UNSEEN 2001

On a building site in present-day Tehran, Lateef, a 17-year-old Turkish worker is irresistibly drawn to Rahmat, a young Afghan worker. The revelation of Rahmat's secret changes both their lives.

Newlyweds Shane and June arrive in Paris for their honeymoon. In the process of trying to find a cure for his strange, bloodthirsty disease, Shane stumbles upon the story of a doctor and his flesh eating wife.

In a future world, young people are increasingly becoming addicted to an illegal (and potentially deadly) battle simulation game called Avalon. When Ash, a star player, hears of rumors that a more advanced level of the game exists somewhere, she gives up her loner ways and joins a gang of explorers. Even if she finds the gateway to the next level, will she ever be able to come back to reality?

2001 film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien

After finding love and success in Italy, French actress Camille returns to Paris, the city she fled three years ago. She secretly dreads confronting her ex-boyfriend Pierre. Her new lover Ugo also has a secret, as he’s meeting with the intriguing Dominique while on his quest for an unpublished manuscript.

"Veteran experimental filmmakers Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub helmed this unusual adaptation of a novel by Elio Vittorini. Focused on the triumphs and failures of a group of laborers and farm hands who pooled their resources to operate an alternative collective farm after the end of World War II, Operai, Contadini features a cast of 12 actors who read aloud from Vittorini's book for the duration of the film, either reciting from memory or using a clearly visible script. Hardly designed to be a crowd pleaser, Operai, Contadini proved to be controversial among the audiences for its showings at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where it was screened as part of the Directors' Fortnight series." ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
"The group makes up a primitive community which seeks to erase not only the distress created by the war but also the hardships of life and hunger, and to protect them from violence, misery and fear. Amid the ruins of this post-war period, the characters build and invent a rapport both in their professional and daily lives between themselves, the sexes, generations, diverse social and geographical origins, and antagonistic political camps.
The group maintains a 'register', a kind of diary, as if it were entering the minutes of an inquiry or a trial." -Steve Grayson
"my favorite Straub-Huillet films are Too Early, Too Late and Operai, contadini (2001), both color landscape films with especially acute senses of place as well as of nature in all its harsh beauty." - Jonathan Rosenbaum

2001 film by Lucrecia Martel

Manoel de Oliveira's autobiographical documentary about returning to his hometown.

Undaunted by a commission to make a film about his mentors and aesthetic exemplars, the filmmaking team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Costa records with great sensitivity and insight the exacting process by which the two re-edit their film Sicilia!, discussing and arguing over each cut and its effect. Incorporating comments about the influence of figures as diverse as Chaplin and Eisenstein, about the ethical and aesthetic implications of film technique and such matters as rhythm, sound mixing, and acting. The film becomes a tour de force, immersing us in the mysteries of cinema as practiced by some of its greatest creators. Costa calls the film both his first comedy and his first love story.

An impossible love. Two young people in love. Vera and John can't find a space nor time, nor identity in this life that can solve this love. Apparently everything is beneficial to them, their families, friends and the land where they live. The issue is time. The time they don't actually have (studies, families, distant houses) and the time of their own life - being so young they are subject to what that life brought upon them, that's when the "story" of the film begins, therefore linked to a life that until then was not chosen by them. This is one reason, which leads to a runaway process. Escape in the possible return to this world.

Raised a boy in East Berlin, Hedwig undergoes a personal transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S., where she reinvents herself as an 'internationally ignored' but divinely talented rock diva, inhabiting a 'beautiful gender of one'.

The comfortable daily routines of aging Parisian actor Gilbert Valence, 76, are suddenly shaken when he learns that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law have been killed in a car crash. Having to take care of his now-orphaned grandson, he struggles to go on with his lifelong acting career like he's used to. But the roles he is offered -- a flashy TV show and a hectic last-minute replacement in an English-language film of Joyce's Ulysses -- finally convince him that it's time to retire.

Unfolding over two days in 1924, the film depicts the dying Lenin, world revolutionary and father of the USSR, now powerless and isolated at his Gorki estate. Cared for by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, sister Maniasha, his German doctor and several attendants, Lenin raves about his diminishing faculties, discusses the deaths of great figures (including Marx), rides a car to a picnic in a meadow and ponders his historic legacy.

Grace Dalrymple Elliot is a British aristocrat trapped in Paris during the French Revolution. Determined to maintain her stiff upper lip and pampered life despite the upheaval, Grace continues her friendship with the Duke of Orléans while risking her life and liberty to protect a fugitive.

A British spy is banished to Panama after having an affair with an ambassador's mistress. Once there he makes connection with a local tailor with a nefarious past and connections to all of the top political and gangster figures in Panama. The tailor also has a wife, who works for the Panamanian president and a huge debt. The mission is to learn what the President intends to do with the Canal.

Josie, Melody and Val are three small-town girl musicians determined to take their rock band out of their garage and straight to the top, while remaining true to their look, style and sound. They get a record deal which brings fame and fortune but soon realize they are pawns of two people who want to control the youth of America. They must clear their names, even if it means losing fame and fortune.

A movie director does a new film against heroin consumption, and the producers are heroin dealers.

A middle-aged salaryman with a typical family, living quietly in a provincial city (Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture), wakes up one morning in the summer of 1994 to find himself the prime suspect in the biggest mass-murder case of the decade.

Golrokh, an Iranian author, struggles to settle her husband's debts caused by a business partner who left him to bear the consequences.

Jon, a first-time filmmaker, finds himself in Lansing, Michigan to present his film at a local film festival. Vince, his high school friend who is now a volunteer fireman and small-time drug dealer, also visits the town to support Jon on his big day, or so it seems. After a raucous hello and much backslapping, it appears that there is an undercurrent of tension in the air.