Best Of 2009

The huge tar sands in Alberta are a potentially profitable resource, but the environmental impact could be heavy and long-term.

One last trip down the rabbit hole before it gets paved over. A deep geography. What is above and what is below. What came before and what will come after. Agrarian fantasies, sacrificial rites, and excavations. A story told with maps, dreams, and prayers. A map lesson in three parts. A history of the State of Georgia - or Anywhere. Deer trail becomes Indian trail becomes county road.

A strange man with otherworldly talents becomes both a friend and a pariah in a small Turkish town in this drama from writer and director Reha Erdem. Yahya is nearly in a panic when his young son falls into the river on a wintry day and looks lifeless when he's pulled from the water.

Actress Thea tries to adjust to life after rehab, 1 1/2 years after a divorce in which her ex won custody of their two sons.

An American drug dealer living in Tokyo is betrayed by his best friend and killed in a drug deal. His soul, observing the repercussions of his death, seeks resurrection.

Story created from fragments in motion of observations from theatre and everyday life.

Marie, a theoretical physicist, searches in island seclusion for an understanding of the universal "unattainable." The natural world inexorably and wordlessly folds in around her even as she struggles to understand it through formal means.

In small-town Poland in the late 1950s, an aging woman married to a workaholic doctor meets a young man who makes her feel young again. Framed around this story, lead actress Krystyna Janda discusses the death of her husband from cancer.

A grieving couple retreat to their cabin in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage, but nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.

"Profetia" is a metaphysical Multi-plot epic about love, life and death in the harsh North West parts of Copenhagen. A woman stands by a fire, burning the stories about love she has written down over the course of a lifetime. One by one her stories seem to come true and converge around her. People, bound by love & blood, will meet and confront each other over the course of one single day. Can they change what seems to be written?

Blackstone is an authentic drama that explores the dynamics of family, power and politics on a First Nation reserve.

Sphinx on the Seine is a film poem: the beginning of a metaphysical journey, musing on a series of brief, but enigmatic images taken from around the world. These images follow one after the other, but geographically span thousands of miles and large passages of time between each cut.

As a family struggles to survive in rural isolation during the Great Depression, their daughter's secret affair begins a journey into the unknown.

Based on Vladimir Nabokov's work. In the center of a picture - history of the artist Troshcheykin, his wife Liouba, her mother and sister. They live abroad, in the provincial small town inhabited by compatriots. Unexpected return to the city nobody Barbashina overturns family life. Five years ago in a jealousy attack this person shot at Troshcheykin and his wife, has wounded them and, having got for six years to prison, has promised to return and finish begun.

An impressionist sea ponders the movements of creatures, seeing them in its dreams like dots swimming on its surface, carried along by the waves that slow the immense motion of its waters.

The everyday scenes are of both the city and countryside, close-ups of people when they are relaxing, and hard at work, and of big crowds at an official outdoor gathering. The interior views are of private and public spaces. The images are suggestive of the ordering of the people's lives.

The breathtaking opening vistas of Personal Baggage, with a choral score to match, give fair but subliminal warning to the audience: this film will twist you and turn you. A talented but spoilt young man smothered in the affection of his adoring mother and heedless of his aloof father; his grandfather, a benevolent but self-important patriarch; and his new girl-friend, a creature of voluptuous innocence wrestling with the torment of a dysfunctional home, are the central characters in this ensemble narrative of strained love and spiralling desire. The masterfully portrayed characters reveal the inexorable issues, or baggage, they bring with them, and ultimately their own baggage becomes a ruinous physical burden. The peripheral, chorus-like characters, including a reclusive painter and her friend, an unworldly man of the woods, provide their own touching story, but offer no redemption. And surrounding the entire film is the remote yet haunting presence of the Slovenian forests, which have been slowly yielding up their own gruesome historical baggage, a subtext that director Janez Lapajne uses to excruciatingly ironic effect.

LOWLANDS is a feature cinematic essay that moves between chronological and geographical zones and events including the 1996 trial of a Bosnian Serb for crimes against humanity, the paintings of Johannes Vermeer, and the relationships between them. The film culminates in a dream by Catharina Bolnes, the widow of Johannes Vermeer, embodied in a contemporary chamber opera/masque.

At 14 my grandmother's sister disappeared from her home in Israel. Years later, she started sending my family letters with a desperate plea for contact, from a refugee camp, where she lived as an Arab. My Jewish family chose to turn their back on their Arab relative. I discovered her letters after my grandmother died and I set on a painful quest, uncovering the past. I search for my lost family in territories occupied by my country and reveal a story that could only be told in the war-torn Middle East, about one family, on both sides of a conflict.

A surreal satire about a philosophy student who takes a job as a gravedigger while suffering an existential crisis.

Two best friends build their own kayaks and paddle alone for 97 days in the wilderness over 1,300 miles from Alaska to Seattle and survive to talk about most things.