All Recommendations

Close-Up
This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

Certified Copy
In Tuscany to promote his latest book, a middle-aged English writer meets a French woman who leads him to the village of Lucignano.

Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen
A film where anything can happen - the hero and the heroine changes their faces, age, look, names, and so on. The only same thing: The love between man and woman... in an archetypical love story cut from 500 classics from all around the world.

The White Balloon
Several people try to take advantage of a little girl's innocence to hustle money her mom gave to her to buy a goldfish with.

Hospitalité
In this black comedy the lives of a timid small-time printer and his young wife are turned inside out by the arrival of a stranger who moves in and takes over their world. Set in a village-like outpost in the heart of Tokyo, this is a wry commentary on Japanese xenophobia. Kiki Sugino heads a spritely ensemble cast.

Sun Valley Serenade
When Phil Corey's band arrives at the Idaho ski resort its pianist Ted Scott is smitten with a Norwegian refugee he has sponsored, Karen Benson. When soloist Vivian Dawn quits, Karen stages an ice show as a substitute.

Dhobi Ghat
Arun is a reclusive and lonely modern art painter. Shai is an American banker who is on a visit to Mumbai. Munna is a washerboy also living near Arun and Yasmin. The movie is about these four characters from different class of society and how the lives of four characters are intertwined.

The Thief
Katya and her 6-year-old son Sanya, who, in 1952, meet a veteran Soviet officer named Tolyan. Katya falls in love with Tolyan, who turns out to be a small time criminal, but who also becomes a father figure to Sanya ...

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
An account of the many tribulations that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, known for his subversive art and political activism, endured between 2008 and 2011, from his rise to world fame via the Internet to his highly publicized arrest due to his frequent and daring confrontations with the Chinese authorities.

Shirin
A hundred and fourteen famous Iranian theater and cinema actresses and a French star: mute spectators at a theatrical representation of Khosrow and Shirin, a Persian poem from the twelfth century, put on stage by Kiarostami. The development of the text -- long a favorite in Persia and the Middle East -- remains invisible to the viewer of the film, the whole story is told by the faces of the women watching the show.

A Thousand Girls Like Me
When Khatera, a 23-year-old Afghan woman, forces her father to stand trial after a lifetime of sexual abuse, she risks her family, freedom, and personal safety to expose a judicial system that incriminates the very women who seek protection.

Atlantide
Daniele is a young man from Sant’Erasmo, an island on the edges of the Venice Lagoon. He lives on his wits, isolated even from his peer group who are busy exploring an existence of pleasure-seeking expressed in the cult of the barchino (motorboat). This obsession focuses on the building of ever more powerful engines to transform the little lagoon launches into dangerously fast racing boats. Daniele too dreams of a record-breaking barchino, one that will take him to the top of the leader board, but everything he does to further his dream and win respect from the others turns out to be tragically counterproductive. The decline that erodes the relationships, environment and habits of a rootless generation is observed from the timeless perspective of the Venetian landscape and its island outskirts: the point of no return is a foolish, vestigial tale of male initiation. Violent and destined to fail, it explodes dragging the ghost city along on a psychedelic shipwreck.

Travelling Salesman
Four mathematicians are gathered and meet with a top official of the United States Department of Defense. After some discussion, the group agrees that they must be wary with whom to trust and control their solution. The official offers them a reward of $10 million in exchange for their portion of the algorithm, swaying them by attempting to address their concerns. Only one of the four speaks out against the sale, and in doing so is forced to reveal a dark truth about his portion of the solution. Before they sign a license to the government, however, they wrestle with the ethical consequences of their discovery. -- Wikipedia

The Old Man and the Sea
Based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway. Santiago goes out on his usual fishing trip and makes a huge catch, the biggest of his life. Then a shark attacks and tries to steal his catch.

Paradiso
Inside a cold and rusty bunker, Irina and Georgi endure the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Georgi´s heavy radiation sickness and imminent death prompts Irina to repair his old and beloved guitar so he can hear it one last time.

Tinnitus
Marina Lenk is an experienced synchronized diver. However, an attack of Tinnitus — an unbearable ringing sound in the ears — drags her from the top of her game to the edge of madness.

Careless Crime
During the uprising to overthrow the Shah's regime in Iran, protestors set fire to movie theatres to protest Western culture. Forty years later, four people decide to re-create the past by burning down a theatre.
Curtains
After 50 years working the wooden dolls, things begin to fall apart for Barry Shepherd, drinking and cursing his way unrepentantly onwards, he continues with the show that threatens to take his soul.

Jagame Thandhiram
When a clever, carefree gangster is recruited to help an overseas crime lord take down a rival, he is caught off guard by the moral dilemmas that follow.

Paternal Leave
Alone and angry, a teenager travels to the coast of northern Italy to meet her biological father. On the beaches of Emilia-Romagna’s Riviera, deserted in winter, the girl meets him for the first time. Their encounter is fraught with questions, longing and conflict, as they struggle for acceptance, love, and honesty. It’s a difficult and complicated reckoning between the choices of the past and its repercussions on the present.