Drama (Films): To watch

An apartment kitchen: a man and a woman discuss Little Red Riding Hood, their voices hushed, mindful of waking the little girl sleeping next room. Waste land on the city outskirts: behind a line of abandoned trailers, the man silently watches what seems to be a family. The same city, the same man: driving through traffic with two hand-made firing pins for a hunting rifle. The man is 42 years old, his name - Viorel. Troubled by obscure thoughts, he drives across the city to a destination known only to him.

In Madrid, orphan sisters Irene, Ana, and Maite are raised by their austere aunt Paulina and their mute, crippled grandmother after the deaths of their mother and their military father Anselmo. Ana is a melancholic girl, fascinated by death, after watching her mother having a painful death and her father dead in bed.

A lumberjack, Doru, whose wife dies leaving the child she was looking after, Meda, at risk of being sent to an orphanage, decides to fight for adoption, against the odds.

Seeing a way to reassert control over her adult son's life when he faces manslaughter charges, an affluent Romanian woman sets out on a campaign of emotional and social manipulation to keep him out of prison, navigating the waters of power, corruption and influence. Child's Pose is based on the sense of loss of parents who have to send their children away-physically and psychologically. The parent-child relationship is re-assessed through a son in his 30s that wants to escape from his mother, who in turn wants to keep her adult son by her side. The mother's character is quite familiar, but this film is unique in that the director delicately portrays how the controlling mother wants to deny that her son is destined to leave her by following the characters' emotional flows and gazing at their twisted desires. Luminita Gheorghiu turns in an extraordinary performance in playing a mother struggling to "save" her son. Heading to the conclusion, the film shows that the unhealthy mother-son relationship is not that simple when it comes to matters of humane duty.

Alexander, an old writer, is ill and prepared to die. He says his goodbyes and recalls his life with his wife long ago. While driving his car he saves a street kid, an illegal immigrant from Albania, from being arrested. Later in the day, by chance, he sees the same boy being abducted, and follows in his car. Although he is preoccupied with his own regrets, he puts death on hold to find a way to help the boy.

Bent on finding their anonymous father, a mythical figure tarnished by uncertainty, innocent eleven-year-old Voula and her wide-eyed five-year-old brother Alexandros summon up the courage to run away from home. As the inexperienced companions embark on a long, peril-laden quest to reunite with the long-lost parent in far-off Germany--against the backdrop of bustling railway stations and the grey, rain-soaked winter landscapes of the harsh Greek province--the face of reality, sometimes heart-warming and sometimes utterly appalling, begins to take shape. Now, on their way to the Promised Land, friendly Orestis seems eager to lend a helping hand and offer shelter; however, can the siblings trust him? But the unprotected travellers are running out of luck and hope. Is this journey to the unknown nothing but a wild goose chase?

Igor--a 15-year-old apprentice mechanic--spends his off hours at the beck and call of his father. Igor's father, Roger, is a low-life involved with smuggling undocumented immigrants into Belgium, and acts as their slumlord, housing them in barely livable conditions, and paying them menial wages to work construction on his building (among other scams). When the building inspector pays a surprise visit and Amidou falls off a scaffold in his hurry to hide, things start to unravel, particularly when Igor makes a promise to the injured Amidou that ultimately exposes the different values of Igor and Roger, and of Amidou's wife, Assita.

Sokol and Lorna, two Albanian emigrants in Belgium, dream of leaving their dreary jobs to set up a snack bar. They need money, and a permanent resident status. Claudy is a junkie - he needs money to satisfy his addiction. Andrei, the cigarette smuggler, must hold up for a while outside Russia; he has loads of money. Fabio, the Italian taxi driver and aspiring gang boss, elaborates a clever scheme: he will pay Claudy to marry Lorna so that she acquires a Belgian citizenship. Then she is to re-marry Andrei, who will in this way obtain the coveted EU passport - and pay a hefty price to Fabio and Lorna for the service. Like all plans, this one will not survive the contact with reality.

The first scene, like almost all others, is a fighting scene. A girl, about 18, is sacked from her factory work because her trial period is over. The girl, Rosetta, is quite upset and the cops will have to arrive to get her out. She has her reasons: she lives in a caravan, with her alcoholic mother. She goes looking for work as some go to the war. Treasons, murders are in her mind, if not in her acts.

After gangster Mulligan's (

At about 11, the stubborn and impulsive Cyril seems on his way to delinquency: he has no mother, his father wants a new life without him, so he's in a foster institution. He searches for his father, wanting him and his bike. Through the intersession of Samantha, a hairdresser Cyril happens upon, he gets his bike back, and she offers to take him into her home on weekends. He remains aloof from her and gets involved with a young crook. Is Cyril intent on driving Samantha away - and what then?

A low-key satire that takes a droll approach to the serious subject of illegal immigration.

Drama set in a repressed, deeply religious community in the north of Scotland, where a naive young woman named Bess McNeil meets and falls in love with Danish oil-rig worker Jan. Bess and Jan are deeply in love but, when Jan returns to his rig, Bess prays to God that he returns for good. Jan does return, his neck broken in an accident aboard the rig. Because of his condition, Jan and Bess are now unable to enjoy a sexual relationship and Jan urges Bess to take another lover and tell him the details. As Bess becomes more and more deviant in her sexual behavior, the more she comes to believe that her actions are guided by God and are helping Jan recover.

Mihai is a maths teacher from Bucharest, unhappy about the compromises that his school headmistress asks him to make. The story starts on a weekend day when Mihai and his lover, SWEETIE, go out for a picnic just to relax a bit after a very stressful week. But the day takes a different course when Sweetie runs their car over a prostitute, on a side road outside Bucharest. The two lovers fight, as Sweetie wants to cover up the accident, while Mihai, a moralist, can't accept that. Sweetie's aggressiveness wins over meek Mihai, and so they decide to hide the woman's corpse in the forest. The prostitute, however, turns out to be not that badly hurt and recovers. The two dodge, pretending they had found her hurt, and Ana, the hooker, invites herself to the picnic. Ana gradually gets into the couple's life, aggressing Sweetie, warming up to Mihai and being indifferent when they are all together. While meaning well, she lies and manipulates them - but then anyone can see that Ana, even if not really mad, is a bit of a loony. This unveils the two lovers' temper- and couple-related problems, the fact that Sweetie is married to another man and Mihai - a lover anguished by a relationship he'd like to legitimate. Last but not least, Mihai thinks Ana is interesting and sensual, while Sweetie becomes jealous and possessive.

Romeo Aldea (49), a physician living in a small mountain town in Transylvania, has raised his daughter Eliza with the idea that once she turns 18, she will leave to study and live abroad. His plan is close to succeeding - Eliza has won a scholarship to study psychology in the UK. She just has to pass her final exams - a formality for such a good student. On the day before her first written exam, Eliza is assaulted in an attack that could jeopardize her entire future. Now Romeo has to make a decision. There are ways of solving the situation, but none of them using the principles he, as a father, has taught his daughter.

Silviu, a young man who has spent years in a youth penitentiary, is granted release. Before he can leave, his mother returns to Romania to bring his little brother to Italy with her, despite Silviu's objections. He meets a young woman, Ana, who is working on a research project in the prison, and becomes interested in her. In his desperation Silviu resorts to violence, and Ana becomes his hostage.

Sitting at the dinner table with his four grown-up children and their partners, widower Victor relishes his role as family patriarch. He holds forth on physics and wine until his son Cosma confronts him with the fact that his name has shown up in historical documents which indicate he denounced women wanting to flaunt the abortion ban in place until 1989. The mood abruptly shifts. Victor defends himself by pointing out that he is, after all, against abortion and that twins Sasha and Romi owe their very lives to this fact - their mother wanted to abort them. Yet when Sasha announces she is pregnant soon afterwards, Victor's convictions are put to a true test.

Alina and Voichita have been friends since their orphanage days. And they have been lovers since they became sexually mature. But despite their oath of mutual fidelity, Alina, who could not bear poverty any more, emigrated to Germany where she became a barmaid. Now she just could not take the estrangement from Voichita and today she is back to Romania with a view to taking Voichita along with her to Germany. The only trouble is that in the meantime her girlfriend has betrayed her in falling in love with... God! Voichita indeed now lives in a convent where she plans to make vows. The priest agrees, if somewhat reluctantly, to accommodate Alina before their (hypothetical) departure. He sees all too well that not only is the young woman materialistic but hostile and troublesome as well...