A hilarious introduction, using as examples some of the best films ever made, to some of Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek's most exciting ideas on personal subjectivity, fantasy and reality, desire and sexuality.
Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim.
Mia is a rebellious teenager on the verge of being kicked out of school. Her hard-partying mother, Joanne, neglects Mia's welfare in favor of her own, and her younger sister hangs out with a much older crowd. Sparks fly between Mia and Connor, Joanne's new boyfriend, and he encourages Mia to pursue her interest in dance. As the boundaries of the relationships become blurred, Mia and Joanne compete for Connor's affection.
Dolf a 15 year old boy is sent back in time by a timemachine. Accidentally he is sent back to the Middle Ages. He is rescued by children who are part of a childrens' crusade, on their way to rescue Jeruzalem. During the trip Dolf finds out the danger is not coming from outside the crusade, but from within.
The Tulse Luper Suitcases reconstructs the life of Tulse Luper, a professional writer and project-maker, caught up in a life of prisons. He was born in 1911 in Newport, South Wales and presumably last heard of in 1989. His life is reconstructed from the evidence of 92 suitcases found around the world - 92 being the atomic number of the element Uranium. The project includes three feature films, a TV series, 92 DVDs, CD-ROMs, and books.
An extravagant, exotic and moving look at Rembrandt's romantic and professional life, and the controversy he created by the identification of a murderer in the painting The Night Watch.
This intimately narrated journey from Russia to Rotterdam, via rail, road and Finnish ferry, is a melancholy meditation on divinity, time and place in art, purpose (or its lack) and the loneliness of the soul. Passing through misty snowscapes, half-glimpsed cities and the icy night sea-swell.
A movie director does a new film against heroin consumption, and the producers are heroin dealers.
A man uses the principles of double-entry bookkeeping to settle his accounts with society.
Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.
SWCHWRM is about a boy who wants to be writer and describes his experiences. He uses the pseudonym, V. Swchwrm, because he wants to remain unknown. He describes, among other things, the death of his grandfather and encounters with the queen. SWCHWRM is based on "Mijn avonturen door V. Swchwrm" by Toon Tellegen.
The seventeen year old Stach is faced with five impossible assignments he has to complete in order to become king. Things do not go as easily as the boisterous Stach had expected, especially when he is confronted with matters of life and death.
"Rosa", with a libretto by Peter Greenaway and score by Louis Andriessen, is the first in a projected series of 10 operas, each dealing with the death of a famous composer - some real, others fictional. "Rosa" falls into the latter category; it tells the story of Juan Manuel de Rosa, a Brazilian who went to study music in America but spent most of his time in the cinema instead, becoming particularly entranced by Westerns. Now 32 years old and residing in an abandoned Uruguayan slaughterhouse, Rosa has become one of Hollywood's foremost composers, specialising in Westerns. He also has a beautiful 19-year-old fiancee, Esmeralda, but he pays her little heed, instead lavishing his attentions on a black mare named Bola. One day, a group of men attired as cowboys arrive at the abattoir and kill both Rosa and Bola; an investigation is conducted, with particular suspicion!
The opera begins at the end. The woman has just experienced a terrible accident, a crash of both the computer and her brain to which the computer is connected. The first two parts take us through the reconstruction of her story, the use of her body, speech, memory and the data banks and central brain of the computer. She shares genetic, organic material with the computer as the computer replaces parts of her body with its cybernetic material. The relationship is unclear to both of them. Where reality exists is in a floating multi-layered network of hallucinations, fractured memories and her externalized inner life viewed on the computers screens, the film itself. She is physically present, witnessing and participating in the story on the stage, the computer, consisting of screens, sounds, musical icons and a glass central unit on which the woman performs her rituals of reconstruction. The story unfolds to her and to us simultaneously in a quest to understand what caused the accident...
