You, the Choice of My Parents (2019)

Finding Forrester

Gus Van Sant tells the story of a young African American man named Jamal who confronts his talents while living on the streets of the Bronx. He accidentally runs into an old writer named Forrester who discovers his passion for writing. With help from his new mentor Jamal receives a scholarship to a private school.

The Poet and the Boy

Trapped in routine, a Jeju poet finds himself drawn to a boy—and to emotions he’s never dared name.

July Dust

“Poussières de Juillet”, produced in 1967 by Hachemi El-Chérif, is taken from a poem by Kateb Yacine. "We made a film on the return of the ashes of Emir Abdelkader, to Algeria. It was the opportunity to make a film on the ancestors with M'hamed Issiakhem. He designed glass plates on the basis of my texts. Then we had actors collaborate. It was a film which cost us a total of 300 dinars, proof that we could do work for television without too much money. We won two first international prizes at the Belgrade festival. We left the original of the film with the Egyptians in Alexandria and they lost it. We kept a copy but over time I wonder what happened to it, because there is no not even had a screening, they say it still exists, but I don't know in what state." Kateb Yacine, July 28, 1986, interview with Arlette Casas.

Notre Musique

A three-chapter (Hell, Purgatory and Paradise) meditation on the city of Sarajevo in the wake of the Bosnian war, on Palestine and Israel, and on war itself.

Woman Is My Last Name

This visual poetry is a celebration of the full spectrum of womanhood, from the complex vulnerability to the hidden power.

Wit

A renowned professor is forced to reassess her life when she is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer.

Do Útero Ao Túmulo

Plot unavailable

Dancing at the Blue Iguana

At the Blue Iguana, L.A.'s most notorious strip club, the lives of five exotic dancers converge, clash and ultimately bond over the course of one week.

Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love

Tara and Maya are inseparable, with the same tastes, habits, and hobbies. Years later, the two have matured but have maintained their friendship. Tara marries local prince Raj Singh, who succeeds the throne as the sole heir. After the marriage, Raj seeks another female to satisfy his sexual desires, with his sights settling on Maya, putting a perhaps unforgivable strain on a longtime friendship.

Chubai. Speaking Again

A theatrical documentary about Hrytsko Chubai, a genius of Ukrainian poetry, a connoisseur of literature, art and music and the brightest representative of Lviv underground culture of late 60s early 70s.

Little Riots

With £2.50 in their bank accounts, two friends Saoirse and Emma vow to have the greatest night of their lives at a punk poetry party. They discuss the current state of their lives while determined to keep the little riots inside of them alive.

Velvet Goldmine

Almost a decade since larger-than-life glam-rock enigma Brian Slade disappeared from public eye, an investigative journalist is on assignment to uncover the truth behind his former idol.

Mirror

A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.

A Knight's Tale

William Thatcher, a knight's peasant apprentice, gets a chance at glory when the knight dies suddenly mid-tournament. Posing as a knight himself, William won't stop until he's crowned tournament champion—assuming matters of the heart don't get in the way.

Summertime

Over the course of a hot summer day in Los Angeles, the lives of 25 young Angelinos intersect. A skating guitarist, a tagger, two wannabe rappers, an exasperated fast-food worker, a limo driver—they all weave in and out of each other's stories. Through poetry they express life, love, heartache, family, home, and fear. One of them just wants to find someplace that still serves good cheeseburgers.

The Doors

The story of the famous and influential 1960s rock band and its lead singer and composer, Jim Morrison.

The Bad Poet

1936. Giovanni Comini, the youngest Federal in Fascist Italy, is summoned to Rome for a delicate mission: to surveil aging national poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose increasingly restless behavior Mussolini fears could damage his alliance with Nazi Germany. However, after spending time with D'Annunzio, Comini finds himself torn between loyalty to the Party and his fascination with the poet, who will put his burgeoning career at risk.

A Season in Hell

The tumultuous life of Arthur Rimbaud, the cursed poet, who completed his masterwork at the age of twenty, became an arms dealer and died at thirty-seven; and his passionate relationship with Paul Verlaine, full of wanderings, storms and falling out.

X's & O's

Relationship issues arise between a researcher with a theory to explain away all his failed dating experiments, a player who wants out of the game, a deejay whose head spins with thoughts of God, a hoodrat with no street cred, a poet not-so-well-versed in the art of love, and a womanipulator of men.

World's Greatest Dad

In the wake of a freak accident, Lance suffers the worst tragedy and the greatest opportunity of his life. He is suddenly faced with the possibility of fame, fortune and popularity, if he can only live with the knowledge of how he got there.

Men Who Sleep in Cars

Drama, entirely in verse, following three men who sleep on the streets of Manchester in their vehicles, having lost all their economic and social power.

Ocean's Arrival

On the winter solstice, four friends reunite at their family's beachside cabin after years apart. From the ocean, a mysterious stranger arrives seeking refuge, eventually pitting the friends against one another. Fantasy, fear, and reality blend together as the days unfold.

Persuasion

Living with her snobby family on the brink of bankruptcy, Anne Elliot is an unconforming woman with modern sensibilities. When Frederick Wentworth – the dashing one she once sent away – crashes back into her life, Anne must choose between putting the past behind her or listening to her heart when it comes to second chances.

The Other Side of Heaven

John H. Groberg, a middle class kid from Idaho Falls, crosses the Pacific to become a Mormon missionary in the remote and exotic Tongan island kingdom during the 1950's. He leaves behind a loving family and the true love of his life, Jean. Through letters and musings across the miles, John shares his humbling and sometimes hilarious adventures with "the girl back home", and her letters buoy up his spirits in difficult times. John must struggle to overcome language barriers, physical hardship and deep-rooted suspicion to earn the trust and love of the Tongan people he has come to serve. Throughout his adventure-filled three years on the islands, he discovers friends and wisdom in the most unlikely places. John H. Groberg's Tongan odyssey will change his life forever.

Poetry Angel

After Tsutomu Tamaki graduated from high school, he has worked at his family farm and raises ume (plum). He becomes interested in a class for “poetry boxing” and decides to take the class. There, he meets a female high school student who has her own problem.

Testament of Youth

Testament of Youth is a powerful story of love, war and remembrance, based on the First World War memoir by Vera Brittain, which has become the classic testimony of that war from a woman’s point of view. A searing journey from youthful hopes and dreams to the edge of despair and back again, it’s a film about young love, the futility of war and how to make sense of the darkest times.

Leopardi

In 19th-century Italy, Giacomo Leopardi channels his debilitating illness and isolation into poetry.

Sing a Song, Poet

About the life and work of the poet Sergei Yesenin, his connection with his native country, its people and nature. Childhood, love, painful searches for his place in the new, revolutionary Russia — everything found a place in Yesenin's lyrics. Frames illustrating Yesenin's poetry and poems are side by side in the film with episodes of the poet's biography: the film reflects the days of his stay in America, World War I, revolution and village round dances, a daring uncle, a wise mother...

Pond, Fish

Qingyan Yu confronts confusion and self-identity problems as she gets to the point where romance starts to take place in her adolescence.

Three Seasons

The residents of Ho Chi Minh City face modernization amid widespread poverty. A retired American Marine arrives on a search for his daughter, whom he abandoned at the end of the Vietnam War. Elsewhere, a cyclo driver falls for a troubled prostitute and schemes to raise money so he can spend time with her. Additionally, a young women begins harvesting lotuses for a writer suffering from leprosy, and a child trinket seller loses his traveling case.

Dead Poets Society

At an elite, old-fashioned boarding school in New England, a passionate English teacher inspires his students to rebel against convention and seize the potential of every day, courting the disdain of the stern headmaster.

The Hours

The story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each is alive at a different time and place, all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.

Howl

It's San Francisco in 1957, and an American masterpiece is put on trial. Howl, the film, recounts this dark moment using three interwoven threads: the tumultuous life events that led a young Allen Ginsberg to find his true voice as an artist, society's reaction (the obscenity trial), and mind-expanding animation that echoes the startling originality of the poem itself. All three coalesce in a genre-bending hybrid that brilliantly captures a pivotal moment-the birth of a counterculture.

Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont

All but abandoned by her family in a London retirement hotel, an elderly woman strikes up a curious friendship with a young writer.

Poetry

A South Korean woman in her sixties enrolls in a poetry class as she grapples with her faltering memory and her grandson's appalling wrongdoing.

Poison

A trio of interweaved transgressive tales, telling a bizarre stories of suburban patricide and a miraculous flight from justice, a mad sex experiment which unleashes a disfiguring plague, and the obsessive sexual relationship between two prison inmates.

What's Up with Cinta?

A popular high school girl strains her relationship with her close-knit clique when she begins falling for a reclusive, lower-class schoolmate.

Dante's Divine Politics

Dante Alighieri was a poet, philosopher and politician in 1300 Florence. The visionary author of "Inferno", the first book of the "Divine Comedy", he was both a direct witness and a narrator of his times and his poem is a remarkable geopolitical chronicle of a tumultuous period of the Middle Ages from 1300 to 1320, a time when Kings, Popes, rulers and warlords played a deadly chess game for the control of Europe. In this high end docudrama, some of the world's finest scholars will help provide historical context to the unfolding of events, making them accessible to a wide audience, and giving us a privileged viewpoint over one of the most eventful and funding chapters of European history.

Entranced Earth

Eldorado, a fictitious country in America, is sparkling with the internal struggle for political power. In the eye of this social convulsion, the jaded journalist Paulo Martins opposes two equally corrupt political candidates: a pseudopopulist and a conservative. In this context, Paulo is torn between the madness of the elite and the blind submission of the masses. But, in this complex tropical reality, nothing really is what it seems to be.

The View

A diary of a boy grappling with identity, love and belonging while exploring our fragile journey through a chaotic world.

A Day in the Park

A Swedish woman prowls through her childhood memories after a Chinese plane crash.

Pull My Daisy

Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's Bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy is a film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration.

Aesthete

A boy feels that his only way of living is through the art of painting.

Blue Car

Meg is a gifted but emotionally scarred 18-year-old who finds solace in writing poetry. Mr. Auster, her English teacher, recognizes her talent and encourages her to enter a national poetry contest. As tension at home escalates and Meg struggles to find a way to get to the poetry finals in Florida, Auster's role in her life becomes increasingly complex.

The Angelic Conversation

The Angelic Conversation is a lyrical, haunting film about a young man’s search for love in a dreamlike landscape. Its tone is set by the juxtaposition of slow moving homo-erotic images and opaque landscapes through which two men take a journey into their own desires. Offscreen, Dame Judi Dench recites a sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets that counterpoint the action. Jarman called it, “My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart.”

Fall

For Michael Shiver, life as an easy-going cab driver in New York suddenly changes when he picks up supermodel Sarah Easton and falls head over heels in love. But Sarah has more than just passion on her mind; she also has a husband and a glamorous lifestyle that she can't seem to leave behind. Torn between her feelings for Michael and the security of her marriage, Sarah is forced to make a realistic decision about the sacrifices that must be made to be truly and totally in love.

Et si tu m’entends

Photos are no longer enough to nourish the memory of happy days... Poems are powerless to preserve lost love... To return to the place of ecstasy is to return to Eden... With risks and perils...

Here and There

One summer evening in a small town in France, two teenage boys, Clarinet and Piano, say goodbye. For twelve years, they rejoin each other at irregular intervals in the same town, discussing their ambitions as they drift apart. Michaël Dacheux's 'Here and There' is a delicate exploration of the eager aspirations of two young men, wise beyond their years yet still innocent in their experience.

Wife! Be Like a Rose!

Kimiko, a Tokyo white-collar working girl, lives with her serious, intellectual, haiku-writing mother. Kimiko seeks to marry her boyfriend but needs her absent father to act as the go-between and negotiate the marriage. Kimiko travels and finds her father living with a second family.

De Noites em Claro

Plot unavailable

Robin: Watch for Wishes

A man of words is forced to become a man of action as John discovers the secret bucket list of his ill son Robin. The two abscond from the hospital to fulfill the boy's greatest wishes - as the police pursue John for kidnapping.

Umrao Jaan

Amiran is sold to a brothel by a corrupt cop after her father testifies against him. Many years later, she grows up to be an accomplished poetess and a renowned courtesan, Umrao Jaan.

Inocencia

Plot unavailable

The Kettle

Following a tumultuous breakup, a young college student tries to win back her ex-girlfriend by performing in a confessional-style poetry slam.