Ash Is Purest White (2018)

Mur Murs

Venturing from Venice Beach to Watts, Varda looks at the murals of LA as backdrop to and mirror of the city’s many cultures. She casts a curious eye on graffiti and photorealism, roller disco & gang violence, evangelical Christians, Hare Krishnas, artists, angels and ordinary Angelenos.

Gutland

Early one summer morning a young man, with a secret stashed away in a duffel bag, emerges from the forest. In a nearby village he asks around for work, but the farmers, suspicious to the point of hostility, are not very forthcoming. Only when Lucy, the mayor’s unruly daughter, takes a liking to him, does the village change its attitude: he is promptly offered a job as a farmhand and a caravan to live in. As time passes and he is gradually integrated into the community, it emerges that he’s not the only one with a past to hide. Something sinister is lurking under the immaculate surface of this picturesque little world - and it is slowly drawing him in.

Ten Years Thailand

A collection of short films by five Thai directors imagining their country ten years into the future.

A Leg

In this deliciously dark comedy, a woman desperately attempts to reunite her husband's amputated leg with his body before his funeral, leading her on a wild goose chase across Taipei and through multiple encounters with bureaucracy, ineptitude, and her own recent past.

Murder Me, Monster

A rural police officer investigates the bizarre case of a headless woman's body. The prime suspect blames the crime on the appearance of a legendary monster.

A Sort of Family

What limits does Malena cross to get what she wants most? Malena is a 38 year old middle class doctor from Buenos Aires. One afternoon she receives the call from Doctor Costas, who informs her that she must travel immediately to the north of the country: the baby she was waiting for is about to be born. Unexpectedly Malena decides to embark on an uncertain journey, full of crossroads, facing all kinds of legal and moral obstacles that will make her constantly wondering how far she is ready to go.

Stay as You Are

A May-December romance. Roué Giulio Marengo, a Roman landscape architect unhappy in his marriage, meets Francesca, a young and beautiful Florentine, and then learns she might be his daughter. He resolves to keep his hands off but can't seem to stay away, and she's eager for a lover who's a father figure.

The White Diamond

This 2004 documentary by Werner Herzog diaries the struggle of a passionate English inventor to design and test a unique airship during its maiden flight above the jungle canopy.

My Future Love

In 1973, the 20-year-old Svante has a heart condition that the doctors cannot fix. When he has a breakdown on a subway platform, a strange train suddenly appears. He steps into the subway car filled with wonder, without knowing that the destination is the future. In the future he meets Elsa and together they must solve Svante's problems and figure out how to live together when they are from two different eras.

Antigone

Sophie Deraspe’s adaptation of the classic Greek tragedy of the same name reimagines the story of a woman’s quest for justice as a commentary on the immigrant experience in contemporary Montreal.

Bunny Lake Is Missing

A woman reports that her young daughter is missing, but there seems to be no evidence that she ever existed.

Hidden Man

A martial arts-infused spy thriller set in 1937 Beijing. A time when China was lurching between revolution, prosperity, and chaos.

The Message

After a series of assassinations in Nanking, a Japanese spy master gathers a group of suspects in a mansion, then a tense cat-and-mouse game erupts as the Chinese agent tries to keep his or her identity a secret.

My Sweet Little Village

The movie's main storyline follows the life of Otík, a young man, in a tight-knit village community. The sweet-tempered Otík works as an assistant truck driver with Mr. Pávek, his older colleague and practical-minded neighbor. Pávek's family takes care of Otík, whose parents are dead. However, the two coworkers become at odds over Otík's inability to perform even the simplest tasks. Pávek demands that Otík be transferred to assist another driver, who happens to be a choleric and suspicious man named Turek (Turk in Czech). Rather than work with Turek, Otík decides to accept an offer of employment in Prague, but finds he does not fit in to the city life. After discovering that the transfer of Otík to Prague was a trick by a crooked politician to get a deal on Otík's large inherited house, Pávek agrees to give Otík a second chance and retrieves him from the city to resume their work together.

Still Life

A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.

Her Smell

A self-destructive punk rocker struggles with sobriety while trying to recapture the creative inspiration that led her band to success.

Pickpocket

A small town pickpocket whose friends have moved on to higher trades finds himself bitter and unable to adapt.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

Leto

Leningrad, one summer in the early eighties. Smuggling LPs by Lou Reed and David Bowie, the underground rock scene is boiling ahead of the Perestroika. Mike and his beautiful wife Natasha meet with young Viktor Tsoï. Together with friends, they will change the destiny of rock’n’roll in the Soviet Union.

Limbo

An offbeat observation of refugees waiting to be granted asylum on a fictional remote Scottish island. It focuses on Omar, a young Syrian musician who is burdened by the weight of his grandfather’s oud, which he has carried all the way from his homeland.

Black Orpheus

Young lovers Orfeu and Eurydice run through the favelas of Rio during Carnaval, on the lam from a hitman dressed like Death and Orfeu's vengeful fiancée Mira and passing between moments of fantasy and stark reality. This impressionistic retelling of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice introduced bossa nova to the world with its soundtrack by young Brazilian composers Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Muslum

A biopic about the Turkish vocal artist Müslüm Gürses. Born into a poor household, Muslum found his redemption in music from the initial trauma that lingered over his musical and personal life as internalizing the grief. He rose through his ashes of shattered dreams like a phoenix. He walked in darkness, sang songs filled with sorrow which stirred people's souls and created a cult following. They were calling him "Baba" (The Father).

Transit

In an attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France, Georg assumes the identity of a dead author but soon finds himself stuck in Marseilles, where he falls in love with Maria, a young woman searching for her missing husband.

Chang'an

A few years after the Anshi Rebellion, Tang dynasty military commander Gao Shi suffers a defeat in a battle threatening Chang'an. Trapped in the besieged city, he recalls his lifelong friendship with the acclaimed poet Li Bai.

Corpus Christi

A pious 20-year-old juvenile delinquent is sent to work at a sawmill in a small town; on arrival, he dresses up as a priest and accidentally takes over the local parish. The arrival of this young, charismatic preacher is an opportunity for the local community to begin the healing process after a tragedy that happened a year prior.

The Warlords

The civil war in China has ruined many lives including General Pang's. A wounded General Pang is saved by a beautiful young woman along with two other men. Together they vow to eradicate the rebels.

It Must Be Heaven

Filmmaker Elia Suleiman travels to different cities and finds unexpected parallels to his homeland of Palestine.

Little Joe

Alice, a single mother who is more dedicated to her work as a genetic engineer than to her teenage son Joe, develops a new variety of flower that is supposed to have the ability to make its owner happy thanks to its special chemical properties.

Lover, Stalker, Killer

In this twisting documentary, a mechanic tries online dating for the first time and meets a woman who takes romantic obsession to a deadly extreme.

A Faithful Man

Marianne leaves Abel for Paul, his best friend and the father of her unborn child. Eight years later, Paul dies and Marianne returns to Abel. However, things have changed for the both of them and feelings of jealousy surround their new relationship.

The Yellow Sea

A Korean man in China takes an assassination job in South Korea to make money and find his missing wife. But when the job is botched, he is forced to go on the run from the police and the gangsters who paid him.

The Cove

The Cove tells the amazing true story of how an elite team of individuals, films makers and free divers embarked on a covert mission to penetrate the hidden cove in Japan, shining light on a dark and deadly secret. The shocking discoveries were only the tip of the iceberg.

Shoplifters

In the outskirts of Tokyo, a poor but close-knit group living on the fringes of society survives through shoplifting and odd jobs. When Osamu and his son take in a neglected young girl, their already fragile existence begins to unravel. As the family grows attached to her, buried secrets surface, forcing them to confront the true meaning of love, belonging, and what makes a family.

The Past

After four years apart, Ahmad returns to his wife Marie in Paris in order to progress their divorce. During his brief stay, he cannot help noticing the strained relationship between Marie and her daughter Lucie. As he attempts to improve matters between mother and daughter Ahmad unwittingly lifts the lid on a long buried secret...

The Beach Bum

An irreverent comedy about the misadventures of Moondog, a rebellious stoner and lovable rogue who lives large.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

An unexpected love triangle, a seduction trap, and a random encounter are the three episodes, told in three movements to depict three female characters and trace the trajectories between their choices and regrets.

Two Women

A young widow flees from Rome during WWII and takes her lonely twelve-year-old-daughter to her rural hometown but the horrors of war soon catch up with them.

Matthias & Maxime

Two childhood best friends are asked to share a kiss for the purposes of a student short film. Soon, a lingering doubt sets in, confronting both men with their preferences, threatening the brotherhood of their social circle, and, eventually, changing their lives.

Do No Harm

3am. Hongjing, China. 1980s. A single-minded surgeon is forced to break her physician's oath when violent gangsters storm into a hospital to stop a crucial operation.

M. Butterfly

In 1960s China, French diplomat Rene Gallimard falls in love with an opera singer, Song Liling – but Song is not at all who Gallimard thinks.

The Warrior

In 1375, China was in chaos between Yuan Dynasty and Ming Dynasty. Coryo (an ancient kingdom of Korea then) sent a delegation of many diplomats, soldiers and a silent slave to make peace with the new Chinese government. However, this delegation got charged as spies and sent in exile to a remote desert.

Spy Game

On the day of his retirement, a veteran CIA agent learns that his former protégé has been arrested in China, is sentenced to die the next morning in Beijing, and that the CIA is considering letting that happen to avoid an international scandal.

Shanghai Madness

In the 1920s Pat Jackson destroys a Chinese post and is discharged from the Navy. Li Po Chang hires him to run a gunboat up the river. He drops Wildeth off at a mission for safety, but when his boat returns the mission is being attacked by communists.

Lust, Caution

During World War II, a secret agent must seduce and assassinate an official who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai.

The Last Emperor

A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.

Brother

A Japanese Yakuza gangster's deadly existence in his homeland gets him exiled to Los Angeles, where he is taken in by his little brother and his brother's gang.

Ed Wood

The mostly true story of the legendary "worst director of all time", who, with the help of his strange friends, filmed countless B-movies without ever becoming famous or successful.

Shanghai Express

A beautiful temptress re-kindles an old romance while trying to escape her past during a tension-packed train journey.

Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl

The love story of an abused English girl and a Chinese Buddhist in a time when London was a brutal and harsh place to live.

The Blue Kite

A young man recalls his childhood growing up in a poor alley in Beijing during the 1950s and 1960s.

Drifting

Yan is an illegal second child born during the One-Child policy. To avoid government punishment, Yan's parents hid their oldest daughter in the countryside and raised Yan as a girl. Now a young adult, Yan struggles with his gender identity and being treated as an outcast in a conservative society. His sole escape is drifting his father's old taxi through abandoned parking lots.

Night Comes On

Angel is released from juvenile detention on the eve of her 18th birthday. Haunted by her past, she embarks on a journey with her 10 year-old sister that could destroy their future.

Telling the World

The journalist Don Davis becomes involved in a murder case, where Chrystal Malone is part of it. Davis follows Chrystal to China. When Chrystal arrives in China, Davis has to save her from an execution.

Party Girl

Slick lawyer Thomas Farrell has made a career of defending mobsters in trials. It's not until he meets a lovely showgirl at a mob party that he realizes that there's more to life than winning trials. Farrell tries to quit the racket, but mob boss Rico Angelo threatens to hurt the showgirl if Farrell leaves him.

Ichi the Killer

As sadomasochistic yakuza enforcer Kakihara searches for his missing boss he comes across Ichi, a repressed and psychotic killer who may be able to inflict levels of pain that Kakihara has only dreamed of.

Red Cliff II

The battle of Red Cliff continues and the alliance between Xu and East Wu is fracturing. With Cao Cao's massive forces on their doorstep, will the kingdoms of Xu and East Wu survive?

Love is a Fairy Tale

In this 1993 Hong Kong film, a boathand (Aaron Kwok) falls in love with a supermodel (Rosamund Kwan) he sees on a billboard.

Red Cliff

In 208 A.D., in the final days of the Han Dynasty, shrewd Prime Minster Cao convinced the fickle Emperor Han the only way to unite all of China was to declare war on the kingdoms of Xu in the west and East Wu in the south. Thus began a military campaign of unprecedented scale. Left with no other hope for survival, the kingdoms of Xu and East Wu formed an unlikely alliance.

Gold and Sand

Based on Zhu Dao-Nan's memoir "In the Flood of the Great Revolution", the film reproduces the historical picture of the changing circumstances of China before and after the Great Revolution through the pursuit, struggle and differentiation of young intellectuals such as Jin Gong-Shou, Gu Da-Ming, and Yang Ru-Kuan in the revolutionary tide.

Australia Day

On Australia's most controversial national holiday, the lives of three Australians from diverse cultural backgrounds will collide, illuminating contemporary issues of racial tension and national identity that simmer beneath the surface of modern Australia.

The Missing

The Missing’ centres on the mysterious case of a policewoman’s missing daughter. When the main suspect suffers amnesia due to a car accident, both sides of the law must team up to try to find out the truth.

The Painted Veil

A British medical doctor fights a cholera outbreak in a small Chinese village, while also being trapped at home in a loveless marriage to an unfaithful wife.

Brick

A teenage loner pushes his way into the underworld of a high school crime ring to investigate the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend.

A Bad Summer

Sasaki is a sincere civil servant, working at city hall. Due to his timid personality, he can't properly deal with nasty people, including a single mother on the verge of giving up her own child, another civil servant pressing him to have a physical relationship, and a person who receives welfare benefits unfairly. His passivity leads him to get caught up in a terrible crime.

Bad Boys II

Detectives Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowrey of the Miami Narcotics Task Force are tasked with stopping the flow of the drug Ecstasy into Miami. They track the drugs to the whacked-out Cuban drug lord Johnny Tapia, who is also involved in a bloody war with Russian and Haitian mobsters. If that isn't bad enough, there's tension between the two detectives when Marcus discovers that playboy Mike is secretly romancing Marcus’ sister, Syd.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

During the Cultural Revolution, two young men are sent to a remote mining village where they fall in love with the local tailor's beautiful granddaughter and discover a suitcase full of forbidden Western novels.

The Boondock Saints

Tired of the crime overrunning the streets of Boston, Irish Catholic twin brothers Conner and Murphy are inspired by their faith to cleanse their hometown of evil with their own brand of zealous vigilante justice. As they hunt down and kill one notorious gangster after another, they become controversial folk heroes in the community. But Paul Smecker, an eccentric FBI agent, is fast closing in on their blood-soaked trail.

TransSiberian

A TransSiberian train journey from China to Moscow becomes a thrilling chase of deception and murder when an American couple encounters a mysterious pair of fellow travelers.

John Rabe

A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.

The Sand Pebbles

Engineer Jake Holman arrives aboard the gunboat USS San Pablo, assigned to patrol a tributary of the Yangtze in the middle of exploited and revolution-torn 1926 China. His iconoclasm and cynical nature soon clash with the 'rice-bowl' system which runs the ship and the uneasy symbiosis between Chinese and foreigner on the river. Hostility towards the gunboat's presence reaches a climax when the boat must crash through a river-boom and rescue missionaries upriver at China Light Mission.

Ushijima the Loan Shark Part 3

Sawamura, a contract part-timer dragged into a multi-million yen internet business, and Kamo, an office worker who lavished money on a beautiful club hostess, arrive at Cowcow Finance, the office of black-market lender Ushijima.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

The film follows Mr. Shi, a retired widower from Beijing. When his only daughter, Yilan, who lives in Spokane, Washington and works as a librarian, gets divorced, he decides to visit her to help her heal. However, Yilan is not interested. She tries keeping an emotional distance but when this finally fails she begins physically avoiding her father. He confronts her about an affair with a married Russian man and she, in turn, lets loose about all the gossip she'd heard as a young girl about his alleged affair with a female colleague back in China.

Public Enemies

Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger's charm and audacity endear him to much of America's downtrodden public, but he's also a thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover and the fledgling FBI. Desperate to capture the elusive outlaw, Hoover makes Dillinger his first Public Enemy Number One and assigns his top agent, Melvin Purvis, the task of bringing him in dead or alive.

Pusher III

Milo is aging, he is planning his daughter's 25th birthday, and his shipment of heroin turns out to be 10,000 pills of ecstasy. When Milo tries to sell the pills anyway, all Hell breaks loose and his only chance is to ask for help from his ex-henchman and old friend Radovan.

The Art of War

Neil Shaw is both agent and weapon - a critical line of defense for the Secretary General of the United Nations. He does not even officially exist. As an international security expert, he must uncover an international plot in which ruthless terrorists threatened to bring down the United Nations on the eve of an historic summit with China. A mysterious chain of events leads to the murder of the Chinese U.N. Ambassador and the terrorists frame Neil Shaw, the one man they believe can stop them. Accused of the crime, Shaw goes underground — in effect, vanishing from his own life — as he tries to stop what could become World War III.

The Road Home

Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.

The Maples

A Chinese drama set in 1966, during the Cultural Revolution.

Mr. Pride VS Miss. Prejudice

Online writer Tang Nan Nan crosses path with Zhu Hou, a second-generation rich boy “sea turtle”, resulting in hilarious situations and face-offs.

Ruby & Quentin

After hiding his loot and getting thrown in jail, brooding outlaw Ruby befriends Quentin, a dim-witted and garrulous giant. After Quentin botches a solo escape attempt, they make a break together. Unable to shake the clumsy Quentin, Ruby is forced to take him along as he pursues his former partners in crime to avenge the death of the woman he loved and get to the money.

Ushijima the Loan Shark The Final

A classmate from Ushijima's middle school days, Takemoto, shows up. He was a kind man, but now is jobless and without a home. Adrift and unable to borrow money from Ushijima, Takemoto heads for Seiai Home where he can stay while doing work.

Coffin from Hong Kong

A private detective finds the limp body of a young Chinese beauty in his office, shot with his own gun.

Lan Yu

A love story between a country boy in Beijing to study and a wealthy businessman set against the backdrop of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident.

The Fast and the Furious

A framed man escapes prison and takes a wealthy woman's Jaguar with her in it. After she tries to escape numerous times, they begin to develop feelings for each other, and enter a road race that ends in Mexico.

High Road to China

A biplane pilot is saddled with a spoiled industrialist's daughter on a search for her missing father through Asia that eventually involves them in a struggle against a Chinese warlord.

The King of Masks

Wang Bianlian is an aging street performer known as the King of Mask for his mastery of Sichuan Change Art in a true story. His wife left him with and infant son over 30 years ago. The son died from illness at age 10. This left Wang a melancholy loner aching for a male descendent to learn his rare and dying art.

The Penalty

Blizzard, deranged from a childhood operation in which both his legs were needlessly amputated after an accident, becomes a vicious criminal, and eventually mob leader of the San Francisco underworld.

Forgotten Faces

A petty thief who robs the very rich at speakeasies, and gets away with it because the rich don't want the bad publicity, is finally caught and sent to Sing Sing. After good behavior, he gets an emergency permission for a return home, so that he may save his daughter from the hands of her disreputable mother. However, he must first promise not to kill his wife while he is out of prison.