Das blaue Licht

On the one hand, there’s the desert eating away at the land. The endless dry season, the lack of water. On the other there’s the threat of war. The village well has run dry. The livestock is dying. Trusting their instinct, most of the villagers leave and head south. Rahne, the only literate one, decides to head east with his three children and Mouna, his wife. A few sheep, some goats, and Chamelle, a dromedary, are their only riches. A tale of exodus, quest, hope and fatality.

Hard times come for the Carraclough family and they are forced to sell their dog, Lassie, to the rich Duke of Rudling. Lassie, however, is unwilling to remain apart from young Carraclough son Joe and sets out on a long and dangerous journey to rejoin him.

Young computer enthusiast Liam runs a website streaming video of his every action captured on a webcam. He lives a reclusive life, temporarily staying in a friend’s apartment in Paris until waitress Alison and her British husband, James, move in.

Olivier Assayas, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuaron are among the 20 distinguished directors who contribute to this collection of 18 stories, each exploring a different aspect of Parisian life. The colourful characters in this drama include a pair of mimes, a husband trying to chose between his wife and his lover, and a married man who turns to a prostitute for advice.

When a young boy makes a wish at a carnival machine to be big—he wakes up the following morning to find that it has been granted and his body has grown older overnight. But he is still the same 13-year-old boy inside. Now he must learn how to cope with the unfamiliar world of grown-ups including getting a job and having his first romantic encounter with a woman.

Sayid wants to keep his status as a father and the family patriarch in a new linguistic and cultural setting, despite his sons progress in assimilating into the danish language culture.

This somber story of love lost forever is set against the backdrop of the changes that Communism brought to the state of Georgia in the former USSR after the 1917 Revolution. Eva and Archil are deeply in love and they pledge to be with each other always. After they marry, Archil dies suddenly and Eva is left alone and childless. Along comes the ruthless Spiridon who romances Eva and marries her - though his cold and cruel spirit break Eva's naturally buoyant self, until she sullenly eats alone, and avoids intimacy with her husband as much as possible. They adopt a daughter, who does not take sides between her glum mother and silent father. When the Communist cadres enter their village to promote the ideals of the October revolution, Eva starts to warm to her husband a little because he joins in that movement. Then her husband commits the fatal error of revealing a previous crime - an error that will later cause their grown daughter to question her parents' strange behavior.

This biographical film celebrates the little-known life of the Finnish novelist and revolutionary Maiju Lassila (Asko Sarkola), born in 1868. Lassila's early years are briefly shown, then the film richly details his active and paradoxically reclusive adult life, beginning with his sojourn in St. Petersburg, working as a businessman. Unable to stay away from politics, he caused the assassination of a high-ranking Czarist and as a result, had to run back to Finland to hide. Once established in the comparative safety of a small village, he taught school in order to support his real vocation as a writer. Always living on the edge of poverty, if not square in the middle of it, Lassila continues to avoid public contact - he keeps his identity low-key and camoflages it by publishing under a variety of pseudonyms.

During the rising of nazism, Sylvia, a rich but sterile woman, needs an heir to inherit her father's money. So she bribes Irene, a Jewish girl, to have a child by her husband.

The seven women inmates in Poslednata Duma are imprisoned because they have been associated with partisans opposing the fascist puppet government of the German Nazis. Each of them has the power to save herself if she will betray the others, and each bravely refuses to do so, even though it means they all will die. Despite their grim situation, and the atrocities perpetuated on them as political prisoners, they manage to laugh, and even celebrate a festival.

An old woman recalls her love life through the prism of a nostalgic heartfulness. A 1995 Norwegian short, can be found on the compilation Short 4: Seduction.