The Peony Pavilion (1995)

Everybody has always loved Jeanne. These days, she hates herself. Up to her ears in debt, she has to go to Lisbon and sell her mother’s apartment, who passed away one year ago. At the airport, she runs into Jean, a whimsical and somewhat intrusive former high school classmate.

A movie fan escapes from a labour camp during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and strikes up a relationship with a homeless female vagabond.

A young American woman is sent by her parents to a cultural immersion program in Taipei where she begins a new journey of self-discovery and romance.

A young girl with malformed ears uses fantasy to help her cope with classroom bullies and process the death of her father.

As Islamic morality squads stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and as fundamentalists seize hold of the universities, Azar Nafisi, an inspired teacher, secretly gathers six of her most committed female students to read forbidden western classics. Unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, they soon removed their veils, their stories intertwining with the novels they read: just like the heroines of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James or Jane Austen, the women in Nafisi’s living room dare to dream, hope and love as we experience the complexity of the lives of individuals facing political, moral and personal siege.

The tale of an individualist proletarian in a time marked by the rise of mass political movements. In early 20th-century Italy, illiterate sailor Martin Eden seeks fame as a writer while torn between the love of a bourgeois girl and allegiance to his social class.

A young art teacher hopes to be transferred to Istanbul after completing his mandatory duty in a remote village school in Anatolia. After accusations of inappropriate contact with a student surface, his hopes of escape fade and he descends further into an existential crisis.

Among gunshots and boleros, a passionate relationship flourishes between a lonely transvestite and a young guerrilla during the Pinochet dictatorship.

Ivy Morgan, a college student in New Orleans, falls for Ren Owens, the last person she expected to enter her rigidly controlled life.

Contemporary Russia. After he flubs a penalty kick, a humiliated national soccer player quits the game. He flees to a small town, where he decides to coach their local team.