Films - Competition - Berlin 1997

The story of controversial pornography publisher Larry Flynt, and how he became a defender of free speech.

A young man develops severe neck pain after swimming in a polluted river; his dysfunctional parents are unable to provide any relief for him or themselves.

Because he wants to keep a promise made to his friend, the physician Antoine Barasse, murdered in Port Djema, former territory of the French Empire in East Africa, Pierre Feldman, surgeon, shares in the footsteps of the disappeared. Antoine had chosen the camp of rebellion, supporting Assad nomads fighting against the power in place. Despite the warnings, Peter goes to Antoine's dispensary. He discovers a bruised and violent Africa and especially the reverse of a humanitarian commitment.

Shakespeare's famous play is updated to the hip modern suburb of Verona still retaining its original dialogue.

During World War II a Jewish boy is left on his own for months in a ruined house in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he must learn all the tricks of survival under constantly life-threatening conditions.

At her son's funeral, Solange, a lawyer famous for losing hopeless cases, agrees to defend René, her son's age, accused of murdering his wealthy aunt, Jeanne, who's part of the Franco-Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, known for odd views and methods. She reads Jeanne's journal, documenting René's criminal tendencies. Solange believes him innocent, manipulated into the murder or framed. Odd psychiatrists turn up, including Georges Didier, who runs FBPS, and his rival, Christian, who believes crime originates in a story's taking hold of a person. After the verdict, René and Solange's relationship changes, Georges and his society commit a bizarre act, and the police record Solange's story.

After he loses his job, his father, and his girlfriend, Jan's life is a shambles. Then suddenly he meets freakish street musician Vera, and a bittersweet romance unfolds...

A devout Catholic peasant girl is corrupted by two new friends when her family moves to the city. An allegory of traditional Polish values under threat from materialism and decadence in the post-Communist era.

A disparate group of African-American men travel by bus to Washington, DC for the Million Man March.

A bitter love story between a talented writer and a gentle nurse.

The winner of the 1995 Jerusalem Film Festival, this political thriller centers on a young hero who returns to Israel from Berlin to ostensibly attend the funeral of his father, a convicted Russian spy. Instead he learns that the death was a ruse and that he is to be the bait in an elaborate scheme to catch his father, who has just escaped from prison. When the son learns the truth, he enters the desert to search for his father. He is assisted by a beautiful young actress. They are constantly followed by a pair of determined cops.

A love story or a tale of the resistance, this poignant movie tells both the haunting story of a French resistance cell in Lyon but also the love of Lucie Aubrac for her husband, and the lengths she goes to to rescue her husband from prison on more than one occasion. Based on a true story Lucie Aubrac works as both history lesson and love story.

Two employee of security section of a shipyard help the police to keep watch on a murder suspect.

Brazillian urban guerrilla fighters kidnap the American Ambassador. Now, the diplomat's life hangs in the balance - helplessly caught between a government unwilling to cooperate - and his fear of the captors themselves.

A dramatization of a 1923 horrific racist lynch mob attack on an African-American community.

A struggling director is offered the opportunity to direct a Cat-III film to revive his career. Torn between artistic integrity and financial troubles, he also has to deal with his jealous girlfriend and keep his gangster financiers happy.

Javi and his friend Carlos snoop around an old house on the way home from school. According to his brother Juan this is a haunted house and one can hear the voices of the dead. Later he is intrigued with a room which is always closed (the room where his father was found dead). He is so interested in these mysteries that he starts to investigate all the secrets of these dead people and their stories.

Opens with a journalist reporting on the 1997 Kobe earthquake, as he remembers a trip made as a young boy. Then, he and family took a boat trip from Awaji to Beppu in order to bury the ashes of his elder brother, killed in the just-ended WWII. The lad spends much of the trip trying to talk his elder brother out of running away. They encounter an array of characters on the journey. Most prominent among them a black marketeer who, like the elder brother, feels that the "new ways" can only benefit him, and work against the boys' father, who is strict and traditional.

A 6 y.o. Inuit boy runs off a snowy roof in Copenhagen and dies. Smilla, a half Inuit who lives in the building and knows the boy, looks into it. What makes an acrophobic boy run up on the roof? The clues take her to Greenland.

Spanish TV reporters covering the War in Bosnia. Based on true experience.

A Salem resident attempts to frame her ex-lover's wife for being a witch in the middle of the 1692 witchcraft trials.

A man goes to see his former schoolmate working at a boiler house and persuades him to burn in the furnace the corpse of his communal flat neighbor whom he has just murdered after a quarrel. An orphaned girl gets a job in the archives of the maternity home to find out the identity of her mother who abandoned her years earlier. She finds her, befriends her and takes the first opportunity to throw her into the sea. An old intellectual tries to explain to the neighbor's five-year-old daughter "all the abomination of her lumpen existence". The girl feeling hurt for her mother decides to poison the old man with arsenic.

Julian and Jeremy, two brothers prefer to spend their time on drugs and joyriding. When their father, Fatty Lewis, they show up demanding compensation.

Laid-back hairdresser Louie (Jordan Chan) and his kind-hearted transgender mother (Lau Kar Ying) take in the bereaved, deeply depressed but beautiful Aggie (Yasuko Tomita) to give her new hope and a new family. With their unconditional support, she learns to blossom as a person and follow her dreams out into the wide world. Romance simmers - yet fails to break the surface - between the young pair, but a terrible tragedy leaves Louie in desperate need and Aggie facing a tough dilemma: should she continue living her dream as a chef in a prestigious restaurant, or return to care for the person she cares for most in his time of need?

At the close of World War II, a young nurse tends to a badly burned plane crash victim. His past is shown in flashbacks, revealing an involvement in a fateful love affair.