Confidence
The nature of our trust and faith in others is delicately, yet powerfully explored in this profoundly moving film by István Szabó. Janos and Kata (members of the anti-fascist resistance within besieged Budapest during WWII) are thrown together and forced to pose as husband and wife to hide from the Nazis. The intensity and suffocating intimacy of their new relationship and the circumstances in which they find themselves, forces them to confront past prejudices and assumptions and challenge what they truly believe.
"[Szabo's] best film... an underrated drama that is perhaps the most refined, intricate and troubling working-out of the larger human issue" The Jewish Week
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Man of the Story
Man of the Story (Kathapurushan) by the Indian master Adoor Gopalakrishnan is a dramatisation of Kerala's history since the onset of the Independence struggle. A complex and challenging blend of traditional and modern story-telling styles that draws upon both folklore and recent Indian history to present an elliptical story of Kerala's modern history through the life of one man - Kunjunni - who is born in 1937 and lives to watch forty years of political upheavals in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
"Adoor Gopalakrishnan's characters are drawn from real people, real lives. His cinema manages to frame details that often escape our everyday glance, turning the mundane into the magical, the commonplace into the startling"
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Casa de Lava
Few filmmakers can boast a body of work as audacious, beautiful or challenging as that of Pedro Costa, and Casa de Lava – his second feature and follow-up to Blood (also available on Second Run DVD) - is one of the most extraordinary cinematic works of the past twenty years.
Pedro Costa's second feature is a dense and ingeniously metaphoric take on Tourneur's I Walked With A Zombie - whilst simultaneously recalling Rossellini's Stromboli. It is another unique and startling film from one of the most singular and important filmmakers working today.
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The Girl from Hunan (Xiangnu xiaoxiao)
The heartbreaking tale of a young girl sold into an arranged marriage with a 2 year old boy who she must raise as his nanny until he is old enough to marry her. She is expected to honour tradition and to toe the line so far as social proprieties are concerned, but the young girl rebels against the edicts of her elders until at 16, she falls in love with another man... Though set in turn-of-the-century China, The Girl from Hunan deliberately parallel the state of affairs in the China of the late 1980s. 
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