Greenaway's first feature film is a documentary in which ninety-two persons are interviewed. They are all victims of a mysterious occurrence known as The Violent Unknown Event, or V.U.E. It has caused immortality and disability. A guidebook, published every ten years by the V.U.E. Board of Inquiry, illustrates the stories of the ninety-two persons involved in the catastrophe...
Mandel Baruch was an handsome man, a "Mensch" who had sacrificed everything for business. When he dies, his beloved son, Lionel, gathers some old family friends to organize a funeral to be remembered.
A writer moves into a ground floor apartment with the hope of finding some peace to write his new book. He will soon find out why the previous tenants abandoned the apartment.
A German U-boat is sunk in Hudson Bay. The survived nazi sailors attempt to evade capture by traveling across Canada to the still-neutral United States. An anti-nazi film, which avoids any stereotypes, recalls Hitchcock's dramas and counts several great English actors, as Anton Walbrook, Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard.
Michael Lamb, a young priest who teaches in a Roman Catholic institution for troubled boys on the Atlantic coast of Ireland, becomes responsible for a 10-year-old epileptic boy, Owen Kane. Michael has formed an attachment to Owen and he takes him with him to London when he decides to secretly leave the school. His escape will be seen as a scandalous kidnapping.
Sylvia works as a secretary and lives in the outskirts of London with her intellectually disabled sister, Hilda. Her solitary and bleak existence turns around a small group of people who, like Sylvia, have communication problems. Mike Leigh's debut film is ironic and moving. The director considers it "the mother of all my movies".
Five English nuns are dispatched to establish a new convent far in the Himalayas. They soon establish a school and an infirmary, but the location, the culture and the mountain air begin to have a strange effect on them. A nun begins to plant flowers instead of vegetables. Another one cures a kid of the village, who dies, and so all the locals abandon the hospital. The beauti...
After her father's death, Amelia follows her mother's strenuous path back to a normal life. A television, a camera and an hamster are the tools which will accompany a nine years old girl towards a world which is suffocating and imaginary.
A night in the life of Isaac, a jewish Russian man who survived the nazi holocaust, and Sophie, a catholic Polish woman. They are both refugees. Since thirty years they live in a garret in London, where Isaac has created a sort of maze of doors on which he has engraved and painted the symbols of their past. In this space, trapped in the history and yet in a time-free dimens...
The story concerns three young people who meet in a small village near Canterbury. An American Army Sergeant who hasn't recently received any letter from his girlfriend, a British Army Sergeant, who, used to work as a pianist in a cinema, and a young shopping assistant, who joined the army after having lost her boyfriend in the war. Chaucer is a odd pretext for this pastoral...
