Ciske the Rat (1955)

Shy working class 15 year-old Antoine, bored with life and school, breaks a leg and has young higher class Olivia help him with his studies. As he silently falls in love with her, he also falls in love with books and his will to become a writer.

한 쌍의 농아인 부부가 동생의 아들을 테헤란으로 데려가는 긴 여정의 과정에 일어나는 이야기이다. 언니 집을 찾아온 동생 부부는 늦은 밤 격렬한 말다툼을 하게 되고, 말도 없이 아들을 남겨두고 떠나버린다. 농아인인 언니 부부는 동생의 아들을 데려다 주는데, 이미 동생부부는 불행한 사고를 당한 뒤이다. 그들은 동생의 아들이 이 사실을 알게 될까 노심초사 하는데...

Living in Almaty, Kazakhstan, a young man is preparing to become a bus conductor. One day, in between wandering the city streets, and going to the movies, he makes the acquaintance of a female student.

Abila (14) lives in one of the most miserable slums in Africa. His girlfriend Shiku belongs to a different tribe, as the result of which he is not really allowed to fraternize with her. And then one drunken night his father gambles away his own soul.

In Crossbow the spoiler is right in front of you, there in the title. A crossbow is an anachronistic device and does not, at least in my mind, lend itself well to analogy or metaphor. In spite, or, more accurately, precisely because this ominous title hangs over the very start of viewing, the short film remarkably sustains a growing dread throughout its languid narration and slow-moving, though arresting visuals; maximizing its force not through the promise of surprise but through the inevitability of its conclusion.

200 BC. During a merciless drought, the brute nature of man and the delicate essence of woman become inextricably intertwined, as the omnipotence of the carnal instinct demands the total surrender of the flesh.

The suffocating love between between a father and a son who, as modern outlaws, struggle to survive in the depleted and neglected southern Dutch province of Limburg.

The town of Derry has a secret, but no one told the new kid. It's gonna be a long night.

“My best friend, Anna, asked me if I would mind taking her fifteen-year-old son Itvan to Berlin with me. I accepted immediately.” An elegant, refined man in his forties sets off with Itvan on a long, enjoyable journey, his Winter Journey. They cross snowbound Germany by car. As the man drives the boy through cities and countryside, Itvan discovers the past and the vast job of reunification now underway. Poetry and culture are also part of the journey, which is accompanied by classical German music. When their paths cross with the man's former lovers or the journey provides unexpected encounters, Itvan also gets to know more about the man's own life. When they finally arrive in Berlin, their ways must part. Itvan watches the man leave, taking the melancholy of his existence with him. However their journey together has created an unbreakable tie between the two men. Itvan will never be the same again.

The gang goes to a circus sideshow to visit Dickie and Spanky's uncle, mistakenly believing he is "The Wild Man from Borneo."

A young Jewish boy travels europe in search of the grave of his Great Grandfather who was killed by the Nazis in the War.

The screen story of four teenagers, on whom the horrors of war had left an indelible mark. Their relatives’ deaths and their yearning for fighting the Nazis led them, one way or another, to a sea cadet school that had been opened on Solovetski Islands at the start of the war. This film tells of men’s friendship, the boys’ first baptism of fire, and the victory…

Surreal tale of a 14 year-old boy who dreams of escaping the loneliness from an unhappy home & sexual abuse (from his mother's boyfriend who is also his school swimming coach). One day his back mysteriously sprouts feathers and he can metaphorically fly away from it all.

This picture shows an old gentleman seated at his shaving table. The razor is evidently giving him a great deal of trouble...

Perhaps the most ebullient “musical” you’ll see this year, Marc-Henri Wajnberg’s singular documentary/fiction hybrid follows a group of street children in the Congolese capital.

In 1939, José Garcés is in French prison camp after the defeat of Spain's Republicans. To entertain and inspire his fellow prisoners, he tells the story of becoming a man in 1919, the year he realized that learning to live is the same as learning to die. His stiff and demanding father loses a fortune in German war bonds, takes a job in Caspe, and leaves José on his own in Zaragoza to finish high school while apprenticing in a pharmacy. José courts his beloved Valentina via letters, becomes intimate with Isabel, a maid he meets in a cinema who shares his ideas of free love, and comes under the influence of El Checa, an anarchist and gentle teacher who leads a doomed revolt.

Although he was once a colonel in Argentina, the principal character in this film is now a wealthy exile living in Paris with his beloved wife, who has been unable to bear children. To fill this void in their lives, he feeds and clothes abandoned children, raising them in his mansion as if they were his own. As would never be the case in real life today, in this fantasized story set in 1925, no one objects to this behavior, and they live pleasantly and enjoyably together. Things grow considerably more animated when a stage magician places his very attractive daughter in the colonel's household, which stirs a lively romantic interest from his boys and from the great man himself.

If the scorpion could see and the viper could hear, there would be no escape". The viper is deaf and the scorpion can't see, so it is and so shall be, the same way the countryside is peaceful and the city bustling and the human being impossible to satisfy. Lacrau demands the return "to the curve where man got lost" in a journey from the city towards nature. The escape from chaos and emotional void we call progress; matter without spirit, without will. The search for the most ancient sensations and relationships of mankind. The amazement, the fear of the unknown, the loss of basic comforts, loneliness, the meeting with the other, the other animal, the other vegetable. A dive looking for a connection with the world. Where beginning and end are the same, but I am not.

Matei lives with his grandfather in Romania. His parents have gone to work in Italy. After arguing with his grandfather, he leaves. A poignant, beautifully shot film on the illusions and disillusionments of childhood.

In this grim German drama, a troubled 14-year-old boy's pent-up rage and frustration leads him to involvement with a bad crowd and gets him caught up in an inescapable spiral of increasingly self-destructive and deadly violence.