The Beginning and the End

This Mexican film, loosely based on Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz's 1940's book, traces the slow and painful collapse of a Mexican family after the sudden death of the father. Much of the film focuses upon the outcomes of two disparate brothers. Following his death, the formerly middle-class Botero family is left destitute. To pay their debts, the mother Ignacia throws the oldest son Guama who does not pull his weight at home, out into the street where he becomes a full-time drug addict, pimp, and bouncer. Guama is doomed right from the start. Ignacia then forces Nicolas and sister, Mireya to give up their bright futures in favor of brother, Gabriel, Ignacia's favorite. The selfish Gabriel is a law student and Ignacia has placed all the family's hopes upon him. Nicolas must leave school and take a peon's job. Mireya works at a sweat-shop and eventually becomes a hooker. Gabriel gets himself into a situation that jeopardizes his potential career. To protect it he cons one of siblings into covering for him. That sibling commits suicide. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The Fish Child

The Fish Child, a romantic crime drama adapted from her novel of the same name. Lala (Inés Efron) is an Argentinean girl from a wealthy family. She's desperately in love with the family's young live-in maid, La Guayi (singer Mariela Vitale, making her feature-film debut), and she's jealous of La Guayi's many other admirers. When Lala's politically active father, Bronté (Pep Munné), dies under mysterious circumstances, she runs off to La Guayi's remote hometown in Paraguay, hoping that her lover will follow. There, she uncovers the truth about La Guayi's sordid past, and the maid's troubled relationship with her own father, a telenovela star named Sócrates (real-life Paraguayan soap star Arnaldo André). Lala also explores the local legend of "The Fish Child." Meanwhile, La Guayi is imprisoned for her suspected involvement in Bronté's death, and when Lala finds out, she jeopardizes her own freedom by returning home. In Puenzo's novel, written when she was just 23 years old, the story is told from the point-of-view of Lala's family dog
The Fish Child Lala, a teenager from the most exclusive suburban neighborhood in Argentina is in love with the Guayi, the 20-year-old Payaguayan maid working at her place. They dream of living together in Paraguay, at the shores of lake Ypoá. Robbing every purse and wallet in the house to fulfill their dream, hiding the money in a shoe box. But when the box is full, it bursts, fueled by desire, jealousy and rage. This is the starting point that spurs the escape through the highway that connects the North of Buenos Aires with Paraguay. While Lala waits to be reunited with her lover in Ypoá by reconstructing her past (the mystery surrounding her pregnancy and the legend of a fish child who guides the drowned to the bottom of the lake), the Guayi is detained in a minors institute in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. She turns out to be hiding a crime from long ago.

"Tales from the Golden Age"

"Tales from the Golden Age" is an unconventional personal history of the late communist period in Romania, told through its urban myths from the perspective of ordinary people. Comic, bizarre, surprising, these myths drew on the often surreal events of everyday life under the communist regime. Humor is what kept Romanians alive, and "Tales from the Golden Age" aims to re-capture that mood, portraying the survival of a nation having to face every day the twisted logic of a dictatorship.

"Tales from the Golden Age" is composed of five short stories - connected by mood, narrative pattern and the details of the historical period: the only car you can see on the streets is the locally produced Dacia, everybody survives by stealing from the state, party orders must be obeyed no matter how illogical or absurd. The people appear grim yet deep inside they are alive, they desire to love and to beloved.

The Other Bank

In reality, a good film has a special appealing quality: the film is taking your breath away; it is full of charm, embraces you and then lets you go only after the very last shot. Those types of films are very few even in a grand film festival such as the Berlinale. The Georgian film The Other Bank (Gagma Napiri) belongs to this type of exceptional film. George Ovashvili has an artistic taste for making films. What are the rhythm and editing, the right actors, landscapes, emotions and thoughts that this full-length feature debut gives birth to? It is hard to say… Overall, it is obvious that it is a special world which you start to believe in and it touches your soul.
The entire film is received only through the heart of every person in the audience. Overall, the film is not only about the regional Georgian-Abkhazian conflict. This film is about the war and any kind of natural disasters are distorting the natural flow of things. And those who suffer the most from this are children. Because this is the order in the community and society, if someone stops fulfilling its duties, then people disappear from nature. Duties are carried on the shoulders of weaker and less protected members of society.

Eastern Plays

The soul in an unstable society, centered on an ex-alcoholic artist and his rebellious brother - director’s first work turns stagnation to sublime by free and fresh approaches, lingering beautifully.
Two brothers who have lost complete contact are suddenly brought together as opposite roles in a racist beating - Georgi as a new member of a neo-Nazi group, Itso who rescues the victimized Turkish family.
Now asked to participate in larger meetings, Georgi starts to question his implication in the movement while Itso fancies the beautiful Turkish girl he saved would be his ticket out of his lone life. Only by living once again as brothers, will they find their aspirations in life.

'The Last Supper,' A Parable From Cuba:Politics and Religion

"The Last Supper," a new Cuban film by Tomas Gutierrez Alea, the director whose "Memories of Underdevelopment" was one of the critical hits of 1973, is a fine, cool, almost detached political parable told entirely in religious terms. In this way it recalls the kind of contradictions that made "Memories of Underdevelopment" so fascinating, and that are, for Mr. Alea, virtually a stylistic method.

Though "Memories" looks at the Cuban revolution through the eyes of a middle-class intellectual who can't bring himself to participate, the film itself is passionately committed. "The Last Supper" is about death resurrection, not only about the death and resurrection of freedom, but also of repression.

Like the earlier film, it seems to say more than one ever expects to hear in popular revolutionary literature, where ideas and feelings are supposed to be recognized and accommodated by even the dimmest minds.

In the last four decades, Cuba has created a beautiful repertoire of films that portray the social challenges of its people in an ever changing world. The following series gives the audience an opportunity to observe the development of this revolutionary society from the standpoint of the Cuban filmmakers of the 20th Century. Our eyes will be, among others, the ones of characters like the decadent bourgeois, the surviving prostitute, and the socialist idealist. The realities of these characters reveal the universal struggle of the fragile and unflagging human spirit.