Mary's Monster

A woman director is making a film about Billie Holiday. She wants to learn from her how to "feel" again, how to love again.

Crystal Lake is about a group of young girls who take over a skate park, forming an all-female force field on the half pipe. There on the reclaimed ramp, with no boys around, they are thriving and visible. This is an anthem for young feminists, which presents female friendship as a means to survive adolescence.

The four sequences in the film cover four days in a life of young Warsaw lad in September 1938, 1939, 1943 and 1944. In the first sequence Jurek decides not to study in the Sorbonne but enlists in a Polish military school instead. In the second sequence the war starts and Warsaw is occupied. In the third sequence he works in the underground resistance. The final sequence takes place during the Warsaw uprising.

In this stop-motion animated comedy, a young couple's romantic weekend getaway is interrupted by a birth control mishap.

About the first years of the formation of Soviet power, about the life and work of Feliks Dzerzhinsky in 1918-1925. The film covers the most important episodes of his biography. In July 1918, as a result of a revolt of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the German ambassador Mirbach was killed. Feliks Dzerzhinsky alone goes to the headquarters of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Anarchists, he manages to persuade ordinary soldiers and sailors, participants in the rebellion, who are now cracking down on their leaders. In 1921, Dzerzhinsky was aimed at combating homelessness, as a result of which, by 1925, former homeless children, having completed their studies, were sent to the construction of Yugostal, the largest industrial plant in Ukraine.

Adina lives in Germany with her father and little brother after fleeing Afghanistan. War trauma and uncertainty about her mother's fate are constant companions in the family. Adina's need to dance her worries away is countered by her father's strict rules.

Emmanuelle lives in the suburbs near a shopping mall. Since her father's death, she feels increasingly out of sync with the world around her. Her mother is distracted, high school bores her. She has just turned 17 and, this particular year, her life will take an entirely different turn.

Nina, a teacher in her mid-30s struggling to have a child, looks for a surrogate mother. It would seem that together with her husband she has found an ideal candidate, yet Nina falls for the woman, who could have given birth to her child.

Five former high school friends reunite for an evening of fun, remembrance and sadness in this Altmanesque portrait of female friendship. A look at how youthful idealism turns into adult pragmatism, and how one can fight such changes, from the director of Free Radicals.

Knut Hamsun is Norway's most famous and admired author. Ever since he was young he has hated the English for the starvation they caused Norway during WWI. When the Germans occupy Norway 9 April 1940 he welcomes them and the protection they can give from Great Britain. He supports the national socialist ideals, but opposes the way these ideals are turned into action - that Norwegians are jailed and executed. His wife Marie travels in Germany during the war as a sign of support from Knut and herself.

Slightly over-the-hill actress Nina has a fainting spell in a Paris park and Sami, an Algerian man, out for a run comes to her aid. She seeks him out afterwards to return some property and discovers he works at night as a female prostitute. Nina is drawn to him and a friendship develops as he attempts to kick his drug habit and she tries to revive her acting career that sidelined when she moved to Russia for years.