48m
Director: Allan King
Cast: Enzina Berti, Diane D’Aquila and Jean Gascon
Synopsis (IMDB): Outraged by the insults to her mother, Maria decides to organize a union for the immigrant women she and her mother work with in a Toronto sweat shop. In her battle against male chauvinism, patronage and bullying, Maria wins her own freedom.
68m; Finland
Director: Aki Kaurismäki
Cast: Kati Outinen, Elina Salo and Esko Nikkari
Synopsis (IMDB): Iris has a dead-end job in a match-factory, lives with her dour and forbidding parents, and her social life is a disaster. But when she is made pregnant after a one-night stand by a man who thought she was a prostitute, she decides that enough is enough and plans her revenge.
85m; France
Director: Frédéric Balekdjian
Cast: Pascal Elbé, Simon Abkarian and Isaac Sharry
Synopsis (IMDB): Vahé, Sahak, and Toros run a bonneteau game on the streets of Paris. They’re Lebanese French of Armenian descent. Vahé also works with his father, a cloth merchant, and is in love with Lu Ann, Chinese French, who’s broken off their affair. Vahé wants to make things right: with Lu Ann, with his father’s business, and with Yuen, Lu Ann’s younger brother, who’s on the edge of delinquency and owes money to the gang who arranged his passage from China. Vahé tries to be like a father to Yuen, teaching him a work ethic. When Yuen impetuosity puts his own life in jeopardy, Vahé tries to save him. Will Vahé’s impulses and hopes die on the streets of Paris?
117m; U.S.
Director: Robert Redford
Cast: Rubén Blades, Richard Bradford and Sonia Braga
Synopsis (IMDB): In Milagro, a small town in the American Southwest, Ladd Devine plans to build a major new resort development. While activist Ruby Archuleta and lawyer/newspaper editor Charlie Bloom realize that this will result in the eventual displacement of the local Hispanic farmers, they cannot arouse much opposition because of the short term opportunities offered by construction jobs. But when Joe Mondragon illegally diverts water to irrigate his bean field, the local people support him because of their resentment of water use laws that favor the rich like Devine. When the Governor sends in ruthless troubleshooter Kyril Montana to settle things quickly before the lucrative development is cancelled, a small war threatens to erupt.
100m; Italy
Director: Vittorio De Sica
Synopsis: Urban poverty in Italy solved by a strange happy ending.
103m; Italy
Director: Gianni Amelio
Cast: Sergio Castellitto, Tai Ling
Synopsis: Labourer Vincenzo travels from Italy to China in search of a machine with a deficiency that was produced in the now defunct establishment at which Vincenzo worked for years.
Contact: Cattleya Via della Frezza, 59 Roma00186 Italy Phn: +39-06-367201 Fax: +39 06 3672050 http://www.cattleya.it/ info@cattleya.it
90m; Burkina Faso/France
Director: S. Pierre Yameogo
Cast: Serge Bayala, Pierre-Loup Rajot and Anne Roussel
Synopsis (IMDB): Mamadi is struggling to complete a doctorate at a Parisian university after the government of his country has stopped paying his scholarship. Thanks to his acquaintances in the African community, he finds a job as night watchman in an underground car park. There, a French colleague, Franck, helps the friendly African academic getting around. However, the car park is also a meeting point for dubious characters, and when Mamadi accidentally wrecks a drug trafficking operation, Franck is really hard-pressed to put his pal and himself out of harm’s way. Wouldn’t Mamadi’s home country be the ideal place to escape the gangsters’ wrath
124m; U.S.
Director: Martin Ritt
Cast: Sean Connery, Richard Harris and Samantha Eggar
Synopsis (IMDB): Life is rough in the coal mines of 1876 Pennsylvania. A secret group of Irish emigrant miners, known as the Molly Maguires, fights against the cruelty of the mining company with sabotage and murder. A detective, also an Irish emigrant, is hired to infiltrate the group and report on its members. But on which side do his sympathies lie?
97m; U.K.
Director: Jerzy Skolimowski
Cast: Jeremy Irons, Eugene Lipinski and Jirí Stanislav
Synopsis (IMDB): A Polish contractor, Nowak, leads a group of workmen to London so they can provide cheap labor for a government official based there. Nowak (Irons) has to manage the project and the men as they encounter the tempations of the West and loneliness and separation from their families. Nowak is the only one of the group who speaks English, and he uses this as a tool over his team. When the unrest in Poland leads to a military takeover, Nowak is faced with a much more difficult situation than he expected.
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