Ciao, 2020! (2020)

Ciao, 2021!

"Ciao, 2021!" - New Year's edition of the Evening Urgant program, aired on Channel One on January 1, 2022. The release parodies the festive concerts of the Italian pop music of the 1980s and the tradition of the Soviet and then Russian "Blue Lights". All participants in the program - presenters and performers - have stylized Italian names and pseudonyms. Communication takes place in Italian and is accompanied by Russian subtitles.

Six Reasons Why

In a desolate place called the Badlands, four men stand off with guns drawn, their fingers ready at the trigger. Among them are a fugitive seeking redemption, a son out to avenge his father's murder, a loyal servant with a secret and a murderous criminal hired to kill with a vengeance. This is their story...in a place where revenge, deception and cruelty are a way of life.

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Next Exit, Main Street

In an effort to discover the depth of the country's polarization, four recent college graduates decide to travel across the United States gathering stories encompassing the spectrum of life in America. Their goal is to find the human stories behind the nation's social and political schism, proving that Americans are not tied together by political identity, geographical location or belief systems, but primarily by love, hope and dreams - universal truths.

Re-Cut

When twin girls are found dead in their family’s barn, reality star turned TV-reporter Meredith Phillips and her de-facto camera crew are dispatched to rural Wisconsin to investigate the gruesome deaths. In their relentless drive to break the story, the reporters become entangled in a deadly mystery and uncover the small town’s shocking secret. Edited together from the crew’s multiple cameras, the film documents their struggle to survive the most terrifying night of their lives and becomes the only evidence of a crime too horrific to imagine.

Star!

Gertrude Lawrence rises to stage stardom at the cost of happiness.

Maintenance by Any Means

"Maintenance by any Means" is about two maintenance men vying for the position of maintenance supervisor in an apartment complex. The maintenance men must compete with each other in order to get the job left open by the former Maintenance Supervisor. They need evaluations by the people who live at the apartments for every work order they finish. The problem is the renters themselves. Each one they run into has their own set of interesting problems. The maintenance men soon discover that a positive review may be hard to come by. Fixing broken down items in the apartments is the least of their worries. Finally one of the maintenance men must win the contest, by any means.

Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara

Once known for his intellectual prowess, a retired professor (Anupam Kher) begins experiencing memory gaps and periods of forgetfulness. But while he tries to laugh it off, it soon becomes clear that the symptoms are a sign of a more serious illness, prompting his grown daughter (Urmila Matondkar) to move in as his caretaker. Meanwhile, as his mind regresses, he recalls a traumatic childhood memory involving the death of Mahatma Gandhi.

Dune

Sounds as witnesses. They blurr into memories, half-dreams, it is undecided if they are real or not. A fluctuation between imagination and reality.

Travelling Hawkers in Frankfurt am Main

A documentary about unemployed people who bought fruit and vegetables at moderate prices at the wholesale market and sold these in the streets of Frankfurt. Since they had no permits they were constantly with their bulky carts on the run from the police. One part of the film was shot at the fairgrounds in front of the wholesale market. Newspaper and lottery ticket vendors, propagandists offering their ware for a few pfennigs, all convey the mood of a time when need made people inventive.

From Russia with Love

Agent 007 is back in the second installment of the James Bond series, this time battling a secret crime organization known as SPECTRE. Russians Rosa Klebb and Kronsteen are out to snatch a decoding device known as the Lektor, using the ravishing Tatiana to lure Bond into helping them. Bond willingly travels to meet Tatiana in Istanbul, where he must rely on his wits to escape with his life in a series of deadly encounters with the enemy.

Re/cycle

With input from actor and writer Jan Hlobil, director and cinematographer Rene Smaal presents a film in the true surrealist tradition, in the sense that only 'found' elements were used, and that it defies interpretation based on ordinary cause-and-effect time sequence.

East of Main Street: Milestones

The Venice Hongwanji Buddhist Temple had an opportunity to take part in an episode of East of Main Street, an HBO documentary series that has been produced for the past three years to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This year’s episode, Milestones, focuses on how different groups of Asian Americans mark the milestones throughout their lives.

Maine-Ocean Express

"Maine-Ocean" is the name of a train that rides from Paris to Saint-Nazaire (near the ocean). In that train, Dejanira, a Brazilian, has a brush with the two ticket inspectors. Mimi, another traveler and also a lawyer, helps her. The four of them will meet together later and live a few shifted adventures with a strange-speaking sailor (Mimi's client).

Oedipus Rex

In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Edipo (Oedipus), and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Edipo that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he flees Corinth and his supposed parents - only to get into a fight and kill an older man on the road…