inherit a chateau – and the last tale that connects all that has gone before.

A female television journalist has a strange affair with a terrorist.

This dark and intense drama follows the slow and painful destruction of a young, passive woman as she watches her family fall apart. Maria is the shy and dutiful daughter upon whose shoulders the family traumas have fallen. In addition to a regular job she cooks, cleans, and studies. Her parents offer no assistance as her father is blind, with a tendency towards violence when drinking. His wife, the focus of his violence is terribly unhappy. After a particularly brutal beating, Maria's brothers rise up against the father and end up leaving the home. It is up to Maria to try to bring the factions together. Maria's pressures increase after she calmly stabs her boss during an attempted rape, and then copes with her mother's suicide.

After 20 years of exile, Aron returns to Chile to find out who he is. He asks questions, not only of those who stayed behind but also of himself, examining his relationship with his past and his own memory. The people who stayed lived through 20 years of dictatorship. They were either victims or executioners. Amidst this wreckage, Aron wonders what name his brother is using now, where his father is... Can he, in Isol's arms and through her love, find his way again ? What future awaits him? Like Mola the torturer, he has returned from an impossible journey, and Aron knows that each man is his own executioner. Shipwreck and resurrection are the two facets of a complex truth.

After 20 years of exile, Aron returns to Chile to find out who he is. He asks questions, not only of those who stayed behind but also of himself, examining his relationship with his past and his own memory. The people who stayed lived through 20 years of dictatorship. They were either victims or executioners. Amidst this wreckage, Aron wonders what name his brother is using now, where his father is... Can he, in Isol's arms and through her love, find his way again ? What future awaits him? Like Mola the torturer, he has returned from an impossible journey, and Aron knows that each man is his own executioner. Shipwreck and resurrection are the two facets of a complex truth.

A well-bred young woman who prizes the virtue of fidelity remains faithful to the doctor who deflowers her, even after he marries her invalid sister.

Documentary about Cuban education. El planeta de los niños is not a documentary and not a feature film. Sarmiento actually filmed a documentary subject with the mise-en-scène and the cutting of a feature film. Without further ado, she takes the viewer into a world where adults would appear to have died out ; a society within which all functions and professions are held by children with deadly seriousness as if things have always been this way. Only right at the end does Sarmiento reveal that she shot the film at the 'Escuele de Pioneros' set up in Cuba in 1979, an institution which Fidel Castro gave to the children of his people to prepare themselves for a later working life. The film opens with an as-good-as-real wedding ceremony and progresses via a birth to a simulated battle ; from birth to death. The subtle irony with which Sarmiento portrays this 'Utopian' world was not understood by all German critics.

These six video segments (10 minutes each) were originally developed for broadcast on Channel 4 as the second installment in the larger, never completed, series comissioned for Peter Greenaway and Tom Philips' A TV Dante (1989). But it was never aired. Ruiz's treatment of the six Cantos can be taken together as a bridge between his previous visions of hell in Mémoire des apparences AKA Life is a Dream (1986) and La Chouette aveugle (1987) and themore recent series of essay videos that he has made for Chilean television under the title Cofralandes (2002).

At the time Portugal presented a strange spectacle to the rest of Europe. D. Afonso VI, son of the fortunate D. João de Bragança, was in possession of the throne and was an insane imbecile. His wife, daughter of the Duke of Nemours and cousin of Louis XIV, dared hatch a plot to oust her husband from the throne. The king's stupidity justified the queen's bravado. Despite being master of unusual strength and having slept with his wife for a long time, she accused him of being impotent. Marie Françoise had acquired through artfulness what Afonso had lost in anger in the kingdom. She had him imprisoned ( November 1667 ) and quickly obtained a papal bull from Rome to confirm her virginity and bless her marriage to her brother-in-law Pedro. Portugal's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1990.

H., 35, an Arabian immigrant, works as projectionist in an old cinema. One day, drawn by the music, he looks through the window of the booth and is fascinated: the dancer he sees on the screen seems to be looking straight into his eyes. He falls in love with her, but the vision last only a moment. Shortly afterwards, an elderly man storms into the projection booth and claims he is his uncle.
 H. wants to prepare a meal for him and reaches for the oil bottle: he sees the same dancer on the label…. H begins to find echoes of his own life in the images he projects. Everything changes when fiction and reality merge...

A baroque mix of revolutionary politics, pop culture and semiotics loosely based on the play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. A young prince learns that life is just a dream from which we wake when we die. And that dreams may be as real as life.

Manoel de Oliveira plays his film in three stages: the first part - a play, the second can be roughly defined as a silent film (with the behind the scenes read excerpts from Beckett works), but in the end the director brilliantly performs the same material of the avant-garde exercise. Surprisingly, a joke, repeated three times, each time everything sounds fresh and develops into an almost verbatim adaptation of the biblical "Book of Job" - a spectacular point in a parable about how hard to empathize with other people's misery, when you have your own.

Richard of Gloucester uses murder and manipulation to claim England's throne.

Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.

This quickly-filmed avant-garde farce by prolific director Raul Ruiz features an insomniac (Michel Lonsdale) whose main preoccupation is surreptitiously watching private matters -- he is a voyeur. He and an equally disreputable acquaintance rape a woman alongside the Seine, a crime made all the worse because she is pregnant. The rest of this slow-paced film deals with the consequences of that action.

When the child Manuel wanders into a garden that is off-limits to him, he meets an unidentified fisherman, and another boy -- the boy is actually himself several years down the road. Manuel experiences three different versions of his encounters in the garden, revealing that fate can have several twists and turns in one's life, depending on decisions that are made early on.

A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.

The story of a Chilean refugee, marked by imprisonment and torture, illustrates the tragedy suffered by victims of violence in Latin America during the years of dictatorship.

A semi-fictional account on the fatidic September 11, 1973, when the military commanded by General Pinochet took over the power from socialist president Salvador Allende, initiating a dictatorship that lasted until 1988 causing the deaths and disappearances of many people.

Many socially-concerned priests in Catholic Latin America have at some time left their parish churches to go and work in the fields and factories of the poor. Such priests, usually adherents of "liberation theology," are called "worker-priests." This Chilean film tells the story of how one man became a "worker-priest" and won the trust of the poor.

The political evolution in Chile seeing from three different times: 1937, 1947 and 1970. A film that shows how a revolution cannot be accomplished by electoral means, and how the wealthy class will always attempt to destroy that revolution, with the help of the armed forces, as soon as their privileges are threatened.

This stark Chilean melodrama concerns itself with the plight of slum dwellers living outside Santiago. For many years they have, with great difficulty, been faithfully paying small sums to a real estate man. This man has said that by doing so they can obtain title to the miniscule plots of land their houses stand on. In fact, he has been swindling them and does not even own the land he has been "selling." One of the aggrieved slum dwellers confronts him about this while he is visiting the slum, and the real estate agent shoots him before everyone's eyes. The question confronting these witnesses is whether testifying against this monster will make their lives even more precarious.