Jean-Philippe Laroche

Hélène, a housekeeper at a ritzy hotel in Corsica, is devoted to her family but lacks any passion in her own life. When she sees a handsome couple play a passionate game of chess, she becomes inspired to play herself. Hélène's working-class husband and spoiled daughter are soon bewildered by her obsession with chess. They also grow suspicious of Hélène's close relationship with Dr. Kröger, her eccentric American expat tutor.

Following over two dozen different individuals in the almost wordless atmosphere of a dark night in a Brussels town, acceptance and rejection in the realm of romance is examined.

During the height of the tourist season, the rivalry between the manager of a slightly fancy restaurant and the proprietor of a nearby fast-food stand becomes quite heated, and shots are fired. In this comedy, the restaurant is run with an iron hand by its "patronne," and the help eventually have had enough. If that weren't sufficient trouble, the children of the owners of both establishments are romantically entangled, further infuriating the passions of the feuding food fanatics.

With the help of state of the art special effects, this National Geographic documentary attempts to recreate what civilization looked like during the first 8,000 years that human beings lived on Earth.

A sensitivity to sounds coming from the activities of an unwelcome guest in the close quarters of an apartment is only one important component in this atmospheric, avant-garde drollery by Chantal Akerman. When the apartment owner comes home, her guest is settled in and at first, the slightly reclusive host decides simply to eat her breakfast in her room instead of having to face morning conversation with her guest. Sounds of the toilet flushing, the bath water running and splashing, footsteps pacing, and furniture moving invade the hostess' refuge in her bedroom like the frontrunners of an all-out offensive. She locks herself up for 28 days, life's detritus accumulating around her, just so she does not have to go out to face the nemesis that lurks beyond her door.

This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. A 74-minute experimental narrative film that turns the destruction of Gaza into a story of heartbreak, Ouroboros asks what it means to be human when humanity has failed. Taking the form of a love story, the film's central character is Diego Marcon, a man who embarks on a circular journey to shed his pain only to experience it, again and again. In the course of a single day, his travel fuses together Native American territories, the ancient Italian city of Matera, a castle in Brittany, and the ruins of the Gaza Strip into a single landscape.

A man remains dazed and confused after his wife's death. Strange things start happening in his house. The next day the undertaker comes to collect the body.