Women in Film: BBC Introducing Arts (2021)

The Woman in the Room

A lonely and exhausted young woman caring for her ill father must make a difficult decision as his health rapidly declines.

The Woman in the Room

Johnny is burdened with the desire to euthanize his terminally ill mother in order to relieve her.

Votum

Mary is slowly succumbing to dementia in a Sanatorium. She knows that her condition is irreversible and time is not on her side.

While the Unicorn Is Watching Me

On a chilly Sunday morning, a man awakens to the mischievous stare of a unicorn that seems to have come straight out of his dreams. Carried along by an early morning sensuality, his fantasies transform his lonely apartment into a garden of delights, in which this young creature can freely reap the fruits of his desires.

Summer Ghost

An urban legend says that lighting fireworks at an abandoned airfield will beckon the "summer ghost," a spirit that can answer any question. Three teenagers, Tomoya, Aoi, and Ryo, each have their own reason to show up one day. When a ghost named Ayane appears, she reveals she is only visible to those "who are about to touch their death." Compelled by the ghost and her message, Tomoya begins regularly visiting the airfield to uncover the true purpose of her visits.

Alice: Crack of Season

Yoon-hye likes Da-joo more than just as a friend but denies her feelings for the sake of their friendship. After some events following Da-joo being introduced to a boy, Yoon-hye is not able to hide her emotions anymore.

Eugène

During Napoleonic wars, a young idealistic drummer, in search of glory, arrives on the battlefield and discovers the horrors of war.

Tsatsiki

Little Tsatsiki, son of a single mother in Sweden, has never met his father, a Greek fisherman. Tsatsiki befriends a nice but straight-laced motorcycle policeman renting one of their rooms and decices he is the right guy for his mother, an amateur rock singer in love with her band's bass player.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio

A Midwestern housewife supports her large family by entering contests for ad slogans sponsored by consumer product companies, while dealing with abuse from her alcoholic husband. Based on a true story.

A Curtain Raiser

Bruno, a young Frenchman, is frustrated by his girlfriend's constant lack of punctuality. He decides to end their relationship the next time she is late again.

Lost in Yonkers

In the summer of 1942 two young boys are sent to stay with their stern grandmother Kurnitz and their childlike aunt Bella in Yonkers, New York.

La Jetée

A man confronts his past during an experiment that attempts to find a solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world caused by a world war.

The Piano

When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.

Together

Elisabeth leaves her abusive and drunken husband Rolf, and goes to live with her brother, Göran. The year is 1975 and Göran lives in a commune called Together. Living in this leftist commune Elisabeth learns that the world can be viewed from different perspectives.

Little Miss Sunshine

A family loaded with quirky, colorful characters piles into an old van and road trips to California for little Olive to compete in a beauty pageant.

Find You in The Crowd

The younger Jing Nian and the older Lu Sheng have been playmates since they were children. After entering university, Jing Nian has been passionately chasing Lu Sheng over the years showing his true love for him. However, Lu Sheng really can't stand it and dares not face his innermost feelings. Emotions, this pair who are born with a tacit understanding, how should love speak out?

Matias and Jeronimo

Matías and Jerónimo know each other since they were just kids. Their friendship is a mix of fun and desire, but everything changes the night they go to the carnival and they see how a group of thugs beat a gay performer behind the scene.

Unicorn Store

A woman named Kit moves back to her parent's house, where she receives a mysterious invitation that would fulfill her childhood dreams.

Jag vill inte dö innan du har älskat mig

Plot unavailable

Explosions in the Heart

Billy falls madly in love with Nilo, but discovers that her great love is polyamorous. Explosions in the heart studies the turbulent and impossible romantic relationship between two young women where one is polyamorous, and finding one’s own autonomy and power independently of others.

Italian for Beginners

Several lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginner's course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives. The film, which unspools the connections and family drama shared between the students, complies with several aesthetic principles of Dogme 95 movement.

The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady

Tired of being a banal architectural ornamental, a sculpture runs from the Louvre to confront real life on the streets of Paris.

Je te tiens

It is the road trip of a mother and her daughter through strange worlds. The daughter wants to kill herself and the mother will try to talk her out of it.

Olla

After answering an ad on a dating website for Eastern European women, Olla leaves Ukraine and heads to French suburbia to move in with Pierre, who lives with his elderly mother. However, the suburbia cannot temper her desires, and nothing goes as expected.

Stay Awake, Be Ready

On a street corner a mysterious conversation among three young men at street stalls. Meanwhile a traffic accident on a motorbike. The night brings together a sketch, a multicolor frame of reality.

The Secret Life of Words

A solitary nurse bonds with a badly burned patient who survived an accident on an oil rig.

Stranger

An old farmer struggles to take care of his rundown farm alone, when a stranger appears and uninvited begins to help him.

Carne

After a dreadful incident coupled with an ungovernable paroxysm of violence, a butcher will fall into a downward spiral that will burn to the ground whatever dignity still remained in him.

Copying Beethoven

A fictionalised exploration of Beethoven's life in his final days working on his Ninth Symphony. It is 1824. Beethoven is racing to finish his new symphony. However, it has been years since his last success and he is plagued by deafness, loneliness and personal trauma. A copyist is urgently needed to help the composer. A fictional character is introduced in the form of a young conservatory student and aspiring composer named Anna Holtz. The mercurial Beethoven is skeptical that a woman might become involved in his masterpiece but slowly comes to trust in Anna's assistance and in the end becomes quite fond of her. By the time the piece is performed, her presence in his life is an absolute necessity. Her deep understanding of his work is such that she even corrects mistakes he has made, while her passionate personality opens a door into his private world.

Nowhere in Africa

A Jewish woman named Jettel Redlich flees Nazi Germany with her daughter Regina, to join her husband, Walter, on a farm in Kenya. At first, Jettel refuses to adjust to her new circumstances, bringing with her a set of china dishes and an evening gown. While Regina adapts readily to this new world, forming a strong bond with her father's cook, an African named Owuor.

Of the Flesh

When Narcing brings home his wife Puring to their hometown Mulawin in the 1930s, it sets off a series of events that include parricide, infidelity, betrayal, guilt and redemption.

Luna

Plot unavailable

August Rush

Lyla and Louis, a singer and a musician, fall in love, but are soon compelled to separate. Lyla is forced to give up her newborn but unknown to her, he grows up to become a musical genius.

Marquise

Marquise is a drama about the rise and fall of a beauteous actress. As cheerfully portrayed by Sophie Marceau, the eponymous heroine is an engagingly ribald, but perhaps rather too modern, character. She rises from an impoverished background to become a favourite of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the mistress of the celebrated Racine, who wrote roles especially for her; but her fate, in the end, is a tragic one.

Saint-Jacques... La Mecque

Three siblings who detest each other and hiking must complete together a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in order to be eligible to inherit their mother's wealth.

The Fisherman and His Wife

A shared love of fish leads to a variety of romantic predicaments in this offbeat comedy from writer and director Doris Dörrie. Otto (Christian Ulmen) and Leo (Simon Verhoeven) are two men from Germany who have launched a successful business in which they import koi, the beautiful Japanese fish, for collectors in their native land. While on a business trip to Japan, Otto and Leo meet Ida (Alexandra Maria Lara), a German tourist who is studying fashion design. Ida begins traveling with the two men, and surprisingly develops an infatuation with the rumpled Otto instead of the handsome Leo. When Ida discovers she's pregnant with Otto's child, the two marry, and upon their return to Germany, Ida attempts to join in the business by creating a line of scarves decorated with koi patterns. However, the honeymoon proves short-lived, and Ida's presence creates a rift between Otto and Leo, as the latter sets up his own concern, raising koi with his new bride, Yoko (Young-Shin Kim).

Room 10

Room 10 focuses on the life of a nurse who finds deeper meaning in her life after looking after a patient who is dying.

Ardor

In revenge for her husband's infidelity, a young beautiful housewife, Mi-heun, starts an affair with an attractive young doctor, In-gyu. Despite her husband's efforts to regain her love and the disapproval by the conservative little town, Mi-huen gradually finds happiness and satisfaction in the affair and decides to turn her back on her quiet life.

Love Under the Crucifix

The basic story in Love under the Crucifix is about Ogin, daughter of a tea master, who are both Christians in feudal Japan. Ogin falls in love with a feudal prince, also a Christian who is already married, and that creates problems. Further, when the Shogun bans Christianity, the situation worsens.

See You

When 14 year old Nete's twin brother Noah is killed in an accident, her world collapses. Months later, her parents decide to move to Copenhagen to start anew. Nete, still deeply troubled by her brother's death, begins in a new school - but the day she starts, a new boy, Jonas, also arrives. To everyone else, he is just the new boy - but Nete is in deep shock at what she sees.

Swept from the Sea

The film tells the story of Russian emigree and the only survivor from ship crash Yanko Goorall and servant Amy Foster in the end of 19th century. When Yanko enters a farm sick and hungry after the shipwreck, everyone is afraid of him, except for Amy, who is very kind and helps him. Soon he becomes like a son for Dr. James Kennedy and romance between Yanko and Amy follows.

The Last Mistress

Secrets, rumors and betrayals surround the upcoming marriage between a young dissolute man and virtuous woman of the French aristocracy.

Anatomy of Hell

A woman employs a gay man to spend four nights at her house to watch her when she's "unwatchable".

The Mourning Forest

A young woman working at a retirement home takes an elderly man living there on an excursion into the countryside, but the two wind up stranded in the titular forest.

Persepolis

In 1970s Iran, Marjane 'Marji' Satrapi watches events through her young eyes and her idealistic family of a long dream being fulfilled of the hated Shah's defeat in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. However as Marji grows up, she witnesses first hand how the new Iran, now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, has become a repressive tyranny on its own.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Pennsylvania, 1993. After getting caught with another girl, teenager Cameron Post is sent to a conversion therapy center run by the strict Dr. Lydia Marsh and her brother, Reverend Rick, whose treatment consists in repenting for feeling “same sex attraction.” Cameron befriends fellow sinners Jane and Adam, thus creating a new family to deal with the surrounding intolerance.

Amélia

Fictional story based on Sarah Bernhard's visit to Brazil in 1905. The actress, experiencing a personal and professional crisis at the time, is induced by her personal Brazilian maid, Amélia, to make a performance in Rio de Janeiro. After arriving, she is forced to stand the company of Amélia's exotic sisters.

The Blue Wave

Deniz and her friends, who have been apart for the summer, have much to tell each other. While adults are busy with their professional lives, Deniz and her friends are still confused about their university plans. Through the worries of their daily routines, they make plans for the future, yet the challenges of teenage years/adolescence are burdensome. Deniz desires a life that is different than the ideals of her friends. A song nobody has heard of, a hopeless love, solitude. A different world, but where exactly?

A Girl, She Is 100%

A man ran into a woman on a street. She was not attractive, but was a perfect girl for him. After missing the chance to talk to her, he contemplates on how he should have approached her.

Nobody's Home

After her father’s sudden death, Feride takes on the role of the father in the family. Her mother, Nurcan, desperately tries to replace her lost husband with Feride, while her brother, İlker, starts to drift away from the family. Feride decides to break free, changing everyone’s fate.

To Walk Invisible

To Walk Invisible takes a new look at the extraordinary Brontë family, telling the story of these remarkable women who, despite the obstacles they faced, came from obscurity to produce some of the greatest novels in the English language.

Lowlands

Set in the early part of 20th century Europe. There lived a dancer who becomes the romantic bone of contention between a humble shepherd and an imperious marquis.

Mouth to Mouth

An aimless adolescent joins several itinerant misfits who live on the fringe of society and welcome at-risk youths into their fold.

Om Shanti Om

Reincarnated 30 years after being killed in a suspicious on-set fire, a small-time actor is determined to punish the person who ignited the blaze.

Khadak

Set in the frozen steppes of Mongolia, a young nomad is confronted with his destiny after animals fall victim to a plague which threatens to eradicate nomadism.

Desperately Seeking Susan

A bored New Jersey suburban housewife's fascination with a free-spirited woman she has read about in the personal columns leads to her being mistaken for the woman herself and into a chaotic adventure of amnesia and self-discovery.

Baby Cake

A gay couple and a lesbian couple are trying to conceive a baby naturally.

Hunt for the Labyrinth Killer

Young, ace assistant DA, Shelby Cook, works with driven cop, Mike Holland, to catch Daedalus, a serial killer infamous for luring his victims to their deaths through labyrinth traps. Three innocent men have already taken the fall for Daedalus and when Daedalus strikes again, Shelby finds herself defending the latest man accused, a retired and respected judge--who also happens to be her own father.