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In the eighteenth century the thwarted love affair between a young man from a good family and his 15-year-old neighbor. But the young lovers' families are fiercely opposed.

A chronicle of Fred Hampton's revolutionary leadership of the Illinois Black Panther Party, followed by an investigation into his assassination at the hands of the Chicago Police Department.

In custody after she murders her middle aged photographer lover, a fourteen year old Pam reflects back on the bohemian life she spent with her mother Lily, a free spirited cabaret performer. Lily tried to elevate her stripper performances from the level of erotic spectacle to artistic expression as she dragged her young daughter from nightclub to nightclub and hotel to hotel, but ultimately lost her at nine to the Paris child authorities.

"Bye Bye America" is the story of an unusual journey, generated from discussions director Jan Schütte had with émigrés he met while walking along the boardwalk in Brighton Beach. The film depicts characters whose fate is to search for a homeland, with no great fuss about it but with laconic humour and an often fairy-tale ambience. Isaak, his friend Moshe, and Moshe's wife, Genovefa, leave New York and set off for Poland. The three of them are all in the same boat, get stranded in Germany, celebrate Christmas in Berlin, and finally end up in Poland...

It is one of the last days of an exceptionally hot summer in 1956. Bertolt Brecht (Bierbichler) is about to leave his lakeside house among the tall birches in Brandenburg to return to Berlin for the upcoming theater season. Most of the women in his life are there: his wife, Helene Weigel (Bleibtreu); his daughter, Barbara; his old lover Ruth Berlau; his latest flame, the actress Käthe Reichel; and sensuous Isot Kilian, whose affections and body he shares with the rebel political activist Wolfgang Harich. The friends and lovers swim, write, eat, drink, and philosophize about art, politics, and life as the Stasi lurks all the while on the sidelines, waiting. The serenity of the country on this summer day stands in marked contrast to the storm of jealousy and egomania, betrayal and dashed hopes at whose center Brecht is trapped, struggling to make plans for a future that fate will end only days later. A brilliant ensemble cast and music by John Cale complement this fascinating portrait of one of Germany's leading modern artists.

In pre-colonial times a peddler crossing the savanna discovers a child lying unconscious in the bush. When the boy comes to, he is mute and cannot explain who he is. The peddler leaves him with a family in the nearest village. After a search for his parents, the family adopts him, giving him the name Wend Kuuni (God's Gift) and a loving sister with whom he bonds. Wend Kuuni regains his speech only after witnessing a tragic event that prompts him to reveal his own painful history.

When K, a man, awakens and finds himself partially transformed into a cabbage, he must come to terms with his new state and how it puts him at the center of a media storm and unsolicited desires.

Almost hallucinatory images of unidentified sleeping figures float across the screen to the accompaniment of increasingly unnerving monologues, the "dream narratives" of Dion McGregor, an aspiring Broadway lyricist who may have been performing for his roommate actively recording these sessions. In somniloquies, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor discover a dark, forked path to the unconscious in the ranting, sleep-talking voice of an obsessive and possibly deranged individual whose racist, misogynistic and xenophobic fears are unleashed with propulsive force and screeching climaxes.

Documenting the conditions of day laborers in San'ya.

This reedited version of Godard's five-hour epic film essay, Histoire(s) Du Cinema condenses the work into eight puzzling yet fascinating chapters. A stunning collage of music, poetry, and, of course, film, Moments Choisis demonstrates that Godard's critical faculty is on par with his creative ability. The film was featured in the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, which described the work as "a ruminative and exhilarating elegy to cinema and the twentieth century."

A spirited, magically inventive and charming film full of large dashes of French New Wave quirkiness, and winner of 1990's Pia Film Festival grand prize, The Rain Women set the stage for Shinobu Yaguchi 's later career in offbeat comedies such as Waterboys and Swing Girls. In the first part of the film, two young women live together and create their own eccentric adventures, transforming their (always rainy) everyday environment into an enchanted playground, full of pop-musical sequences and synchronized tooth brushing performances. As the second half of the film shifts to both deeper psychological themes and a more meta-filmic playfulness, Yaguchi develops a bewitchingly melancholic atmosphere of unpredictability. Often compared to Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, the film is a fascinating example of the exploration of the lines between filmic reality and filmic fiction-a signature jishu film obsession.

A colorful and provocative survey of anarchism in America, the film attempts to dispel popular misconceptions and trace the historical development of the movement. The film explores the movement both as a native American philosophy stemming from 19th century American traditions of individualism, and as a foreign ideology brought to America by immigrants. The film features rare archival footage and interviews with significant personalities in anarchist history including Murray Boochkin and Karl Hess, and also live performance footage of the Dead Kennedys.

One of Tsai's last and most successful television films, Boys also marks Lee Kang-sheng's acting debut. A slice-of-life tale of a teenager whose attempts to blackmail a younger student goes strangely awry, Boys is a key transitional work from Tsai's early career that points directly towards the stylistic and narrative nuance of Rebels of the Neon God.

A blacksmith falls off his bicycle when he tries to avoid a tortoise which crosses his path. He brings the animal home to his twelve year old son, Rabi, who becomes so fascinated that he forgets his chores at this father's shop. When the angry smith removes the tortoise, Rabi's grandfather, Pusga, helps Rabi find a larger one to consol the boy. Rabi wants to tame the animal and this new obsession leads him to defy parental authority. Pusga gently opens the boy's eyes to the visible and invisible ways of nature. Rabi starts to understand liberty, responsibility and respect for life. In turn he awakens long buried sentiments in the grandfather.

An elegiac ode to a loner who finds it difficult to fit in and the inevitable eruption of his frustration, Isolation of 1/880000 tells the story of Takemitsu, a disabled young man caught in the "examination hell" of trying to get into one of Japan's top universities. Director Sogo Ishii (now renamed as Gakuryu Ishii) was the original 8mm punk, whose works expressed unhinged energy and made speed, intensity and rebellion their stylistic and thematic center, carrying over into his later 16mm and 35mm films such as Crazy Thunder Road and Crazy Family. In contrast, Isolation prefigures the more ethereal aesthetic of his big budget 1990s films.

Uruphong Raksasad concludes his agriculture trilogy (Stories from the North, Agrarian Utopia) with a visual record of the lifecycle of Thailand's most important and symbolic crop: rice. Focusing less on narrative and more on the visceral experience surrounding the farming, The Songs of Rice, as the title suggests, features the use of music and songs that chronicle the growth of rice, from cultivation, to harvest, right through to the moment when it is consumed. However, the songs in this film do not merely act as a soundtrack or accompaniment to the motion picture, rather, they document a traditional practice in which Thai farmers would sing to their beloved crop: the songs they sing were written for the rice. Raksasad, who himself came from a rice-farming family, presents this fascinating practice at the core of his artful study. The result is a masterfully crafted aural and visual tribute to rice and the people who cultivate it.

Asylrecht is a curious production: medium-length, an unclassifiable cross between documentary and fiction, made on order of the British Film Section, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, shown for the first time in West Germany on the occasion of a refugee congress, and never regularly released except by way of non-commercial distribution for decades in various versions. Call it a crypto classic, like several other works of Rudolf Werner Kipp, a master of educational filmmaking who, in his finest achievements, did honor to his professed main inspiration: John Grierson. Kipp filmed with real refugees in actual camps. While in many cases scenes were arranged with their participation, some of the most dramatic moments were shot using a hidden camera. The refugees whose plights we learn about here mainly try to leave the Soviet-occupied areas for the Trizone, but not everybody could enter. Curious considering that West Germany would need every person able to work (in fact, later shorts about refugees stress exactly this as the main argument for being less hostile towards the strangers). In the film's most haunting shots, groups of refugees walk like spectres through misty woods and meadows-lost to the world, fallen through a crack in space and time.

The generation gap is difficult enough to bridge on its own-add a father's service in Vietnam and the gap gets even wider. Following three veterans and their grown children back to the land where they witnessed incredible carnage as soldiers, director Beth B investigates "what we pass on from one generation to the next" in the hope that the experience will help both fathers and children come to grips with the war and each other. In doing so, she provides proof that the trauma of war does not end when peace begins.

In the Mossi culture, one of the rites attending the birth of a child and its induction as a new member of the community involves the burial of the placenta. The space in which the placenta is buried is called 'Zan Boko' - a phrase which connotes the religious, cultural and affective relations that bind the child to the land and that embraces the notions of 'rootedness' and 'belonging'. Kaboré tells the story of Tinga, who resists the encroaching urbanization of his native territory. The specific rhythms and vision of the rural community, including its values, social relationship, and individual & collective destinies, are altered when a city is planted on the edge of an ancient native village.

With its title taken from Georges Bataille's journal Acéphale (literally, a headless man, but figuratively expressing the need to go beyond rational ways of thinking), Deval's film is the most literary of the Zanzibar works. The film opens with an illustrative image: a head in the process of being shaved, in close up. This image is accompanied not by the sound of an electric razor but an electric saw, suggesting the need to achieve a tabula rasa by radical means. The story follows the adventures of a young man and his friends as they wander through a barely recognizable post-May 1968 Paris. In documenting the by-gone expressions and gestures of the '68 generation in France, Acéphale becomes something of an anthropological film that reveals the rites and beliefs of the ideological novitiates.

Life is treating self-confident and open-minded Max very well. As the first born of a wealthy Jewish family, he doesn't need to worry about money. He loves his girlfriend and can imagine sharing his life with her. Everything could easily just continue the way it is, if it weren't for his sudden doubts, diffused emotions of inner emptiness, and the urge for change. His father owns Supertex, a discount textile company. When a dramatic accident befalls the family, Max and his two brothers must change their plans for the future...

Constantin Dita's quiet consternation once again inhabits Porumbiou's second short and is once more joined by the more carefree antics of Ion Sapadaru. It is not just old world meeting new as the young teacher's vain attempts to merely purchase a computer lead to unnecessary delays, political favors, bureaucratic conundrums, criminal activity and unexpected camaraderie. As as in his feature films to come, Porumboiu fills the screen with so much life and so many stories-while his characters still wait for something to happen.

Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art to make a work about pioneering African-American director, producer and occasional actor Spencer Williams (1893-1963), Andersen turned to Williams' films as director, assembling major and minor moments into a portrait of the everyday in Black America of the 1940s. "I am not trying to make some new meaning from these films; I am striving to bring out the meanings that are there but obscured by the plot lines: the dignity of black life and the creation of dynamic culture in the segregated society in small-town north Texas. I regard my movie as akin to Walker Evans' photographs of sharecroppers' home in 1930s and George Orwell's essays on English working class interiors."

A dynamic story of how students and immigrant janitors took on-and defeated-one of the most powerful corporations in the world, "Occupation" documents the historic three-week sit-in by the Harvard Living Wage Campaign. The Campaign won unprecedented gains for low-wage workers at the world's most affluent university and catapulted the living wage movement to the center of public attention. In demonstrating one local response to corporate power in an age of globalization, "Occupation" powerfully depicts how people from dramatically different backgrounds were able to raise their hands together in victory.

Featuring one of the era's most beloved male idols, Hans Albers, as the doctor losing control of his dark side, is Viktor Turzanskij's rarely-screened Jekyll-and-Hyde version Vom Teufel gejagt. For added depth and relevance, a colleague who, years before, had assumed the doctor's guilt when an experiment went badly returns to continue their earlier research-besides, his name is tarnished anyway, where else could he go? It's difficult to not see this very elegantly dispassionate piece (a curious predecessor to the soon rising Arztfilm-wave) as an attempt to discuss its star's and auteur's involvement with the Nazi-era film industry: Albers starred in Herbert Selpin's world-weary anti-British epopee Carl Peters (1941), and Turzanskij directed (and co-wrote) the edgy anti-Polish, anti-labor drama Feinde (1940).