Arthur Harari's Favourite Films

After enrolling in a school, an impoverished boy finds conflict with his classmates and decides to compete to earn their respect.

Based on a true story, primarily on a conflict between two youth gangs, a 14-year-old boy's girlfriend conflicts with the head of one gang for an unclear reason, until finally the conflict comes to a violent climax.

A woman falls in love with a Japanese soldier during the Japanese Occupation in the Philippines; the whole town turns against her.

Júlio Madiaga, a 'provinciano', arrives in Manila to search for his beloved, Ligaya.

The hidden nightlife of ordinary people living in Manila unveils. Lovers and families' conflicts are radically pitted against each other as they live in the night streets rampant with drugs and prostitution. The outstanding narrative explicitly unravels the various characters and episodes. This landmark film of Ishmael Bernal depicts the darkness of city life so vividly that it was once prohibited to use the word 'Manila' on its title.

This is the story of a generation of women, told with verve by Pascal Thomas through the story of the three Roussel sisters, suburbanites who became Parisians in the 1960s.

While drag-racing through the American Southwest in a Chevrolet 150, a driver and his mechanic cross paths with an enigmatic hitchhiker and the tall-tale-spinning driver of a GTO.

Follows a family of Native Americans living in the City of Angels.

At the instigation of the filmmakers, the young men of the Ile-aux-Coudres in the middle of the St-Lawrence River try as a memorial to their ancestors to revive the fishing of the belugas interrupted in 1924.

A young furrier leaves Castoria in 1971 to emigrate to France to live with a relative. He finds a photograph, leading to a confrontation with his relative.

A social commentary on post-war France's urban developments.

A trip into the Mediterranean sea becomes a trip into the discovery of how society's frameworks of the rich and poor are delicate and temporary.

A young man named Kaspar Hauser suddenly appears in Nuremberg in 1828, barely able to talk or walk, and bearing a strange note.

Film-maker Werner Herzog follows mountaineers Reinhold Messner and Hans Kammerlander as they attempt to climb the high altitude peaks of Gasherbrum II and Gasherbrum I all in one expedition, seeking to reveal their inner motivation.

The semi-autobiographical film on director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's childhood and adolescence, when he was growing up in Taiwan, living through the deaths of his father, mother and grandmother.

In Seoul, a suicidal student meets a young woman who decides to join him in his fatal gesture. Tongsu, an unsuccessful filmmaker, spots a beautiful young woman, who happens to be the lead actress in the film he has just seen.

Two teenage girls heading to a rock concert for one's birthday try to score marijuana in the city, where they are kidnapped and brutalized by a gang of psychopathic convicts.

Distrust and uncertainty arise when four long-term inmates cautiously induct a new prisoner into their elaborate prison-break scheme.

The film outlines Japanese students movements in the 60s, then shows the formation of the Japanese United Red Army, a communist armed resistance group.

Lisbon, 1989. A middle-aged poor idiot, tormented by an illness, lives in a cheap room in a family boarding house, in the old section of the city's waterfront.

Jamie leaves the children's home to live with his paternal grandmother. After working in a mine and in a tailor's shop, he is conscripted into the RAF, and goes to Egypt, where he is befriended by Robert, whose undemanding companionship releases Jamie from self-pity.

The First part of Bill Douglas' influential trilogy harks back to his impoverished upbringing in early-'40s Scotland. Cinema was his only escape - he paid for it with the money he made from returning empty jam jars - and this escape is reflected most closely at this time of his life as an eight-year-old living on the breadline with his half-brother and sick grandmother in a poor mining village.

Jamie and Tommy are separated by the death of their grandmother; Jamie with another relative and Tommy to a welfare home. Now Jamie is all alone and his life is not at all happy taken over by silence, rejection and violence.

A French-American in Paris lives by sponging off his working friends, and throws a party using borrowed money when his rich American aunt dies, believing firmly in his horoscope.

Silvio refuses to fight for the fascists and joins the resistance with Elena. After the war, his vitriolic newspaper articles cause him to be sentenced to imprisonment.