Film Catalogue

A kid wants to play with his friends; a woman is trying to avoid her husband; an everyday guy is owed money. They all try to find the courage to escape manipulation, while a “giant alien flying object” starts falling from the sky.

Sinan, a lieutenant in the Turkish army, is tasked with escorting his brother, who is also an officer, to face military court. This mission feels like the ultimate test of obedience for Sinan, especially since the disgraceful discharge and tragic end of their father still cast a shadow over his otherwise spotless career prospects. However, things take a dangerous turn when, during the transfer, Turkey plunges into a night of deep political unrest and turmoil. With the failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016, as its backdrop, debut director Türker Süer crafts a mature thriller that draws comparisons to Michael Mann’s cinema. In the world of Edge of Night, even the bright daylight can’t dispel the darkness of uncertainty, where every decision could turn into a catastrophic mistake. A film deeply rooted in the 1980s aesthetics, complete with an evocative and haunting soundtrack.

When David Lynch made his debut with the extremely experimental and utterly unconventional Eraserhead, few could have foreseen that the same director would reach and win over broader audiences with his second feature, even making it all the way to the Oscars. The Elephant Man, with its charismatic cast (featuring Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft, and Wendy Hiller) and its immersive black-and-white cinematography by the great Freddie Francis, garnered eight Oscar nominations (also prompting the Academy to introduce an Oscar for Best Makeup the following year) and went on to triumph at the BAFTAs and win a César Award for Best Foreign Film. Drawing inspiration from the incredible true story of Joseph Merrick, David Lynch presents a tale marked by compassion and the acceptance of difference, reminding us all that there is nothing more monstrous than a (high) society that enjoys freak shows without shame, yet never plucks up the courage to look at its own inner monsters in the mirror.

A bizarre epidemic slowly turns human skin into “inorganic” matter and, as a result, people get absorbed by their environment. The disease is transmitted through eye contact with the infected. While increasingly more people gradually transform into cement, stone, wood, and other materials, a young couple isolates in their apartment as a precaution, grappling with maintaining their identity as the world around them dissolves. An outrageous (and quite innovative) concept provides the material for a remarkably unique psychedelic thriller to be crafted, borrowing vivid elements from Cronenberg’s body horror, which uses the human body as a canvas for expressionistic compositions reminiscent of visual arts. A horror film serving as a parable to the modern, post-covid world, and inextricably intertwining the grotesque and the poetic. The chilling Else destroys the barriers between species and culminates into an uncontrollable visual trip, one which David Lynch would applaud.

At long last something happens in a quiet and picturesque fishing village near the Opal Coast, in northern France; a special baby is born. A child so unique and peculiar that it becomes the catalyst for the start of a secret war between extraterrestrial forces. An anarchic formalistically and delightfully idiosyncratic, unapologetic blend of fantasy adventure, science fiction, comedy, and sociological satire, The Empire undermines the still idleness of summertime, converting a seaside village where nothing exciting ever occurs into a battlefield between interplanetary empires. Anyone who ever wanted, as a child, to let their imagination run wild, incorporating the archetypal powers of Good and Evil in their game in order to acutely enjoy it, can expect to be filled with an intoxicating sense of nostalgia watching The Empire. With unique visual power, boundless inspiration in its surrealism, saucy “disparaging” humor, and eroticism that overflows, Bruno Dumont’s latest film is also the most amusing in his entire – fascinatingly sui generis – filmography.

The debut fiction film of the two-time Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer is to no one’s surprise a messy, profoundly penetrating, and politically undermining post-apocalyptic musical, starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon. Deep below the earth's surface, within the protective embrace of an abandoned salt mine, a family of the once great elite spends the days in a luxurious shelter reminiscent of a grand estate, trying to forget the catastrophe that led to their seeking refuge there – as well as their own culpability in the whole situation. When a survivor from the world up above unexpectedly finds herself among them, the convictions they all hold dear, and in particular the ones of their young son who was born there in the aftermath of the disaster, will slip from their grasp like a handful of salt. By creating a film that refuses to submit to any type of categorization, Oppenheimer delivers yet another versatile work of art that gleams with the brilliance of a contemporary cinematic classic.

As World War II is reaching its conclusion, French nurse Hana takes up caring for Almásy, a man with extensive burns on his body caused by the airplane crash that occurred when he was flying it over the war zones of North Africa. As he opens up to her about his life, episodes of a fateful love affair unfold. Only a handful of films can boast they were etched onto the collective cinematic unconscious of the '90s the way Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient did, as evidenced by the nine Academy Awards it was awarded – Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Picture, Best Film Editing, Best Supporting Actress for Juliette Binoche, among others. Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Juliette Binoche form a trio that dominates the screen, and with each flashback of the central hero they seem to get further entrapped, sinking increasingly deeper into the quicksand of the vast African desert. Trapped yet preserved in eternity, as the case seems to be with each great love affair.

Nadine and Paul, two workers at a dystopic coal mining factory have been married for seven years, and raising their two children. Their marriage is threatened by Paul’s impulsive behavior, their pressing everyday life, and the emotional distance brought about by time. Surrounding its two heroes with tender melancholy and ineffable empathy, the film tracks the chronicle of a marriage dissolution, and the couple’s – particularly, Nadine’s - attempts to save a wounded yet profoundly meaningful relationship. Every You Every Me, the impressive debut of young filmmaker, Michael Fetter Nathansky, infiltrates the great mystery that is a couple’s relationship with astonishing maturity, intertwining the metaphysical element – the man’s shape shifts depending on how he is perceived by the woman, sometimes embodying an adult and sometimes a teenager or even a bull – with the down to earth, austere social drama, yet always converging towards a single goal: to preserve the love between a couple, the most crucial bulwark and refuge when it all falls apart.

Delia, a Chilean immigrant working as a taxi driver in Barcelona, is still grieving alongside her college-aged daughter over the death of Julián, the family’s beloved husband and father, who was deeply attached to a small olive grove he cultivated in his village. As financial pressures mount and the threat of eviction becomes imminent, these two women – tied by profound love but often clashing –are confronted with a painful yet liberating decision. This tender and grounded drama, layered like the ancient geological strata of a seismic region, circles around two deeply impactful characters. The family gatherings, the symbolic olive grove, and its association with the late father add a surprising, almost transcendent dimension to a classic narrative of mourning and redemption, delivering emotional depth through the sincerity and directness of its performances.

In Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, the surgeon Dr. Génessier – wracked with guilt for the disfigurement of his daughter’s face during a car accident where he was driving – devises a diabolical plan. With the help of Louise, his loyal assistant, he kidnaps beautiful young women in order to steal their faces and surgically graft them onto his daughter, who is forced to wear a terrifying porcelain mask in the meantime. As these disappearances of young women gradually increase, the police nose out the root of this evildoing and close in on the desperate doctor. Eyes Without a Face, which signaled Franju’s definitive shift from the documentary form to fiction features, elicited extreme reactions from audiences at its first screenings; the film would, of course, go on to influence such major directors as Pedro Almodóvar, John Carpenter, and John Woo, and also inspired Billy Idol to write a hit song that shared its title. An ingenious take on the Frankenstein myth, as well as a stunning homage to the tenets of German expressionism, Franju’s film delineates an electrifying treatise on the fluid notion of identity, on the fear of death, and on the slippery vanity of beauty, while also serving as a metaphor for the constructs and illusory semblances of cinema.

She had a lot of talent, but unfortunately no voice.

A photojournalist, an architect and his father who suffers from dementia, are trapped in the centre of Athens, while extensive clashes unfold. They are all involved in a massive ecological disaster, that burned forests and killed dozens of people. Conflicts, co-dependencies, and anger emerge, while the search for truth seems impossible.