Country:Japan

Director:Takashi Shimizu

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Shimizu casts cult director Shinya Tsukamoto as a cameraman possessed by a craving to understand fear—what it is and where it ultimately leads. He wanders the Tokyo streets as a voyeur, hungrily looking for clues. The title refers to a person who is not forthcoming but it also means, oddly enough, the dieties the one visits in a foreign country. Shimizu creates a new mythology based on old historical occult practice and theory, a collage of various authors’ fiction, and urban legends.

Country:Italy

Director:Dario Argento

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Dario Argento's thriller stars the director's daughter Asia as Anna Manni, a police woman trying to capture a vicious serial rapist and killer. The problem is that she suffers from ‘Stendhal’s syndrome’, a psychosomatic disease that gives her dizziness and hallucinations when she is exposed to the sight of paintings and artistic masterpieces. When the maniac lures her into a trap inside Florences' famous Uffizi museum, her troubles are just beginning... Argento puts his own highly perverse giallo spin on the dynamic relationship of fetishism, subjectivity and cinema.

Country:Netherlands

Director:Frans Zwartjes

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

One of the most remarkable filmmakers from Holland, Frans Zwartjes created a singular body of work in the late sixties and seventies that typically placed strange mannequin-like figures, seemingly imagined yet clearly with a life of their own, in simple situations that become inbued with angst like a slow spreading stain which ultimately engulfs them in waves of arousal and menace.

Country:United Kingdom

Director:Michael Powell

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

British master Michael Powell reversed his angle with this hard edged study. Mark Lewis works as a focus puller in a British film studio. As a sideline, he supplies a local shop with sexy photos and also dabbles in filmmaking. A lonely, unfriendly, sexually repressed fellow, Mark is obsessed with the effects of fear and how they manifest. This obsession dates from the time when, as a child, he served as the subject of some cold-blooded experiments in the psychology of terror conducted by his own scientist father.

Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Incredibly, Kuleshov restricts himself to the parallel lives of individuals in a single cramped room as the montage graphically isolates each one. Set in a remote, frozen, and often claustrophobic location in the Yukon, the story focuses on a five-person team of gold prospectors in the Yukon who have just begun to enjoy great success when one of the members snaps, and suddenly kills two of the others. The two survivors, a husband and wife, subdue the killer but are then faced with an agonizing dilemma.

Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Kuleshov in particular was fascinated by Western films of popular culture which he was eager to transform and energize by both embracing them wholeheartedly yet satirizing them with targeted irony. Luch Smert, as it is known in Russian, is made like an adventure serial, fast moving, funny and crammed full of amazing moments. Lann needs the ray of the title to make the revolutionary rising at the helium factory a success while an international gang of reactionaries, headed by Revo, try to get hold of the deadly contraption for themselves.

Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein and the School of Soviet Montage

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Kuleshov demonstrated the necessity of considering montage as the basic tool of cinema art. In Kuleshov's view, the cinema consists of fragments and the assembly of those fragments, the assembly of elements which in reality are distinct. It is therefore not the content of the images in a film which is important, but their combination.

Country:Canada

Director:David Cronenberg

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Allegra Geller, the leading game designer in the world, is testing her new virtual reality game, eXistenZ with a focus group. As they begin, she is attacked by a fanatic assassin employing a bizarre organic gun. She flees with a young marketing trainee who becomes her bodyguard. Unfortunately, her pod, an organic gaming device that contains the only copy of the eXistenZ game program, is damaged. To inspect it, she talks Ted into accepting a gameport in his own body so he can play the game with her.

Country:United States of America

Director:David Fincher

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

A ticking-time-bomb insomniac and a slippery soap salesman channel primal male aggression into a shocking new form of therapy after they discover the pleasures of beating one another senseless. Their concept catches on, with underground fight clubs forming in every town, until one eccentric gets in the way and ignites an out-of-control spiral toward oblivion.

Country:United States of America

Director:David Fincher

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Nicholas Van Orton is a very wealthy San Francisco banker, but he is an absolute loner, even spending his 48th birthday alone (the age his father committed suicide) when his brother Conrad, who has gone long ago and surrendered to addictions of all kinds, suddenly returns and gives Nicholas a card giving him entry to unusual entertainment provided by something called Consumer Recreation Services. Giving up to curiosity, Nicholas visits CRS and life turns dramatic. Just when you get a hold on the plot it changes!