Movies I Saw in 2014

In a secluded house by the sea with the curtains shut, a screenwriter hides from the world with only his dog as company. The tranquility is abruptly broken one night by the arrival of a young woman fleeing from the authorities. Refusing to leave, she takes refuge in the house. But come dawn, another unexpected presence will change everything.

Anna (Carina Lau), a wealthy Hong Kong housewife, suddenly finds herself deep in financial trouble as her only source of income, her husband, disappears. Her driver, Fai (Chen Kun), who lives in Shenzhen with his wife, are expecting the couple's second child. But under China's One Child Policy, they need to find the money to pay the penalty or the couple must find a way for Fai's wife to give birth in Hong Kong.

The story of an Argentine family who lived with Josef Mengele without knowing his true identity, and of a girl who fell in love with one of the biggest criminals of all time.

TRANSIT explores the intersecting stories of Filipinos in Tel Aviv when the threat of a law deporting the children of migrant workers looms their precarious lives.

As a leader of the local community, Chairman Amin bans every kind of image in his water-locked village in rural Bangladesh. He even goes on to claim that imagination is also sinful since it gives one the license to infiltrate into any prohibited territory. But change is a desperate wind that is difficult to resist by shutting the window. The tension between this traditional window and modern wind grows to such an extent that it starts to leave a ripple effect on the lives of a group of typically colorful, eccentric, and emotional people living in that village. But at the very end of the film, Television, which he hated so much, comes to the rescue and helps Chairman Amin reach a transcendental state where he and his God are unified. A new twist to the story makes him embrace IMAGE and IMAGINATION

To promote their book BOSNIAN FLAT DOG, Swedish comics artists Max Andersson and Lars Sjunnesson tour the countries of former Yugoslavia with a mummyfied Marshal Tito in a refrigerator. Watching border controls turn into improvised snapshot sessions, admiring mutant iron-curtain Disney toys, buying souvenir grenade shell handicrafts and discovering sniper art in blown-out apartments, they find that truth may indeed be stranger than fiction. Max Andersson's feature film debut operates on multiple levels to achieve a rare synthesis of form and content. The combination of animated crumbling, fragmentary garbage characters and grainy black and white super 8 mixed with documentary MiniDV looks like nothing else but seems perfectly natural. A roller coaster ride through a parallel universe where all borders are disintegrating - at the same time tragic, poetic and hilariously funny.

This film is about the relationship of a mother and her daughter, the split-up of their family, the blessing and curse of belonging together and about coming of age - all this from the perspective of the young girl Aglaja. The story is based on real-life events, an Eastern European circus artist family that fled to the West. If they want to stay in the circus business they have to make up an exotic act. The mother spends all their money to buy a very dangerous act: hanging by her hair high up in the dome of the circus while juggling with burning torches. Every night Aglaja is terrified by the fear of losing her mother. But, on some day, she has to follow the family tradition and become the "Woman with the Hair of Steel".

In 1939 the 13-year-old Carl arrives at the lighthouse Lågskär in the Åland Islands, for a position as lighthouse disciple. He is trained by the demanding lighthouse keeper.

A country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse in the human. Love and death become interlaced and with immense consequences. The fortunes of the people in the country through the horses' perception.

In the antebellum United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.

A young priest gets an idea to pierce condoms before they are sold in order to increase the birth rate of his island.

A European princess arrives in New York City to secure a much-needed loan for her country. She contracts the mumps, and an actress who looks exactly like her is hired to impersonate her.

An opera troupe in a small town decides to perform Mozart's Don Giovanni. The view behind the scenes uncovers the world of opera without the glitter. A tale of love and disappointment, about music and passionate love-making and about people that live their lives in spite of the opera.

As the Berlin Wall crumbles, Katrine, the daughter of a Norwegian woman and a German occupation soldier, finds her idyllic life disrupted as she refuses to testify a trial against the Norwegian state on behalf of her fellow "war children."

A Polish man who returns home after the death of his father unearths a secret about the now-deceased Jewish residents of his village.

Set in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in 1992. Friends Eka and Natia look to leave childhood behind as they ignore societal customs and work to escape their turbulent family lives.

A writer encounters the owner of an aging high-class hotel, who tells him of his early years serving as a lobby boy in the hotel's glorious years under an exceptional concierge.

Spend a year in the life of one of America's most innovative classrooms.

Roots music icon Chris Strachwitz is a detective of deep American music - music that's the antithesis of the corporate "mouse music" dominating pop culture. Since 1960, he has been the guiding force behind legendary Arhoolie Records, bringing Cajun music out of Louisiana, Tex-Mex out of Texas, blues out of the country - and into the living rooms of Middle America. American music has never been the same. Born a German count, Strachwitz fled his homeland after WWII at 16. In the US, he discovered, and shared, a musical landscape that most Americans missed. He takes us on a hip-shaking stomp from Texas to New Orleans, Cajun country to Appalachia, as he continues his passionate quest for the musical soul of America.

An intimate look into the rewriting of the Icelandic constitution by its citizens. Chronicling a nation-redefining event, Blueberry Soup is inescapably political, social, and creative. This feature-length film documents the 5-year aftermath that lead to the re-writing of the Icelandic constitution. Wilma's Wish Productions has directed and produced Blueberry Soup in order to contribute a vital example of civic engagement to include in global discussions on national reform.

An art instructor and an English teacher form a rivalry that ends up with a competition at their school in which students decide whether words or pictures are more important.

After he is threatened during a confession, a good-natured priest must battle the dark forces closing in around him.

A head chef quits his restaurant job and buys a food truck in an effort to reclaim his creative promise, while piecing back together his estranged family.

Dan Cohen, founder of the nonprofit organization Music & Memory, fights against a broken healthcare system to demonstrate music's ability to combat memory loss and restore a deep sense of self to those suffering from it.