Clara and Nikolaï meet at a rave. They return to Nikolaï's apartment and frantically make love. Afterwards, instead of parting, the two lovers divulge their deepest secrets to one another. Nicolaï is a beautiful loner, one with great ambition which he's unable to articulate to his peers. At thirty-one years old, he leads a simple and frugal life. He applies himself to reading the great classics of literature but never finishes a book he has begun....

In order to escape her narrow and restrictive life, Senta, the daughter of a rich ship owner, seeks refuge in her fantasies and dreams. In this realm of imagination, a bold and restless sea captain appears to her, the Flying Dutchman, who is cursed to wander the seas forever. In her obsessive dreams, Senta frees this man through her love for him. Herz's successful staging of The Flying Dutchman at the Berlin Komische Oper in 1962 at the invitation...

The engineer Linda falls in love with not with one, but two of the men on her construction team, in a film that raises questions about the importance of work, love and happiness in socialist East Germany of the 1970s. When Iris Gusner, one of very few East German female directors, previewed the rough-cut of her debut film, she was accused of presenting an "unrealistic picture of life," and officials banned the film. It did not become widely available...

Based on his own novel Metaphysics, Lech Majewski crafts intimate passion plays and creates "a luminous, highly erotic treatise on art, love and death" (Chicago Reader). When a terminally-ill art historian meets an engineer, it is love and lust at first sight. But their love is threatened by her looming illness. With her remaining days on earth numbered, she chooses to fan the flames of her obsession by taking her lover on a trip to Venice, where...

A powerfully intimate drama that captures the fears and desires of a young Japanese woman lost in America, Littlerock is an affectingly authentic portrait of the bittersweet pain of young love and the cruel reality of cultural miscommunication, making it one of the most emotionally moving American Independents in recent memory.

Legendary French actress Isabelle Huppert stars in the first English-language film from South Korean master Hong Sang-soo, "the love child Antonioni and Hou Hsiao-hsien never had" (Village voice). In a triptych of overlapping stories, three different French women (a filmmaker, an adulterer and a divorce- Huppert, Huppert and ... Huppert) visit a small Korean resort town and encounter a flirtatious director, a lovestruck lifeguard and far too much...

Tired of his troubled marriage, an Italian businessman's life changes dramatically after he learns that an aunt has left him property in Istanbul. Francesco (Alessandro Gassman) arrives to the Turkish city hoping that he can take care of the matter swiftly and return to Italy. He is surprised to discover that the property is actually one of the last traditional hamams (old-fashioned bath houses) in Turkey. The family that has been running the Turkish...

From legendary Oscar-winning director King Vidor (The crowd, Duel in the sun) comes an exotic tale of romance set in gorgeous Polynesia: Bird of paradise. Johnny (Joel McCrea) is an intrepid young sailor traveling the South Seas who falls in love with Luana (Dolores del Rio), the beautiful daughter of an island chief. But Luana is betrothed to a neighboring native prince, and is soon to be married. With little thought to the future, Johnny and Luana...

Legendary director Douglas Sirk's (Written on the wind, Imitation of life) La Habanera is a lushly poetic and boldly modern musical drama decades ahead of its time. Working at Germany's famed UFA Studios (Metropolis), under the very noses of the Nazi authorities that would later force him into Hollywood exile and eminence, Sirk transformed a glossy musical vehicle for UFA's "new Garbo" Zarah Leander into a dark and intimate anti-colonial melodrama....

Stylish and sophisticated, the film follows vocalist Toni LeBrun (Corinne Griffith), who leaves her family's bakery for Budapest to become an opera singer,unaware that she has contracted to perform as a chorus dancer at the Palais de Paris, a cabaret run by the decadent and delightfully menacing Madame Bauer (Maude George). Toni soon escapes to Monte Carlo with the cabaret's seamstress, Rosa (Louise Dresser), after warding off the wily cabaret patron,...