Theban Plays: Oedipus the King

Funeral Parade of Roses

In 1960s Tokyo, Gonda owns a bar in which the gay, cross-dresser, and trans scenes meet. Gonda is in a relationship with the madam of the bar, Leda. As the younger Eddie starts a passionate affair with Gonda, she ignites the jealousy of Leda, unaware of another kind of history between them.

EXIT MEDEA

Torn between loyalty to her family, and her love for Jason, Medea attacks her father and flees with Jason to unknown lands. Her brother pursues them. When Jason betrays and abandons her, she is driven to the ultimate act of vengeful destruction.

ITA Live: Oedipus

It is election night. Oedipus is on the verge of a massive victory. The country has not known a leader for many years since Laius' death. The ambitions are great. Oedipus wants to create a future, create a new way of life. He also insists, if elected, that the investigation into the death of his predecessor is reopened. In the meanwhile, in the half-empty campaign headquarters, Oedipus is surprised by his family - mother, wife and children - with a dinner. An old incident is thereby brought up. Gradually, Oedipus discovers that his past is very different from what he has always thought. During his research, the pieces of the puzzle fall together. Oedipus tries to control his fate, but discovers that he has been seeing blind all along.

Oedipus Rex

The story of Oedipus' gradual discovery of his primal crime, killing his father and marrying his mother, filmed by the famed British theatrical director Sir Tyrone Guthrie. This elegant version of Sophocles' play adds a brilliant stroke: the actors wear masks just as the Greeks did in the playwright's day.

Medea

Based on the plot of Euripides' Medea. Medea centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed her for another woman.

Mother's Meat and Freud's Flesh

Inspired by the early trash films of John Waters, the film stars Estdelacropolis as Demira, a gay porn actor struggling with both his emotionally complicated relationship with his mother Esther and his desire to break out of porn and into mainstream movies. He connects with a Freudian psychiatrist who is convinced that his homosexuality stems from an unresolved Oedipus complex which he has repressed by denying his natural attractions to women, to which the psychiatrist's proposed solution is to hypnotize Esther into believing that she is a man so that men will become the gender that sexually repulses Demira; in his career, he is ambivalent when the first "mainstream" role he is able to land is a gore film in which he will play the victim of a cannibal family for which Esther has also been cast as the mother.

Frine cortigiana d'Oriente

Le Troiane

A short film by Chiara Del Bove. Starring Caterina Cesari, Elisa Brunelli, Denise Del Bove and Camilla Calabrò.

The Trojan Women

In the aftermath of the Trojan Wars, Queen Hecuba takes stock of the defeated kingdom. Her son has been killed, and his widow, Andromache, is left to raise their son, Astyanax, alone. Hecuba's daughter, Cassandra, fears being enslaved by her Greek masters, while Helen of Troy risks being executed. Astyanax also becomes the focus of the Greeks' attention as the last male heir of the Trojan royal family.

Electra

Living in exile after the death of their father, the grown children of a murdered and usurped king converge to exact eye-for-an-eye revenge.

Phaedra

A modern retelling of the Greek myth of Phaedra. The young and fiery second wife of an extremely wealthy shipping magnate meets her estranged stepson Alexis and sparks immediately fly. Their love seems doomed from the beginning when she convinces him to come to Paris to meet his father.

Meinir's Tree

Grey and Black

The story of Maria, a woman betrayed by his companion, David, when he steals a sack of money and flees, taking refuge in the island of Pico. Furious and determined to avenge herself, she proposes to an Police Inspector, Lucas, to chase and to find David. However, David, on a visit to the island of Faial, falls in love with a local, Marina. Maria and Lucas look for David in the Azores, they cross with Mariana in Faial and the three will discover David in his house of the mountain, at the top of the Peak. In a final confrontation, as in a Greek tragedy, Mary and David adjust the accounts that fate has traced to them.

Catching the Big Fish

Set during the turbulent shift from silent to sound, this film intertwines the lives of a struggling filmmaker and a solitary fisherman. A meditation on creativity and change, this film explores the enduring value of artistic integrity in an ever-shifting world.

Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One

Scheherazade narrates three more tales, supposedly selected from the 470th, 484th and 497th nights of her ordeal: “It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that a Judge will cry instead of giving out her sentence. A runaway murderer will wander through the land for over forty days and will teletransport himself to escape the Guard while dreaming of prostitutes and partridges. A wounded cow will reminisce about a thousand-year-old olive tree while saying what she must say, which will sound none less than sad!

Medea

Medea is expelled from the mining region in the Atacama Desert and is given just one day to disappear. But in that single day, she comes up with a plan for revenge. In order to carry out this plan, which will culminate in her murdering her own son, she invokes her innermost strength, summoning the power of the female gender.

Mourning Becomes Electra

Near the end of the Civil War, the proud residents of Mannon Manor await the return of shipping tycoon Ezra Mannon and son Orin. Meanwhile Ezra’s conniving wife Christine and daughter Lavinia vie for the love of a handsome captain with a dark secret while well-meaning neighbor Peter sets his sights on Lavinia.

In the Darkness of the Night

A disturbing film about the Portuguese underworld of prostitution.

Lost, Found

Li Jie, a lawyer, is taking divorce proceedings to try to get custody of her daughter. As she is working hard to earn a better life for her daughter, she hires a baby sitter, Sun Fang, to watch her child. One day, Li comes home only to find her child and Sun have disappeared. Unfortunately, Li is suspected by both her family and the police, and must lean on herself to trace Sun alone.

Creature Companion

In the American suburbs, two women mysteriously and sensuously entwine in this slow-burning, saucy, abstracted fable on the longing and laboring female body.