Women in Film: BBC Introducing Arts (2021)

Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice

A tribute to Mallarmé that not only asserts the continuing relevance of his work but also confronts its literary ambiguities with political and cinematic ambiguities of its own. In outline, the film could not be more straightforward: it offers a recitation of one of Mallarmé’s most celebrated and complex poems (it was his last published work in his own lifetime, appearing in 1897, a year before his death) and proposes a cinematic equivalent for the author’s original experiment with typography and layout by assigning the words to nine different speakers, separating each speaker from the other as she or he speaks, and using slight pauses to correspond with white spaces on the original page.

The Trouble with Being Born

Elli is an android and lives with a man she calls her father. Together they drift through the summer. During the day they swim in the pool and at night he takes her to bed. She shares his memories and anything else he programs her to recall. Memories that mean everything to him but nothing to her. Yet, one night she sets off into the woods following a fading echo… The story of a machine and the ghosts we all carry within us.

I Will Make You Mine

Three women wrestle with life's difficulties while confronting their past relationships with the same man.

Lost in Translation

Two lost souls visiting Tokyo -- the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial -- find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.

Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself

The strange comedy film of two close brothers; one, Wilbur, who wants to kill himself, and the other, Harbour, who tries to prevent this. When their father dies leaving them his bookstore they meet a woman who makes their lives a bit better yet with a bit more trouble as well.

Boys Don't Cry

A young transgender man explores his gender identity and searches for love in rural Nebraska.

Antoine and Colette

Now aged 17, Antoine Doinel works in a factory which makes records. At a music concert, he meets a girl his own age, Colette, and falls in love with her. Later, Antoine goes to extraordinary lengths to please his new girlfriend and her parents, but Colette still only regards him as a casual friend. First segment of “Love at Twenty” (1962).

Dummy

Using a faceless doll criminal reenacts a brutal crime. But surprisingly he is not the one being judged. There seems to be an odd one out in the investigative group. The film premiered in the Berlinale Short competition programme.

Filipiñana

A film about a girl drawn to a golf course.

Genius Loci

One night, Reine, a young loner, sees among the urban chaos a moving oneness that seems alive, like some sort of guide.

Union County

Cody is a recovering opiate addict in rural Ohio, 45 days clean and enlisted in a strictly enforced drug court programme by the county government. Local sober-living facilities are full, so Cody is living in his car on the outskirts of town and working at the nearby lumber mill to save money and keep busy. But his past doesn't want to forget him.

Savannah

Savannah is the true story of Ward Allen, a romantic and bombastic character who rejects his plantation heritage for the freedom of life on a river. Ward navigates the change of early 20th century America on the wrong side of the law and society, his long-time friend, a freed slave named Christmas Moultrie, at his side. Master of Shakespeare, and the shotgun that provides Savannah's markets with fowl, Ward fights for his rights as a hunter. His charisma and eloquent rhetoric win the heart of a society woman who defies her father to marry him. An elderly Moultrie tells the story of life on the river with his friend to a little boy, who passes the legendary Ward Allen down to the next generation.

A Simple Goodbye

This film expresses feeling in a highly obscure way. It presents a seemingly desultory time period to tell the story of two generations. A young girl who’s confused about what lies ahead is sent to England to receive education from childhood. She indulges herself in cyberlove and cannot get herself out of the hurtful affair. A middle-aged father who’s perplexed about death left his hometown for Beijing when he was young. He feels helpless about the status quo of the state-owned film studio. Tortured by terminal disease, he gives up the hope to live on.

Boys on Film 22: Love to Love You

The latest in Peccadillo’s critically acclaimed series – now established as a leading showcase for new and emerging queefilm-makingng talent from around the world – features a fresh and exciting selection of the very best contemporary gay short films. Each self-contained drama in this diverse and thoughtfully curated collection offers fascinating and insightful new perspectives on the gay experience – sensual, affecting, sometimes provocative and always entertaining. The 8 short films are: Have We Met Before? (2019); The Act (2020); First Position. (2019); Winter [Invierno] (2021); The Suit Weareth the Man (2020); Infinite While It Lasts [Infinito Enquanto Dure] (2019); Melon Grab (2017); Thrive (2019).

Fedor's Journey Through Moscow at the Turn of the XXI Century

A long time ago, Prometheus was cursed by the God's for bringing fire to mankind. Today, Fedor finds himself in Moscow for the first time and falls in love with Masha.

Growing Fangs

Val Garcia, a Mexican-American teen who is half human/half vampire, has had to keep her identity a secret from both worlds. But when her human best friend shows up at her monster-infested school, she has to confront her truth, her identity, and herself.

The Little Prince(ss)

When Gabriel, a 7-year-old Chinese kid who loves ballet, becomes friends with Rob, another Chinese kid from school, Rob’s dad gets suspicious about Gabriel's feminine behavior and decides to intervene.

Emmanuelle

While traveling, Emmanuelle meets Kei, a man who constantly eludes her. Though she indulges in the many alluring distractions, she can’t shake their chance encounter. Will she submit to her basest desires to forge a deeper relationship?

Incoming Call

Nervous Kerri is delighted when she starts being Skyped by her future self with life advice, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing...

7333 seconds of Johanna

Johanna is struggling not only to get divorced from her husband, but also to become strong when he uses suppression techniques over and over again.

Life in the Alley

This is the story of four people: ODNEY, RAJNI, ALUKI and MUFEEDA. Four lives, four journeys that led them in a search for freedom. Together they decide to live on the fringe of society and to finally find a place where they can do things their way.

The Capture

Rose hardly ever tells lies. She has a natural elegance and sincerity that few 20-year-old girls possess. However, neither her friends nor her boyfriend know about her difficult past. She’s managed to hide it well, even though she is still haunted by her father’s violence.

A Good Wife

When 50-year-old Milena finds out about the terrible past of her seemingly ideal husband, while simultaneously learning of her own cancer diagnosis, she begins an awakening from the suburban paradise she has been living in.

Mammal

After Margaret, a divorcée living in Dublin, loses her teenage son, she develops an unorthodox relationship with Joe, a homeless youth. Their tentative trust is threatened by his involvement with a violent gang and the escalation of her ex-husband's grieving rage.

Sand Storm

A Bedouin village in Northern Israel. When Jalila's husband marries a second woman, Jalila and her daughter's world is shattered, and the women are torn between their commitment to the patriarchal rules and being true to themselves.

Wild

An anarchist young woman breaks the tacit contract with civilization and fearlessly decides on a life without hypocrisy or an obligatory safety net.

Big Girls Don't Cry

Kati and Steffi have been best friends since they were six. Now they're both 17 and enjoying the ups and downs of becoming adults together. While Kati's parents are religious and conservative, but argue constantly, Steffi comes from what appears to be a harmonious and liberal family. But the girls discover how quickly their attractive world can fall apart when, at a hip nightclub, they happen to see Steffi's father in the arms of another woman. Steffi is shocked, her trust in her small perfect world shaken to the core. She can only think of one thing: revenge.

Ten Minutes

A desperate man makes a call to customer service looking for an answer.

The Five Devils

8-year-old Vicky has a mysterious gift: she can recreate any scent she comes across, even that of her beloved mother Joanne. When her estranged aunt Julia suddenly returns to town, the invocation of her fragrance plunges the young girl back in time to unravel a past replete with family secrets.

Game of Checkers

Following Marta's wake, her five best friends decide to spend the night at a rural tourist getaway that Marta never got around to opening. The night becomes a long, mazelike journey through their interconnecting friendships, ultimately leading to deep self-revelations about life, themselves and a friendship that survived it all. But will this friendship be able to survive death?

Alaska is a Drag

Leo's dreams of being an international drag superstar are hard fought working in a fish cannery in Alaska.

Goynar Baksho

Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay's famous tale of 3 generations of women & their changing position in society,seen in relation to a box of jewels, handed down from one generation to the next. A film by Aparna Sen.

Tea

While rehearsing asking out the girl of his dreams, a lonely and highly allergic Circuit-Shack employee gets stung in the throat by a hornet.

Mark, Mary + Some Other People

Mark and Mary's meet-cute happens at a neighborhood drug store, where she is busy buying a pregnancy test, and he has to make an effort to remind her they met in college. After asking her out, he accompanies her as she takes the test, and upon it showing negative, she agrees to a date. One year later, they have fallen deeply, passionately, head over heels in love, and their whirlwind romance leads to marriage. So when Mary suddenly requests they open their relationship to “ethical non-monogamy”, Mark is taken by surprise, but agrees to try it. And that's where this story really begins.

Biscut

BISCUT (HOTSTAR-DISNEY RELEASE -2022) In an Indian village ruled by muscle and money, one man sparks a revolution without guns or bullets by betting his life on just the power of democracy. Biscut is the awe-inspiring story of Bhoora, a poor Dalit (lower caste) youth condemned to a daily struggle for survival, who turns a collective curse into a formidable force for change. BISCUT is the Hindi language word for a cookie or a biscuit.

Annaluise & Anton

Luise, called Pünktchen, and Anton are closest of friends. Being the daughter of a wealthy surgeon, young Pünktchen lives in a great house. Her mother, who always travels through the world more for public relation reasons than for the social tasks she pretends to fulfill, is never available to her as a mother. Anton, son of a single and sick mother in financial trouble, does his best to help her out of it by working late. Pünktchen decides to help her only friend (as nobody else would anyway) and starts singing in public places. Trouble arises when Anton can't resist stealing a golden lighter and Pünktchen's secret life is discovered by her parents. Two troubled families finally can see the need for actions to be taken.

Sleepless in Seattle

After the death of his mother, a young boy calls a radio station in an attempt to set his father up on a date. Talking about his father’s loneliness soon leads to a meeting with a young female journalist, who has flown to Seattle to write a story about the boy and his father.

Fall From Grace

Jim Bakker establishes a large televangelical empire in the 1980s, including Heritage Village. However, they are removed from P.T.L, the ministry that they had established in 1987.

About Love

What is love? The heroes of the film try to answer this question. A series of the most different characters and their stories are woven together. Small stories about various things, all about love: a young pair who prefer to live through images of Japanese anime-heroes; a secretary who receives an obscene offer from her boss; a Japanese woman who arrives in Moscow in search of a Russian man; a graffiti artist in search of beauty; an ex-wife employed by her husband for an unusual task; and many other things...

Water Lilies

Set during a sultry summer in a French suburb, Marie is desperate to join the local pool's synchronized swimming team, but is her interest solely for the sake of sport or for a chance to get close to Floriane, the bad girl of the team? Sciamma, and the two leads, capture the uncertainty of teenage sexuality with a sympathetic eye in this delicate drama of the angst of coming-of-age.

God's Creatures

In a windswept fishing village, a mother is torn between protecting her beloved son and her own sense of right and wrong. A lie she tells for him rips apart their family and close-knit community.

Fraulein

Ruža left Serbia, her country, over 30 years ago and lives in Zurich. Her daily life is a string of repetitive moments until, one day, Ana arrives on the scene and upsets Ruža's painstakingly organized world. A subtle friendship develops between the two strong willed women.

28 Days

After getting into a car accident while drunk on the day of her sister's wedding, Gwen Cummings is given a choice between prison or a rehab center. She chooses rehab, but is extremely resistant to taking part in any of the treatment programs they have to offer, refusing to admit that she has an alcohol addiction.

Before the Sun Explodes

After his wife kicks him out, an anxious comedian is lured in by an intriguing woman with a stalker.

Claire in Motion

Claire is sure of herself, her work and family, until — like a bad dream — her husband disappears, leaving a trail of puzzling secrets that shatter her certainty.

My Blind Brother

Love for the same woman causes conflict between an over-achieving blind athlete and the brother who made him that way.

American Fable

When 11-year-old Gitty discovers that her father, Abe, a good and beloved farmer, is holding a wealthy man hostage in their abandoned silo in order to save their suffering farm, she befriends the captive in secret. As the truth unfolds about who he is and what will happen if he escapes, Gitty chooses to confront the thin line between reality and fiction.

Murder Games: The Life and Death of Breck Bednar

Murder Games tells the true story of Breck Bednar, the 14 year-old schoolboy who was lured to his death after being groomed online by Lewis Daynes.

The Parrot (Papagajka)

A stranger arrives in Sarajevo and barges into Damir's reclusive world. Little by little she takes over his life. She absorbs his dreams, until finally she threaten his very existence.

Raven's Touch

Blaming herself for a tragic accident, Raven Michaels secludes herself at a remote family cabin. She wanders the woods on the verge of a breakdown, seeking peace in isolation. In a last ditch attempt to save her family, Kate Royce takes her two teenagers camping far from the distractions of technology and young romance. When Raven and Kate's worlds collide they offer each other unexpected opportunities for intimacy and healing.

Last Day of Winter, First Day of Spring

The tradition is sleeping alone every night and the only exception is the last day of winter. She came on that day and found no one. Perhaps it’s already the first day of spring.

Step Up

Tyler Gage receives the opportunity of a lifetime after vandalizing a performing arts school, gaining him the chance to earn a scholarship and dance with an up and coming dancer, Nora.

Lords of Dogtown

The radical true story behind three teenage surfers from Venice Beach, California, who took skateboarding to the extreme and changed the world of sports forever. Stacy Peralta, Tony Alva and Jay Adams are the Z-Boys, a bunch of nobodies until they create a new style of skateboarding that becomes a worldwide phenomenon. But when their hobby becomes a business, the success shreds their friendship.

The Quiet

After her widowed father dies, deaf teenager Dot moves in with her godparents, Olivia and Paul Deer. The Deers' daughter, Nina, is openly hostile to Dot, but that does not prevent her from telling her secrets to her silent stepsister, including the fact that she wants to kill her lecherous father.

The Prince of Egypt

The strong bond between two brothers is challenged when their chosen responsibilities set them at odds, with extraordinary consequences.

Slave

14-year-old Ana is easily seduced by Sam, a 17 year-old young man who, along with his mother and others deceive and blackmail Ana into the world of prostitution. Ana will shortly discover soon that it is part of a network of trafficking in persons and tries to escape.

Mediation

A divorce mediation spins way out of control for a husband, his soon-to-be ex-wife and their court-appointed mediator.