Loie Fuller, in her 1920 feature-length film Le Lys de la vie, […] explored the new technique for poetic ends, creating fleeting, dreamlike images that "freed" the medium from "illusionism" and imbued it with fantasy.
Margery Meadows
as Corona
Flora Hart
as Mora
René Clair
as
Jean-Paul Le Tarare
Damia
An alliance of evil-doers, led by Frieda, looks to take over Fairy Tale Land. But when Ella realizes her stepmother is out to ruin her storybook existence, she takes a dramatic turn and blossoms into the leader of the resistance effort.
In Bagdad, Princess Badr al-Budur, the daughter of the Sultan, falls in love with Aladdin, the son of a poor tailor, and rejects the suit of evil alchemist al-Talib, her father's choice. Al-Talib consults his Evil Spirit, who advises him to find the magic lamp hidden in an underground cave. Unable to get it himself, al-Talib hires Aladdin, who secures the lamp but keeps it when he realizes al-Talib's wickedness. With wealth obtained through wishes, Aladdin courts the princess. After the lamp changes hands between al-Talib and Aladdin, al-Talib steals it and abducts the princess to the desert. Aladdin follows with only a gourd of water. Suffering from thirst and exhaustion, Aladdin nearly succumbs, but the horsemen of the Sultan, who learned of his daughter's abduction, ride up and rescue Aladdin.
Simultaneously sumptuous and gorgeous, garish and grim, this is a re-working of Pinocchio for the neo-liberal era. Rachel Maclean’s dark fairytale, which represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale 2017, depicts a brash and baroque binary world of poverty and riches where the prospect of easy wealth tempts even good boys like Pic into bad ways. But if everyone believes the lie, what’s the problem?
Whispered to by an ancient tree, a young shepherd dreams of more than his simple existence among grass and sheep. The journey he embarks on brings him into contact with golden birds, a dragon and a fair damsel.
On the mystical island of Themyscira, a proud and fierce warrior race of Amazons have raised a daughter of untold beauty, grace and strength: Princess Diana. When an Army fighter pilot, Steve Trevor, crash-lands on the island, the rebellious and headstrong Diana defies Amazonian law by accompanying Trevor back to civilization.
The presence of the moon affects all under its glow. The film explores the lunar cycle and the energies invoked by its radiance.
Aboard a spaceship where souls of the deceased are readied for reincarnation, a lone crew member's rigid existence is disrupted by a spry new assistant.
Six women in Paris traverse the anxiety of the city after dark. A filmmaker struggles to understand the film she is making. A Black single mother refuses the categories imposed on her. A former sex worker reflects on her past. A poet gives up trying for a child. Taking place over a single night, the film intertwines dream, fiction, and reality, liquefying one into the other.
When a young boy makes a wish at a carnival machine to be big, he wakes up the following morning to find that it has been granted and his body has grown older overnight, but he is still the same 13-year-old boy inside. Now he must learn how to cope with the unfamiliar world of grown-ups, including getting a job and having his first romantic encounter with a woman.
15-year-old Mia faces an overwhelming transformation which puts her entire existence into question. Her body is changing radically, and despite desperate attempts to halt the process, Mia is soon forced to accept that nature is far more powerful than she is.
Phyllis is a moving and atmospheric portrait of a ‘psychic’ vampire, a woman obsessed with synthetic Nollywood dramas, that lives alone in Lagos, Nigeria. The central idea of this short experimental film is the practise and significance of wig-wearing in Nollywood film; a practise the director has invested with deeper psychological as well as science-fiction layers. Underpinning this central idea however is a critique of the unforgiving treatment of single women in Nollywood and Nigeria. The film is an example of what the director, Zina Saro-Wiwa, has termed “alt-Nollywood”, a genre that plays with and reworks certain narrative, stylistic and visual conventions of Nollywood. Phyllis explores the gothic possibilities of the Nollywood aesthetic creating a new kind of low-budget atmospheric film that is very much of Nollywood and yet subverts the genre. Using Nollywood to subvert Nollywood.
Mr. Conductor's supply of magic gold dust, which allows him to travel between Shining Time and Thomas's island, is critically low. Unfortunately, he doesn't know how to get more. Meanwhile, Thomas is fending off attacks by the nasty diesel engines. Getting more gold dust will require help from Mr. C's slacker cousin, his new friend Lily and her morose grandfather, plus the secret engine.
Two women are bonded by strange rituals; a blurred sense of blood relation portrayed through a game of domination, submission, voyeurism and cruel tenderness.
'The Wishing Tree' is a magical, inspirational and an extremely entertaining story of five children in a hill-station somewhere in India, who come together to save their 'wishing tree' from being cut by vested interests. The film is extremely lively, endearing and engrossing so that the underlying message to protect trees and environment is seamlessly driven home.
A formal 1861 portrait of a Chinese Mandarin and his wife is the starting point for this allegorical investigation of the fantasies spawned in the West about the East, particularly that which associates femininity with the mysterious Orient. ADYNATA presents a series of oppositions-male and female images, past and present sounds-which in and of themselves construct a minimal and fragmentary narrative, an open text of our imaginations, fears and fantasies.
When young dockworker Jude leaves Liverpool to find his estranged father in the United States, he is swept up by the waves of change that are re-shaping the nation. Jude falls in love with Lucy, who joins the growing anti-war movement. As the body count in Vietnam rises, political tensions at home spiral out of control and the star-crossed lovers find themselves in a psychedelic world gone mad.
A young teenage werewolf is torn between honoring her family's secret and her love for a man.
A young girl inhabits an isolated island with her scientist father and communicates with a reclusive author of the novel she's reading.
Darken is set in a bizarre, mysterious, and violent unknown world with danger and death around every corner. After a young woman is accosted by a dying warrior in the middle of the street, a bizarre incantation propels her into the realm of Darken - a violent prison-like world of labyrinthine rooms, interconnected with no apparent rhyme or reason and no way of escape. As she fights for survival within this brutal place, she finds allies who are rebelling against the rule of a self-appointed religious despot who demands allegiance to an all-powerful god called "Mother Darken." Eve and her allies must fight with everything they have if they are to have any hope of surviving the horrors Darken has in store for them.
Mario and Luigi, plumbers from Brooklyn, find themselves in an alternate universe where evolved dinosaurs live in hi-tech squalor. They're the only hope to save our universe from invasion by the dino dictator, Koopa.
