An eulogy to Giorgio Strehler, the first real director in the italian theatre. He was a master, knowing all aspects of the show, from the set techniques up to narrative influences. The documentary tells the personal life and the artistic career: it starts from that Christmas day in 1997, when the news broadcasts opened with the news of Strehler's death, to summarize the story of the Piccolo Teatro, the first municipal theatre in Italy.
A beautiful Chinese girl, Meiling, has a forbidden love affair with a young American man in Singapore. He leaves Singapore and never returns. Meiling gives birth to their Eurasian daughter whom she names Perfect Harmony. When she grows up, Perfect Harmony journeys to America to search for her father.
Is this what paradise looks like? The Todas tribe in the southern Indian Nilgiri Mountains know neither war nor work nor calendar. The 1000 members feed on the gifts of the jungle, and women maintain the tradition of polygamy.
In Paris, Maxi Ardel, in her elegant forties, successfully and firmly runs a haute couture house bearing her name. In Florence, she is about to take over a textile company that belonged to an old Italian aristocratic family, the di Falco. She has, indeed, a revenge to take on them. Count Massimo di Falco had stolen her child twenty years earlier. Driven by a desire for revenge, Maxi wants to destroy this family at all costs, but she has to count on Countess Bianca, who is ready to defend herself from her former rival. From then on, the two women fight without mercy.
Ulrich Mühe plays a German businessman who was born completely without scruples. This makes him an eminently suitable candidate for success in the chaotic years after World War I. The shameless man's story is contrasted with that of his polar opposite, a Jewish anarchist.
Beleaguered by choppy editing and potholes in the script, this story is about the bond that develops between an aging, former railroad worker living in an abandoned theater and Willie, the wayward, alcoholic architect he shelters (Elliot Gould). The flaws in the script and story development, and the architect's exaggerated character traits, work against the concept of a growing friendship between the two men and leave the main thrust of the film in limbo. A subplot has a gang of street thugs chasing Willie all over the city in order to retrieve some photos of a murder he accidentally recorded. At the same time, Willie is trying to reconcile with his son, left in the care of his neglected wife. ...
Two old school friends, both in their late twenties. One lives on his parent’s rural estate and does nothing; the other half-heartedly pursues work as a journalist in Düsseldorf.
Wassa Schelesnowa, a manipulative matriarch who will stop at nothing to keep her business afloat and her family together. Infanticide, forgery, murder, blackmail, adultery, exile, and plain old-fashioned greed are the order of the day as Wassa's colorful clan tries to scheme its way out of the house and into financial independence.
