Which movies on Fandor pass the Bechdel Test?
The Bechdel test, named after American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, first made its public appearance in the 1980's. It asks three simple questions to evaluate whether the filmmaker portrays female characters with at least a bare minimum of depth. We find it's a great way to examine the films we watch, and to ask ourselves whether we're supporting cinema that offers a diversity of voices.
It may also be true, as Walt Hickey recently pointed out that featuring meaningful interactions between women is good for business.
Take the Bechdel Test and support diversity in film.
When you are watching a film, ask yourself:
- Are there two or more named female characters?
- Do they talk with each other?
- About something other than a man?
Let's work together to make sure all voices are heard!
While we think there is a time and place for the latest shoot-em up we strongly believe that those aren't the only movies worth seeing. There's a great number of wonderful films that also meet the criteria above. Let's help each other find them. Each time you view a film on Fandor, take the test. If the film passes we'll flag it as meeting the Bechdel Test requirements and add it to this page.
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Films on Fandor that pass the Bechdel test
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Teknolust
Academy Award® winner Tilda Swinton plays four roles in this award-winning science fiction film about Rosetta Stone and her three Self-Replicating Automatons which she clones from her own DNA. Though they look human, the SRA cyborgs were bred as intelligent machines and are immortal. In order to...Watch Movie
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Female Pervert
Phoebe is seeking a true connection, unfortunately she doesn't relate to people like most in "normal society." She starts making changes, and as her road to self improvement unfolds, her more eccentric interests lead her down a darker path. She meets a few men, hoping to spark a love connection....Watch Movie
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Home
Switzerland's official entry for "Best Foreign Language Film" at the 82nd Academy Awards®, HOME is a mesmerizing fable of modern family life starring internationally renowned actress Isabelle Huppert. Huppert plays Marthe, a happy-go-lucky mother whose family enjoys an idyllic existence in their...Watch Movie
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Dogtooth
Graceful, enigmatic and often frightening, DOGTOOTH is an ingenious dark comedy that won the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, propelling Yorgos Lanthimos to the forefront of contemporary cinema's most ambitious young filmmakers. In an effort to protect their three children...Watch Movie
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4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
A criminally overlooked gem from master filmmaker Eric Rohmer. Over the course of four episodes, two young women (one from the city, the other from the country) meet and bond over an exquisite atmospheric event, and then room together in Paris, where they encounter many of the...Watch Movie
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The House that Dripped Blood
A review of the files of the local policeman shows that everyone who has owned a particular mansion has died in a horrible fashion. In one instance, "Method for Murder," the obsessions of a mystery writer provide his wife with an opportunity to do him in. In a second,...Watch Movie
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35 Shots of Rum
Widely hailed as one of the best films of 2009, the latest from the renowned director of BEAU TRAVAIL, Claire Denis’ sublime 35 SHOTS OF RUM is the moving story of a father and daughter whose close-knit, tender relationship is disrupted by a handsome young suitor. Sumptuously filmed and featuring...Watch Movie
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Ida
From acclaimed director Pawel Pawlikowski comes IDA, a moving and intimate drama about a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland who, on the verge of taking her vows, makes a shocking discovery about her past. Eighteen-year-old Anna (stunning newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska), a sheltered orphan raised...Watch Movie
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Asylum
Widely regarded as one of the best horror anthology films ever made, this serpentine chiller takes you deep inside the psyches of the patients of an experimental asylum. Under the guidance of a controversial psychiatrist who engages in some very strange practices, the patients of the Archway...Watch Movie
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Hannah Arendt
In the award-winning HANNAH ARENDT, the sublime Barbara Sukowa reteams with director Margarethe von Trotta for a brilliant new biopic of the influential German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist. Arendt's reporting on the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann in The New Yorker...Watch Movie
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Trust
The second feature film from writer/director Hal Hartley is TRUST. It concerns the unusual romance between two young misfits wandering the same suburban town. When Maria, a recent high school dropout, announces her unplanned pregnancy to her family, her father dies of a heart attack, her mother...Watch Movie
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Slacker
Richard Linklater's independent classic SLACKER presents a day in the life in Austin, Texas, among its social outcasts and misfits (predominantly the twenty-something set) using a series of linear vignettes. These characters who, in some manner, just don't fit into the establishment norms move...Watch Movie
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The Maid
After twenty-three years working as a devoted maid in an upper class Chilean household, embittered and ailing Raquel can no longer care for the family alone. Trapped by guilt, matriarch Pilar refuses to let Raquel go, even though it is clear their longtime maid is slowly unraveling. Instead,...Watch Movie
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The Watermelon Woman
Cheryl Dunye's debut feature is as controversial as it is sexy and funny. Cheryl is a twenty-something black lesbian working as a clerk in a video store while struggling to make a documentary about Fae Richards, an obscure black actress from the 1930's. Cheryl is surprised to...Watch Movie
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Out 1
In Paris, April 13th 1970, two theater groups each rehearse avant-garde adaptations of plays by Aeschylus. A young deaf-mute begs for change in cafes while playing the harmonica. A young woman seduces men in order to rob them. As a conspiracy develops, the protagonist's stories start to...Watch Movie
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Meek's Cutoff
Three 1840s' pioneer families become dangerously lost amidst the dust of the Oregon desert in Kelly Reichardt's sensory update of the Western genre, focusing not on typical fare like gun battles, card sharks or dramatic rescues but instead on the long, arduous journey westward. Having hired the...Watch Movie
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Stop the Pounding Heart
Sara is a young girl raised in a family of goat farmers. Her parents homeschool their twelve children, rigorously following the precepts of the Bible. Like her sisters, Sara is taught to be a devout woman, subservient to men while keeping her emotional and physical purity...Watch Movie
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Alps
ALPS is a mysterious and moving investigation into the process of mourning, a stunningly original follow-up to director Yorgos Lanthimos' Academy Award®-nominated debut, DOGTOOTH. An oddball group of four people (made up of two hospital employees, a gymnast and her coach) form a secret society...Watch Movie
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Beeswax
BEESWAX revolves around the personal and professional entanglements of twin sisters Jeannie and Lauren (played by extraordinary newcomers Tilly and Maggie Hatcher) living in Austin, Texas. Jeannie co-owns a bright, candy-colored vintage clothing store. When a conflict with her business partner...Watch Movie
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I Killed My Mother
Focusing on the relationship between Hubert Minel (Xavier Dolan), a 16-year-old Quebecois living in suburban Montreal, and his single mother Chantale (Anne Dorval), I KILLED MY MOTHER beautifully captures the anxieties of a mother-son relationship. While he gauges her with...Watch Movie
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Casa Grande
Coming-of-age as rude awakening: one high school senior's dawning sexuality is shadowed by the discovery of his upper-class family's looming financial ruin. Polished and penetrating, CASA GRANDE renders a sharp social canvas of contemporary Brazil through the eyes of young Jean, who struggles...Watch Movie
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Boccaccio '70
Four legendary filmmakers direct some of Europe's biggest stars in BOCCACCIO '70, a landmark anthology film. Mario Monicelli (BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET), Federico Fellini (LA DOLCE VITA), Luchino Visconti (THE LEOPARD) and Vittorio De Sica (BICYCLE THIEVES) direct Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg,...Watch Movie
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Soft in the Head
Thrown out of her New York City apartment, Natalia, a twenty-five year old hot mess, relies on the kindness of friends and strangers. Seemingly unaware of the havoc she wreaks, she skips from one place to another, including her best friend's, where she crashes a holiday meal...Watch Movie
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Paris Was a Woman
A film portrait of the creative community of women writers, artists, photographers and editors (including Colette, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas) who flocked to the Left Bank of Paris in the early decades of the 20th century. Utilizing groundbreaking...Watch Movie
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Breakfast with Curtis
Syd, an eccentric bookseller with delusions of grandeur fueled by red wine, caused a rift five years ago between the freewheeling bohemian residents of his house and the family next door. Over the course of a balmy summer, he now tries to draft the boy next door to make videos...Watch Movie
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Green
Genevieve, a New York intellectual, moves to the country with her self-involved journalist boyfriend, Sebastian, while he works on his latest project. Bored and neglected, Genevieve turns to Robin, a working class local, for companionship. When Sebastian forms a bond of his own with Robin,...Watch Movie
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Starlet
STARLET explores the unlikely friendship between twenty-one year old aspiring actress Jane and elderly widow Sadie after their worlds collide in California's San Fernando Valley. Jane spends her time getting high with her dysfunctional roommates and taking care of her chihuahua Starlet while...Watch Movie
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Butter on the Latch
Former performance artist Josephine Decker's stunning debut feature is a deeply subjective and mysterious portrait of a frantic young woman, Sarah, who leaves the city for the apparent safety of a Balkan music camp hidden deep in the California woods. Once there she reconnects...Watch Movie
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Funny Ha Ha
Marnie is 23 and "wandering the Earth," perhaps in search of romance, or employment--or perhaps just avoiding both. Mostly she's just trying to keep her sense of humor as a constellation of friends and would-be lovers engage in their own post-collegiate flailing around her. Rarely have the loose,...Watch Movie
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In the Folds of the Flesh
In a genre defined by shocking violence and psychosexual kink, it remains perhaps the most over-the-top "giallo" in EuroCult history: former MGM starlet and doomed James Dean paramour Pier Angeli (two decades past her Golden Globe award for "Most Promising Newcomer" and just...Watch Movie
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The Bridesmaid
It's love at first sight when bridesmaid Senta falls into the life of handsome young Philippe at the wedding of his younger sister. As their passion for one another intensifies, Philippe slowly discovers that Senta is shrouded in mystery. When one day she asks Philippe to perform a terrible deed...Watch Movie
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Lore
Left to fend for themselves after their SS officer father and mother, staunch Nazi believers, are interned by the victorious Allies at the end of World War II, five German children undertake a harrowing journey that exposes them to the reality and consequences of their parents' actions. Led by...Watch Movie
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Sangue do meu sangue
Márcia is a single mother with two grown-up children who works as a cook and shares her home in a social housing estate with her sister Ivete, a hairdresser. One day, Cláudia, her daughter, a student nurse who also works as a supermarket cashier, tells her that she has fallen...Watch Movie
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Ten
Celebrated Iranian writer-director Abbas Kiarostami once again casts his masterful cinematic gaze upon the modern sociopolitical landscape of his homeland, this time as seen through the eyes of one woman as she drives through the streets of Tehran over a period of several days. Her journey is...Watch Movie
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À tout de suite
A stylish thriller, A TOUT DE SUITE is the highly anticipated film from acclaimed French director Benoit Jacquot. Based on actual events, it tells the story of free-spirited Lili, a Parisian art student who falls for a charismatic bank robber and joins him on the run, a dizzying cross-continent...Watch Movie
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Prey
Glory Annan (FELICITY) and Sally Faulkner (VAMPYRES) star in this controversial British Sci-Fi Horror thriller from cult director Norman J. Warren (INSEMINOID, SATAN'S SLAVE). Something has fallen to Earth. Something terrible. A merciless, carnivorous predator with an insatiable hunger for flesh....Watch Movie
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Lying
When a long weekend brings four women together in the countryside, each of them is forced to navigate the depths of social interaction as virtual strangers. How well do we really know the friends we make in adulthood? And in an age of lies, what can be made of a person who tells untruths so small...Watch Movie
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Keep Smiling
"It's all about soul beauty, it's a beauty contest of Mothers, so dear Georgian mothers please keep on smiling." In 2010, a Mother's Beauty Contest is held in Georgia, Tbilisi. The winner will get an apartment and $25,000. Ten mothers, with seven of them belonging to the poorest population layer,...Watch Movie
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Satan's School for Girls
Unwilling to accept the official ruling of her sister's death as a suicide, Elisabeth (Pamela Franklin) enrolls at her sister's boarding school under an assumed name to find the truth. The truth, as the film's title makes abundantly clear, involves a Satanic cult with sinister...Watch Movie
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Come Undone
This sensual gay classic COME UNDONE explores a young man's homosexual awakening and the turbulence of first love in a small French seaside town. Mathieu, a quiet 18-year-old spending the summer with his troubled family, meets the handsome and aggressive Cedric, who takes an interest in the...Watch Movie
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Dishonored Lady
In this star-studded mystery, Madeleine Damien is the fashion editor of a major Manhattan magazine by day and a party girl at night. A string of failed relationships and years of burning the candle at both ends have taken their toll and Madeleine is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As her...Watch Movie
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For the Plasma
In a remote house on the coast of Maine, a young woman named Helen has found work as a forest-fire lookout responsible for monitoring the nearby woodland. While analyzing CCTV footage of the surrounding forest, she discovers she can reconfigure her perception to predict shifts in global...Watch Movie
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Queen to Play
Academy Award®- winner Kevin Kline and the luminous Sandrine Bonnaire square off in this stylish and sophisticated dramedy of newfound passions and mid-life triumphs, set on the postcard-perfect isle of Corsica. Lovely, repressed and quietly intelligent, French chambermaid Helene comes upon a...Watch Movie
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Uncertain Terms
Needing a sudden escape from the city, Robbie flees Brooklyn for the countryside to stay with his aunt who runs a home for pregnant teenagers. As the only man in the house, Robbie inadvertently becomes the object of the girls' attention... and affection. He eventually meets Nina, who is mature...Watch Movie
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The Girl Who Played with Fire
In this second installment of Stieg Larsson's phenomenal "Dragon Tattoo Trilogy," Lisbeth Salander is a wanted woman. A researcher and a Millennium journalist about to expose the truth about the sex trade in Sweden are brutally murdered and Salander's prints are on the weapon....Watch Movie
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In Bloom
Early nineties, in Tbilisi, the capital of the newly independent Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The country is immersed in violence, there's a war on the Black Sea coast in Abkhazia and vigilante justice plagues society. But for Eka and Natia, fourteen-year-old inseparable...Watch Movie
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Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore
Mary Jane is a sexually curious teenage girl who sees sex as a way to become cool. Written, directed and produced by Sarah Jacobson, MARY JANE'S NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE is lauded for depicting sex from the female perspective. The film premiered at Sundance in 1997 and features...Watch Movie
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Jellyfish
Poignant, often witty and exceedingly cinematic, JELLYFISH tells the story of three very different Tel Aviv women whose intersecting stories weave an unlikely portrait of modern Israeli life. Batya, a catering waitress, takes in a child apparently abandoned at a local beach. Batya is one of the...Watch Movie
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Uninvited
In a Florida research lab, a seemingly harmless orange cat has developed the ability to transform itself into a hideous mutant creature. A group of gangsters and criminals unknowingly bring the furry monster aboard a yacht in the Caribbean. The heinous feline begins terrorizing the passengers and...Watch Movie
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Blood Pressure
Nicole, forty-one years old, is a pharmacist with a husband and two teenage kids, who is at a point in her life when she is asking if "this is it," or whether there's something more. One day she gets a letter from an anonymous Observer who knows her daily habits, and her potential, intimately. He...Watch Movie
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Sea Child
Marina Shron's poetic short film about a young girl, Lila (played by Argentine actress Federica Cafferata), who has lost her father, SEA CHILD is a surreal coming-of-age story. Filmed against the beautiful backdrop of Laguna de Tota, a dreamy mountain lake in Columbia, Shron composes a...Watch Movie
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Exit Elena
With no place to call home, nineteen year old Elena takes a job as a live-in aide. She finds herself thrust into the middle of a family in crisis: all the things that go on between a father, grandmother, mother and cat. Eventually, Elena strikes something of a balance (until the prodigal son...Watch Movie
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Loving Couples
For her feature film directing debut, actress Mai Zetterling turned to Agnes von Krusenstjerna's controversial masterpiece of Swedish feminist literature, "The Misses von Pahlen," an intense and personal seven-part novel that has been likened to the great works of D.H. Lawrence. As three pregnant...Watch Movie
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Leo's Room
In the heart of Montevideo, the affable but secretly troubled Leo wraps himself in the comfort of his small rented room, unmotivated to finish his college thesis or find a job and content with infrequent visits from his girlfriend. After their six-month relationship ends, Leo begins to break out...Watch Movie
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Thirst
She was innocent, pure and unsuspecting. Now, Kate Davis has been kidnapped by a bloodthirsty cult and taken to a remote village. It is there that she discovers her unholy fate! According to the prophecies of the Brotherhood, she must fulfill her destiny by marrying their leader and helping them...Watch Movie
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Commune
In 1968, two hippies hiking near Mt. Shasta in Northern California stumbled across an unlikely property for sale: an abandoned goldmine and surrounding land, 300 acres for $22,000. Fueled by contributions from the Doors, the Monkees, Frank Zappa and others, they bought the property and named it...Watch Movie
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Villa des roses
When Louise's husband dies on the Titanic trying to emigrate, she must leave their son with her aging father to set up a new life for her family in Paris. Working as a maid in the run-down Villa des Rosas, she falls in love with a painter, but their relationship proves tumultuous on the eve of...Watch Movie
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Desire Will Set You Free
DESIRE WILL SET YOU FREE takes you deep into the free-spirited, drug-fueled, queer-paradise of contemporary Berlin. Ezra, a struggling American writer, meets Sasha, a Russian immigrant escort, and he introduces him to his world of clubs and parties, a dizzying and vibrant...Watch Movie
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Bernice Bobs Her Hair
It's the hot summer of 1919. Visiting her cousin Marjorie (Veronica Cartwright), sweet-but-dull Bernice (Shelley Duvall) is transformed into a smooth-talking man-trap by her vampish kin. However, the “make-over” works too well, Bernice becomes the belle of the ball,...Watch Movie
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Penance
Japanese master of suspense Kiyoshi Kurosawa's eerie, intense psychological thriller PENANCE unfolds on a sleepy small town playground, when a mysterious stranger approaches a group of young friends, then kidnaps and brutally murders one of the girls. Wracked with grief, the victim's unhinged...Watch Movie
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The Edge
THE EDGE is a story of suppressed passion and destructive obsession set in a remote post WWII Siberian village, sparked by the arrival of Ignat, an emotionally and physically damaged Soviet tank commander with an obsession for steam engines. His self destructive streak causes increasing havoc...Watch Movie
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Treeless Mountain
When their mother needs to leave in order to find their estranged father, seven year-old Jin and her younger sister Bin are left to live with their Big Aunt for the summer. With only a small piggy bank and their mother's promise to return when it is full, the two young girls...Watch Movie
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Tall as the Baobab Tree
In a rural Senegalese village poised at the outer edge of the modern world, a teenage girl hatches a secret plan to rescue her eleven-year-old sister from an arranged marriage. A powerful voice from Africa's young generation, TALL AS THE BAOBAB TREE poignantly depicts a family...Watch Movie
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Bloody Pit of Horror
"Filmed in PsychoVision" isn’t even the most outlandish claim made by a movie that opens with a bogus quote attributed to the Marquis de Sade ("My vengeance needs blood!") who, in the 1960s, became synonymous with all things kinky. Admittedly, by the standards of the time,...Watch Movie
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Open
The first American film to ever win the Teddy Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, OPEN weaves together tales of a young hermaphrodite's journey through the largest mall in America, a couple mending themselves into one entity through plastic surgery, and the effects of hormone use on sex,...Watch Movie
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The Animal Project
Leo is a mid-30s widower, single parent and struggling theatre director. His relationship with his teenage son is rocky, and he's dissatisfied with his everyday life. So, after he has an unusual and inspiring dream, he decides to shake things up by having the group of actors...Watch Movie
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All the Light in the Sky
Jane Adams stars as an actress living in Malibu who faces harsh realities of the industry as her age exempts her from more and more acting opportunities. Amidst this career and life crisis enters the actress's niece, played by Sophia Takal, who arrives for a weekend stay and...Watch Movie
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My Man Godfrey
Whilst on a scavenger hunt for a high society party game, Cornelia Bullock and her sister Irene find Godfrey, a tramp living on the city dump. Godfrey takes a dislike to Cornelia and decides to help Irene win the hunt for a "forgotten man." Soon Irene persuades him to work for her family as the...Watch Movie
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Richard's Wedding
RICHARD'S WEDDING is an irreverent, often politically incorrect and ultimately touching film that plumbs the depths of friendship and marriage. The film follows Tuna and long time friend, Alex, on their quest to go to Richard's wedding in Central Park. The duo meet up with...Watch Movie
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Conceiving Ada
In this award-winning film (which was the first to use "virtual sets"), Academy Award® winner Tilda Swinton embodies Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter of Romantic poet Lord Byron and the mathematics genius who developed what became the world's first computer language one hundred years before computers...Watch Movie
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Hard Labor
A middle-class couple slowly succumbs to the allures of entrepreneurship and the horrors of a schizophrenic job market. As Helena starts a new business venture (a small grocery store), her white-collar husband Otavio is let go from his job. Determined to stay afloat, Otavio goes on a series of...Watch Movie
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I am a good person / I am a bad person
Well-intentioned but misguided filmmaker Ruby White leaves her husband and son in Toronto and embarks on a European film festival tour with her eighteen-year-old daughter, Sara, tagging along as her assistant. Ruby over-shares, doesn't listen and is a bundle of insecurities,...Watch Movie
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Miss Firecracker
Carnelle Scott is best-known in her hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi, for her unrepentant promiscuity. An orphan taken in by her genteel relatives, she idolizes her older cousin, Elain Rutledge, a former Fourth of July "Miss Firecracker" contest winner who is taking time...Watch Movie
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Hester Street
Gitl and her son arrive on the Lower East side of New York in 1896 to join her husband Jake. While Jake, who has job in a sweatshop and an English-speaking girlfriend, has completely embraced America, Gitl clings to her old country ways. Jake is embarrassed to be seen with her as he struggles to...Watch Movie
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Hide and Seek
HIDE AND SEEK is a daring exploration into wild, uncharted territory, in the 1960s. Lou is a twelve year old girl who daydreams in a tree house, wins a rock throwing contest and is horrified to discover that her best friend is taking an interest in earrings and boys. Interwoven with Lou's story...Watch Movie
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52 Tuesdays
A sixteen year old's reluctant path to independence is accelerated when her mother reveals plans for gender transition and their time together becomes limited to Tuesday afternoons. Filmed over the course of a year, once-a-week every week (only on Tuesdays), these unique filmmaking rules bring a...Watch Movie
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The Midnight Swim
Spirit Lake is unusually deep. No diver has ever managed to find the bottom, though many have tried. When Dr. Amelia Brooks disappears during a deep-water dive, her three daughters travel home to settle her affairs. They find themselves unable to let go of their mother and...Watch Movie
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Vision
Hildegard von Bingen was truly a woman ahead of her time. A visionary in every sense of the word, this famed 12th-century Benedictine nun was a Christian mystic, composer, philosopher, playwright, poet, naturalist, scientist, physician, herbalist and ecological activist. In VISION, New German...Watch Movie
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The Inheritance
Ulrich Thomsen (of the festival hit CELEBRATION) stars in this absorbing, Dogma-like look at family loyalties, personal responsibility and class distinctions, made under the mantle of Zentropa Entertainments, Lars von Trier's production company. Thomsen is Christoffer, a Dane living abroad in...Watch Movie
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The Unspeakable Act
Set on a quiet tree-lined street in Brooklyn, THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT is an acclaimed, darkly funny film about a young girl's unusual coming of age. Jackie Kimball is a normal 17-year-old girl, except that for as long as she can remember, she's been in love with her older brother...Watch Movie
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De jueves a domingo
It all begins on a Thursday when two children go on a holiday trip with their parents to the north of Chile. It all ends on a Sunday. Lucía and Manuel travel for the long weekend with their parents, Ana and Fernando. The couple has decided to break up but has previously...Watch Movie
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Rânia
Sixteen-year-old Rania studies dance and lives with her mother and two brothers in restricted circumstances. With her father, a fisherman, also facing hard times, Rania contemplates following her friend Lizi and becoming a dancer in a grotty nightclub. A wonderful opportunity then presents itself...Watch Movie
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Oma and Bella
Two older Jewish women, best friends who live together in Berlin (and one of whom, Regina “Oma” Karolinski, is the filmmaker’s grandmother), are Holocaust survivors who have remained in Germany since the war. Oma and Bella spend their days telling stories and cracking jokes, dispensing advice and...Watch Movie
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The Wolves of Kromer
In the cozy English village of Kromer, where few things are as feared as the werewolves who wander the surrounding forests and fields, two handsome wolves, Seth and Gabriel, meet and fall in love. No smelly pelts here: Seth and "Gabs" look more like fashion models than Lon...Watch Movie
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Raise Your Kids on Seltzer
Terry and Tessa are married ex cult deprogrammers living in the San Francisco Bay Area. A "deprogrammer" is a professional contracted by families to kidnap people away from dangerous cults. Terry and Tessa's cryptic motto during their often verbally and physically abusive...Watch Movie
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The Scenic Route
Making relationships work is murder, sometimes literally, in Mark Rappaport's 1978 feature, a Strindbergian battle between (and within) the sexes that filters melodrama through the gallery sensibility of 1970s video art and myriad other cultural reference points. Coolly...Watch Movie
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Kept and Dreamless
During Argentina's economic crisis of the '90s, nine year-old Eugenia and her mother, Florencia, live a seemingly colorful life surrounded by eclectic neighbors and an offbeat collection of family. But for Eugenia, who must deal with her mother's dysfunctional and drug-addled...Watch Movie
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Umm Kulthum
She had the musicality of Ella Fitzgerald, the public presence of Eleanor Roosevelt and the audience of Elvis Presley. Born a peasant at the turn of the last century, legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum earned a position of great wealth and influence. She was a powerful symbol, first of the...Watch Movie
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Bandaged
Old-style horror blends with forbidden love in this period thriller. Lucille lives with her domineering father and great aunt in a creepy mansion out in the middle of nowhere. She's about to turn eighteen and longs to go to college to study poetry, but her surgeon father insists the sciences are...Watch Movie
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The Trip to Bountiful
Forced by circumstances to live with her loathsome son and daughter-in-law, elderly Mrs. Watts wants nothing more out of life than to return to her hometown of Bountiful. Escaping from her family's clutches, she boards a bus to Bountiful, where she makes the acquaintance of...Watch Movie
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Two-Bit Waltz
In the wonderfully dysfunctional tradition of The Royal Tenenbaums, teenage years are always messy... but for Maude, things couldn't seem more tragic. Within one week just prior to her 18th birthday, she is suspended from school, stranded by her best friend, dumped by the boy she "loves," and...Watch Movie
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The Arbor
Instead of making a conventional documentary or adapting Andrea Dunbar's play "The Arbor" for the screen, director Clio Barnard has crafted a truly unique work that transcends genre and defies categorization. Following two years conducting audio interviews with Dunbar's family, friends and...Watch Movie
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Daughter of Keltoum
A young woman, Rallia, raised in Switzerland, travels to an isolated and barren Berber settlement located in the rocky Atlas Mountains of Algeria. Rallia's journey is one of multi-tiered discovery in terms of her relationship to her extended family, traditional Berber culture...Watch Movie
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Four Windows
Divided into four chapters: Son, Daughter, Father and Mother, FOUR WINDOWS is a look inside the brains of your not so normal German family. The very handsome and sexy Son leaves for school in the morning only to spend his time cruising the local gay video arcade. There he hooks up with an older...Watch Movie
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Clean
Maynard Yates is trying to clean up his life when chance gives him a job as a limousine driver. He is soon chauffeuring the Hollywood elite and finds himself submerged in the dark, seedy underbelly of celebrity. When his own bad habits return, Maynard is unwillingly led into a downward spiral and...Watch Movie
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Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness
Two sisters share a complex and compelling relationship in the well crafted film about sibling rivalry. Anna seems dependent, emotionally and economically, on Maria. Successive inward turns of the screw reveal them, Siamese twin-like, bonded to one another, so that eventually...Watch Movie
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Half of a Yellow Sun
Olanna and Kainene are glamorous twins from a wealthy Nigerian family. Upon returning to a privileged city life in newly independent 1960s Nigeria after their expensive English education, the two women make very different choices. Olanna shocks her family by going to live with...Watch Movie
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She's a Boy I Knew
Filmmaker Gwen Haworth turns her camera on her family for this down-to-earth grassroots documentary that follows her transition from male to female over the course of several years. This thoughtful film is less a detailing of surgeries and more a meditation on family ties, a...Watch Movie
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Halima's Path
Years before the Bosnian War ravaged their lives, Safija becomes pregnant by Slavo, a Christian man. Beaten and ostracized by her Muslim family, Safija gave the infant boy to her childless aunt, Halima, to raise and told Slavo the child was stillborn. Nearly twenty years later, war has devastated...Watch Movie
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Where I Grow Old
Francisca is a young Portuguese woman who's been living in Brazil for a year. At her mother's behest, she welcomes Teresa - a fellow citizen she'd lost contact with - into her home. While Teresa is enthralled discovering Belo Horizonte, where she means to settle and escape the...Watch Movie
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I Used to Be Darker
When Taryn, a Northern Irish runaway, finds herself in trouble in Ocean City, Maryland, she seeks refuge in Baltimore with her aunt and uncle. Kim and Bill are having problems of their own: they're trying to dissolve their marriage gracefully for the sake of their daughter,...Watch Movie
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Tax Day
On a sunny April 15th morning, Irene and Paula set out on a walk to the post office. They're soon led astray by two young men who take them on an urban canoe ride through the downtown canals. As they make their way back to the post office, Irene and Paula are repeatedly diverted by a variety of...Watch Movie
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Sheer Madness
Director Margarethe von Trotta weaves a wondrously compelling tale of friendship and feminism around the relationship between two seemingly opposite women. Olga is a professor of women's literature, Ruth is a gifted and extremely reticent artist who is desperately fearful of the outside world....Watch Movie
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Satan's Sadists
Tom Weaver, author of The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, writes, "Terror on wheels haunts the highways as a gang of psycho bikers, the Satans, prey on the helpless in the most desolate parts of the California desert. The sleazy riders invade a roadside cafe where bloodshed ensues, with only...Watch Movie
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Impostors
A polysexual vaudeville playing promiscuously with melodramatic intrigue, camp and intellectual gamesmanship, IMPOSTORS remains as unclassifiable as it was in 1979. Its slippery "plot" centers on the romance between besotted Peter (Peter Evans) and elusive Tina (Ellen McElduff). She's a faithless...Watch Movie
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Torremolinos 73
Spain, circa 1973. Alfredo is a struggling door to door encyclopedia salesman. Meanwhile his wife Carmen is obsessed with becoming a mother. Alfredo’s boss gives Alfredo a choice: make 'educational' sex films at home for a Scandinavian distributor, or get fired. Alfredo chooses the former, and it...Watch Movie
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Live Nude Girls Unite!
Julia Query, activist, comedian, lesbian and stripper at a club called the Lusty Lady, put in long hours on stage and in the peep booth along with fellow exotic dancers Decadence, Lolita and Octopussy. But when faced with no sick leave, unfair demotions, safely and privacy...Watch Movie
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Private Practices
In this groundbreaking cult documentary from 1985, director Kirby Dick weaves a fascinating study of the curious role of a sex surrogate. Maureen Sullivan and two of her clients agreed to have the entire progression of their therapy taped and what emerges is a disarming and...Watch Movie
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The Fish Fall in Love
Atieh's singular passion is food, and her small but popular restaurant on the sleepy Caspian coast is her pride and joy. But when Aziz, her former fiancé, appears after a twenty-year absence, the women believe he has intentions of closing the restaurant, so Atieh prepares his...Watch Movie
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Lovedolls Superstar
The Lovedolls return from their untimely demise in this 1986 sequel to DESPERATE TEENAGE LOVEDOLLS. Patch Kelley becomes Patch Christ, the leader of an acid-damaged religious cult who rescues has been Kitty Karryall from a boozy, wasted life. Once reunited, they recruit Sunset...Watch Movie
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From Two Worlds as a Keepsake
1988, in a multi-ethnic town in Soviet Azerbaijan, eight-year old Ashen's divorced Armenian parents are in an emotional tug-of-war over which of them will raise their child. Ashen's custody becomes a complex matter when family tragedy and political danger impact decisions made...Watch Movie
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Putty Hill
A beautifully realized portrait of a close-knit community on the outskirts of Baltimore, PUTTY HILL is the second feature from celebrated young filmmaker Matt Porterfield. At a neighborhood karaoke bar, friends and family gather to remember a young man who passed away. Knowing little about his...Watch Movie
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SpaceDisco One
In this sequel of sorts to both LOGAN’S RUN and 1984, George Orwell's Winston Smith runs into the daughters of Logan 5 and Francis 7 as they're busy running amok in a park, shooting laser beams at one another. A roller-skating rink in space, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA references and a Ministry of Truth...Watch Movie
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Strangers in Good Company
In this film by Academy Award® winner Cynthia Scott, seven old women become stranded at a deserted farmhouse miles from civilization. They don't have much food, a decent place to sleep or much in common. But these surprising, remarkable women turn a crisis into a magical time...Watch Movie
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Balcony
A ten year old boy is sitting on the edge of a balcony on the fourth floor. Neighbors and passers-by, terrified by this situation, call the police and firefighters for help. But the situation quickly becomes unmanageable. BALCONY is an observation of the authentic mindset of our society, which...Watch Movie
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Girl in Gold Boots
Michele, a young woman who works at a dead-end job, is convinced by an untrustworthy man named Buz to go with him to Los Angeles, where he claims to have connections that can land her a job as a Go-Go dancer. The two head to L.A., along with a hitchhiker named Critter. Once in...Watch Movie
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Who Took the Bomp?
WHO TOOK THE BOMP? LE TIGRE ON TOUR follows iconic feminist electronic band Le Tigre on their 2004 to 2005 international tour across four continents and through ten countries. Supported by a community of devoted fans and led by outspoken Riot Grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna...Watch Movie
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Hunting
Tina is high-strung and over-worked. Her boss (whom she refers to as "Rick the Dick") is so strict about personal time she can't even apartment hunt with her roommate Maureen. Already suffering from terrifying chronic stress dreams about a creepy, claustrophobic hallway and not wanting anymore...Watch Movie
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Curling
Set on the fringe of society in a remote part of the countryside, CURLING takes a keen look at the unusual private life of a father and his daughter. Between his unremarkable jobs, Jean-François devotes an awkward energy to Julyvonne. The fragile balance of their relationship will be jeopardized...Watch Movie
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Stay Until Tomorrow
Nina is a former teen star who quit acting to go to college, left college to travel the world, then became attached to the lifestyle of an international drifter. Several years later, she drops in on her childhood friend Jim, a reserved librarian, and asks to crash for a few...Watch Movie
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The Second Awakening of Christina Klages
Director Margarethe von Trotta's first solo effort is an intense political drama that embraces the theme of closeness between women. Christa is a young mother who, distraught over the prospect that her children's day care center is running out of money, executes a bank robbery...Watch Movie
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Enough!
Set in war-torn Algeria in the 1990s, ENOUGH! follows two women on the dangerous search for the younger woman's husband, a journalist whose writings resulted in his disappearance. Both women represent anachronisms in Islamist Algeria: the younger woman is a doctor, the older a nurse with vivid...Watch Movie
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Mothers of Men
Made two years before the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote, this melodrama depicts a future in which a woman holds high political office. Dorothy Davenport Reid plays an ardent suffragist who ascends from judge to governor and manages, despite the odds, to maintain her...Watch Movie
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White Rabbit
How an Iraq War veteran, battle-trained in maximum security telecom encryption and battling her own post-combat trauma, uses her high-tech expertise to bring down a tea party candidate for the United States Senate. Twenty-four years old and home from a hellish stint in Iraq, Kerryann Terkel...Watch Movie
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Sister Smile
In the early 1960s, the hit single "Dominique" was something of a tonic for the troubles of the era. Little was known then nor now of Soeur Sourire (Sister Smile), the Belgian nun who recorded the astonishingly successful album and then, shortly thereafter, left the convent. In his phenomenal...Watch Movie
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Virtual Love
A love story for the 90s: Valery falls in love with an identical twin, a virtual reality scientist, and finds she can have a more intimate relationship with him through the computer screen than in person. Or is it really him? Commissioned by ZDF German Television, VIRTUAL LOVE features a number...Watch Movie
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Poppy Shakespeare
Adapted from the best-selling novel by author Clare Allan, this gripping drama follows the unlikely friendship between a psychiatric patient who lives to sponge off the system, and the newly arrived patient who causes her to question everything she ever thought she knew. N has...Watch Movie
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Sticky Wicket
In the small town of Brunswick, Maine, the Women-Only Croquet Club is the only organized resistance to a corporate takeover by an invading cineplex movie chain. In its direct path is a 100 seat, hippie-built theater called the Eveningstar Cinema, crunched into a tiny, jewelry-store-sized space at...Watch Movie
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Face
An annual Halloween fear competition between a fraternity and sorority goes awry when drugs, alcohol and the old battle of the sexes are mixed together. What is on the line? The losers must do anything the winners ask for one night. The bros won last year. They not only violated the loser but...Watch Movie
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Black Rat
From Kenta Fukusaku comes a twisted tale about the lives and deaths of several high schoolers. They receive a message from their friend Asuka telling them to go back to their classroom in the middle of the night. This ordinarily wouldn't be an issue, except for the fact that Asuka was supposed to...Watch Movie
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Triple Bogey on a Par Five Hole
The Levys, a glamorous couple, used to make their living robbing golfers, until they met their fatal handicap. Years later, scriptwriter Remy Gravelle, investigating their death, decides to observe the Levy progeny as they sail endlessly round Manhattan in their luxury yacht.Watch Movie
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Empire of Dirt
Going home was never an option for single mother Lena Mahikan. But when her thirteen year old daughter Peeka overdoses in the streets of Toronto, she is forced to return home to her estranged mother and face a life-long legacy of shame and resentment. EMPIRE OF DIRT is a story about second...Watch Movie
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Captain Video
"Captain Video" was such a nationwide sensation that in 1951, Columbia Pictures Corporation contracted to produce a theatrical serial of the Captain's exploits, the first television show ever to be adapted to the big screen. The result, CAPTAIN VIDEO: MASTER OF THE STRATOSPHERE has been hailed as...Watch Movie
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Women's Prison
This taboo-breaking film is based on Manijeh Hekmat's long fieldwork among women prisoners in Iran. She depicts the lives of Iran's lost generation in the two decades since the 1979 Islamic Revolution using the claustrophobic life of women behind bars as a metaphor for the entire society. Her...Watch Movie
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Año uña
AÑO UÑA chronicles the impossible romance between Molly, a twenty-one year old American, and Diego, a Mexican in the throes of puberty. Molly travels to Mexico where she rents a room in Diego's house. A close relationship immediately develops between the two. Diego, who had previously been...Watch Movie
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Wretched Lives
WRETCHED LIVES focuses on Vanessa, a cosmetics consultant who is forced to care for her troubled and mentally-challenged sister after the sudden death of their mother. Her hustler boyfriend, Olivier, seems unreliable and Vanessa soon abandons him for Uno, an ostensibly liberal and caring...Watch Movie
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Redemption Trail
Two powerful, yet deeply troubled women (refugees from political and personal trauma) flee a past that haunts them. The daughter of a murdered Black Panther revolutionary, Tess, lives off the grid on a Sonoma vineyard, fiercely detached from all connections. Her hermetic life...Watch Movie
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Another Man's Garden
For a young girl who wants to study medicine in Mozambique, the obstacles extend far beyond the distractions of her boyfriend and her family. A moment of weakness or an error in judgment can cost her a place at the university, an irretrievable loss in a country with so few...Watch Movie
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Life Kills Me
Life and death come wrapped in a mutual embrace, both absurd and poignant, in this smart comedy about an unlikely friendship between a grieving cinematographer and a morbidly obsessed drifter. At work on a seriously schlocky, low-budget horror film, Gaspar is still reeling from the untimely death...Watch Movie
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About the Pink Sky
High school student Izumi Kawashima, whose daily routine is rating newspaper articles, finds a wallet containing a large sum of cash. Instead of returning the wallet to its owner, Izumi decides to lend a substantial portion of the money to a middle-aged male acquaintance. She...Watch Movie
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Cinemanovels
In this slyly humorous family drama about what we inherit (and don't inherit) from our parents, Grace has not spoken to her recently deceased father, a fabled filmmaker, in years. She surprises her confidant (Jennifer Beals) and herself when, on a trip to pick up some of his belongings, she...Watch Movie
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I am from Titov Veles
Set in the quaint but scarred town of Veles, three sisters long to escape the suffocating environment of their dying community. Burdened by memories of their late father, each chooses a different path: Sapho struggles to secure a visa to Greece; Slavica desperately searches...Watch Movie
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A Leap to Take
A small-time club owner takes his wife out for a birthday "night on the town" accompanied by a retinue of friends: would- be escorts, potential johns, ersatz modern artists; a motley group watching their lives go up in smoke due to the economic downturn. A satirical rocket ride of political...Watch Movie
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In the Battlefields
Daughter of self-destructive parents, twelve-year-old Lina doesn't show much interest in the war taking place around her in 1980's Beirut. Instead, Siham, her aunt's beautiful adolescent maid is the focal point of her rebellious and neglected childhood. As the basis for the...Watch Movie
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Lauren is Missing
Mia returns home from an unnamed journey to find her belongings packed and her roommate missing. She strikes up a friendship with Millie, a quirky outgoing woman who claims to be a friend of the missing roommate. Their friendship blossoms, leading to many mischievous,...Watch Movie
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Collapse
America faces grim times. The financial collapse we are experiencing endangers homes, families, livelihoods and rattles the peace of mind of millions. It is perhaps an indication of the relative social irrelevance of much contemporary art that few people are asking what role film, music, dance...Watch Movie
