Browse Movies : 2004 : Foreign

A young photographer (David Wissack) from Los Angeles takes his girlfriend (Katerina Golubeva) with him while looking for locations in the Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California for a photography shoot, where they find their lives changed by something horrible that happens in the desert...

Alain (François Morel) runs a small hi-tech engineering company; he is married to teacher Cecile, and they seem to be a blissfully happy couple. But Alain has come to the conclusion that he's terminally ill. A chronic worrier, he's convinced that some minor symptoms which he's experiencing are the beginning of the end. Alain decides not to tell his wife the bad news. So, on the night she holds a surprise birthday party for him, he goes to see his doctor, a family friend, and makes a lame excuse for this late return home that makes Cecile instantly suspicious. Cecile seeks help from Pascal, who agrees to follow Alain to see if he's meeting another woman. When he does, indeed, see him embrace a young woman (Raphaële Godin) in a city park, he thinks the mystery is solved; but the girl turns out to be Louise, the daughter of Alain and Cecile. Cecile then considers the possibility that Alain is having an affair with his secretary, Claire (Valérie Mairesse), but when Agnes asks her if she can borrow her chalet for a few days because she's met a man, Cecile immediately assumes that Agnes is her husband's secret mistress. But by this time Alain has come to the conclusion that Cecile is hiding something from him. The two begin to lie to each other and suspect one another as their paranoid delusions escalate.

Based on a concept the director and Abbas Kiarostami developed on a photography trip together, a man and a young woman (Leila Hatami of Leila) are stranded in a remote village after their car breaks down. The photographer and the sole adult male inhabitant, a schoolteacher, leave to get help while the young woman, herself childless, bonds with the children whose parents are nowhere to be found.

A dramatic tale of the moral dilemmas of a not-too-honest cop played out against a background of a manhunt. Pascal supplies his wife, Agnes, with morphine provided by Jaquillat, the local crime boss; Agnes was addicted even before the pair met. But the prison break-out of terrorist Bruno Le Roux, and the certainty that he's settling old scores in the Grenoble area, has made Jaquillat a worried man. He attempts to blackmail Pascal into killing Bruno on sight, using the supply of morphine as a lever. Pascal refuses to co-operate, but he can't tell Agnes why his supplies have suddenly dried up. As a result, she trawls the streets in search of a hit, which is where she meets, and is helped by, the fugitive. He takes her back to her place to tend to her injuries after a street dealer beats her up, and Pascal, coming home, sees them together; however, he doesn't make them aware of his presence, and deliberately lets the fugitive slip through his fingers.

Something sinister is lurking under the surface of 10-year-old Michele's (Giuseppe Cristiano) idyllic summer in 1978. While the days in his remote sourthern Italian village are filled with the familiar routines of childhood, a chance discovery leads to a shocking revelation. Now, suddenly beyond the point-of-no-return, Michele digs further to find that even his own parents may be behind what's quickly becoming the country's most nefarious crime.

In June 1940, as politicians, journalists, society figures, demi-mondaines and spies from all sides all meet up at the Hotel Splendide in Bordeaux, a young man has to choose between a famous actress and an impassioned student, between politicians and hoodlums, between insouciance and adulthood.

The unspoken code of the underworld: keep your mouth shut, protect your family and don't be a traitor. Dris, having spent the last four years in jail with his mouth shut, wants to get back to his quiet life with his beautiful wife. But the past is never far away, and his partner and best friend Yanis, who now runs the streets, wants nothing more than to bring Dris back into the family.

A 12-year-old Afghan girl and her mother lose their jobs when the Taliban closes the hospital where they work. The Taliban have also forbidden women to leave their houses without a "legal companion." With her husband and brother dead there is no one left to support the family, and without being able to leave the house the mother is left with nowhere to turn. Feeling she has no other choice, she disguises her daughter as a boy. Now called Osama, the girl embarks on a terrifying and confusing journey as she tries to keep the Taliban from finding out her true identity. Inspired by a true story, "Osama" is the first entirely Afghan film shot since the rise and fall of the Taliban.

Anne Reid stars as May, an ordinary grandmother from the North of England. When her husband dies on a family visit to London, she recedes into the background of her busy, metropolitan children's lives. Stuck in an unfamiliar city, far from home, May fears that she has become another invisible old lady whose life is more or less over. Until, that is, she embarks on a passionate affair with Darren (Daniel Craig), a man half her age who is renovating her son's house and sleeping with her daughter.

On a passenger train, a beautiful young woman traveling alone carries a handmade ceramic vase, intricately painted by her own hand, a gift for a distant lover. She meets a friendly, handsome young veterinarian, who tries to tell her that she should sell the valuable piece to him, instead of giving it away to her boyfriend for free. Simply to spite the persistent animal doctor, the young woman hurls the vase to the floor of the train, shattering it to pieces.

An expressionist work comprised of surreal action involving: a hockey rink that houses a forgotten wax museum, where ghosts of dead lovers stroll; and a beauty salon where a demented doctor, wearing a corset, performs abortions.

A photographer who is haunted by the feeling that the gap between his ideals and his real life is growing finds himself obliged to put up in his apartment a young relative who has left behind his village looking for a job aboard a ship in Istanbul to go abroad.

"House of Flying Daggers" is set in the year 859AD as China's once flourishing Tang Dynasty is in decline. Unrest is raging throughout the land, and the corrupt government is locked in battle with rebel armies that are forming in protest. The largest, and most prestigious of these is the "House of Flying Daggers", which is growing ever more powerful under a mysterious new leader. Two local captains, Leo (Lau) and Jin (Kaneshiro) are ordered to capture the new leader and the two hatch an elaborate plan. Captain Jin will pretend to be a lone warrior called Wind and rescue the beautiful, blind revolutionary Mei (Ziyi), from prison, earning her trust and escorting her to the secret headquarters of the House of Flying Daggers. The plan works, but to their surprise, Jin and Mei fall deeply in love on their long journey to the House. Danger lurks in the forest surrounding them, and the wind is still, as if sensing the tension in the air. What lies ahead for Jin and Mei, these star-crossed lovers? If this is true love, then why are there plots in their heads, and secrets in their hearts?

Itami, a young Japanese man, falls deeply in love with Cynthia, a beautiful Chinese girl. Their brief happiness ends when he is called home for his military service and they are forced to part. Three years later, Shanghai has been unofficially occupied by Japan. Cynthia - now known as Ding Hui—is working for Purple Butterfly, a resistance group planning to assassinate Yamamoto, head of the Japanese secret service. Itami is also in Shanghai, operating as a secret agent and reporting directly to Yamamoto.

This is the story of two brothers in Glasgow, Harbour (Adrian Rawlins) and Wilbur (Jamie Sives), who inherit a used bookstore. The brothers discover that a chance encounter with a cleaning lady at the local hospital, Alice (Shirley Henderson), who's the single mother of a little girl, Mary (Lisa McKinlay), prompts them to reconsider the choices they've made in life, which might change all four of their lives.

This is the story of two men, one of whom is a film director, in Spain who meet again 20 years after they attended a Catholic school together as children during the time of Franco's rule. The film will flash back to extended sequences from their youths, and will also include a movie-within-the-movie sequence.

A group of young geniuses are drawn together by a mysterious advertisement, then suspiciously abandoned on an island, where they scramble to sort out their collective fate.

When her husband dies, an Israeli mother, Dafna (Orly Silbersatz Banai), must cope with both her own grief, that of her four children, and the economic problems that his passing leaves them with, as she tries to keep the family together and functioning.

We come to know the rapist Gilson, tried and sentenced by the Law Behind Bars; Zico and Deusdete, inseparable half brothers who, in jail, become each other's assassins; Highness and his shrewd balancing act between women and heists; Old Chico, a Zen master in the ways of the dungeon, at last on the brink of his long-awaited freedom; Warden Pires, who oversees the prison with the perspicacity of a tightrope walker; Ebony, the true leader of the inmate community and the arbiter of all its contentions; the religious conversion of the assasin, Dagger, the rise and fall of the surfer Ezequiel; Antonio Carlos, Claudiomiro and, coming between them like a knife, and depraved Dina; the existentialist philosopher No Way and his love affair with the divine lady Di. The narrative of the film is crafted like a puzzle with one story giving way to another for of surrealist, uniquely Brazilian collage of tragedy.

A murder and a suicide occur early one morning in a jewelry store. Behind this headline lies the story of a desperate man's feelings of humiliation in a world of social injustice... When his friend Ali shows him the contents of a lost purse, Hussein cannot imagine the large sum of money marked on a receipt for an expensive necklace. He knows that his pitiful salary will never be enough to afford such luxury. Hussein feels even lower on the social scale when a smooth-talking professional thief mistakes the two friends for petty crooks. Hussein receives yet another blow when he and Ali are denied entry to an uptown jewelry store because of their appearance. Hussein's job delivering pizzas allows him a full view of the contrast between rich and poor. He motorbikes every evening to neighborhoods he will never live in for a closer look at what goes on behind closed doors. The hypocrisy of the system is thrown in his face wherever he turns. But Hussein will taste the luxurious life for one night before his deep feelings of humiliation push him over the edge.