Broken Silence

Description: A Carthusian monk, Fried Adelphi, dedicated to silence and meditation for the last 25 years, tells his story (to priest, Michael Moriarty, in a minor role). His order sends him to Indonesia to request the extension of their cloister's lease. En route to Jakarta, he experiences claustrophobia and de-planes in New Delhi, India. Without contacts or any worldly knowledge, he fortunately is reunited with his fellow passenger, Ashaela, the wallet thief. Unaware of her indiscretion, Fried allows Ashaela to help him find his way to Jakarta.

Starring:Martin Huber, Ameenah Kaplan
Director:Wolfgang Panzer
Duration: 106 minutes
Year: 1995

Music of the Heart

Description: The true story of a young teacher who fights against the board of education in her bid to teach underprivileged kids in a Harlem school the beauty of music through the violin. In her struggle she loses everything as the system comes down on her with all their might but her determination for the kids happiness helps her to battle back with wonderfully inspirational results.

Starring:: Meryl Streep, Cloris Leachman
Director:Wes Craven
Duration: 124 minutes
Year: 1999

After the Wedding

Description: Jacob Petersen has dedicated his life to helping street children in India. When the orphanage he heads is threatened by closure, he receives an unusual offer. A Danish businessman, Jørgen, offers him a donation of $4 million dollars. There are, however, certain conditions... Not only must Jacob return to Denmark, he must also take part in the wedding of Jørgen's daughter. The wedding proves to be a critical juncture between past and future and catapults Jacob into the most intense dilemma of his life.

Starring:Mads Mikkelsen, Rolf Lassgård
Director:Susanne Bier
Duration: 120 minutes
Year: 2006

Ladies in Lavender

Description: Taking place in pre-war England, aging sisters Ursula and Janet live peacefully in their cottage on the shore of Cornwall. One morning following a violent storm, the sisters spot from their garden a nearly-drowned man lying on the beach. They nurse him back to health, and discover that he is Polish. Communicating in broken German while they teach him English, they learn his name is Andrea and that he is a particularly gifted violinist. His boat was on its way to America, where he is headed to look for a better life. It doesn't take long for them to become attached to Andrea, and they dote on him. Other townspeople, however, have their suspicions, especially when he befriends a German woman, Olga.

Starring:Judi Dench, Maggie Smith
Director:Charles Dance
Duration: 104 minutes
Year: 2004

Saawariya

Description:A Bollywood musical romance "Saawariya" is a lush production featuring fabulous sets, an extravagant musical score. Indian cinema’s past meets its present in the lavish Saawariya.
”It’s a love story taken to another level. Unrequited love never looked or felt so good. The film is spellbinding, heartwarming, and yes, heartbreaking as well.”
 And “Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya is an eternal film that transports the viewers across time and space into a world that exists just beyond our ordinary lives.”   Bhansali's Saawariya inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story called White Night is like experiencing a refreshing love story off a picturesque fairy tale book. Yet, it is real and enrapturing.

Starring:Ranbir Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor
Director:Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Duration: 142 minutes
Year: 2007

The Wind Will Carry Us

Description: : A film poem of sometimes humbling beauty: a movie that opens up a new world to us - in the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan - with an enchanting freshness and austerity of vision. A brilliant if slow-paced movie about one man's unwitting journey into adulthood. An engineer from Tehran (Behzad Dourani) arrives in a small mountain village in order to record a ritual that depends on the death of an old lady. But the old woman, whom we never see, refuses to die, and the engineer waits and waits, he begins to question his life. He becomes friends with a little boy...

Starring:Behzad Dorani, Noghre Asadi
Director:Abbas Kiarostami
Duration: 118 minutes
Year: 1999

Beijing Bicycle

Description: Beijing: young men in packs, machismo, class divisions, violence, and indifference. Guei arrives from the country: toothbrushes, hotel foyers, and Qin, a rich neighbor in high heels, dazzle him. He gets a job as a messenger. The company issues him a bike, which he must pay for out of his wages. When it is stolen, Guei hunts for it. A student, Jian, has it; for him, it's the key to teen society - with his pals and with Xiao, a girl he fancies. Guei finds the bike and stubbornly tries to reclaim it in the face of great odds. But for Jian to lose the bike would mean humiliation. The two young men - and the people around them - are swept up in the youths' desperation.

Starring:Lin Cui, Bin Li
Director:Xiaoshuai Wang
Duration: 113 minutes
Year: 2001

Shadow Magic

Description: Beijing, 1902: an enterprising young portrait photographer named Liu Jinglun, keen on new technology, befriends a newly-arrived Englishman who's brought projector, camera, and Lumière-brothers' shorts to open the Shadow Magic theater. Liu's work with Wallace brings him conflict with tradition and his father's authority, complicated by his falling in love with Ling, daughter of Lord Tan, star of Beijing's traditional opera. Liu sees movies as his chance to become wealthy and worthy of Ling. When the Shadow Magic pair are invited to show the films to the Empress Dowager, things look good. But, is disaster in the script? And, can movies preserve tradition even as they bring change?

Starring:Yu Xia, Yufei Xing
Director:Ann Hu
Duration: 116 minutes
Year: 2000

Whale Rider

Description: On the east coast of New Zealand, the Whangara people believe their presence there dates back a thousand years or more to a single ancestor, Paikea, who escaped death when his canoe capsized by riding to shore on the back of a whale. From then on, Whangara chiefs, always the first-born, always male, have been considered Paikea's direct descendants. Pai, an 11-year-old girl in a patriarchal New Zealand tribe, believes she is destined to be the new chief. But her grandfather Koro is bound by tradition to pick a male leader. Pai loves Koro more than anyone in the world, but she must fight him and a thousand years of tradition to fulfill her destiny.

Starring:Keisha Castle-Hughes, Rawiri Paratene
Director:Niki Caro
Duration: 101 minutes
Year: 2002

Pay It Forward

Description: Young Trevor McKinney, troubled by his mother's alcoholism and fears of his abusive but absent father, is caught up by an intriguing assignment from his new social studies teacher, Mr. Simonet. The assignment: think of something to change the world and put it into action. Trevor conjures the notion of paying a favor not back, but forward--repaying good deeds not with payback, but with new good deeds done to three new people. Trevor's efforts to make good on his idea bring a revolution not only in the lives of himself, his mother and his physically and emotionally scarred teacher, but in those of an ever-widening circle of people completely unknown to him.

Starring:Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, Haley Joel Osment
Director:Mimi Leder
Duration: 123 minutes
Year: 2000

Tara Road

Description: Two grieving women - Ria, a Dublin mom whose husband discloses he's in love with a woman already pregnant, and Marilyn, a Connecticut Yankee who's son has died - swap houses for a couple months. Marilyn finds solace in Ria's garden and becomes friends with Colm, a local with a restaurant and his own demons. Ria gets a job cooking, has a date or two, and gradually comes out of her shell. Meanwhile, Ria's husband Danny has problems, economic and personal, that may bring more ruin to those close to him. The house on Tara Road comes to stand for the past, for possibilities, and for what can be lost.

Starring:Olivia Williams, Andie MacDowell
Director:Gillies MacKinnon
Duration: 97 minutes
Year: 2005

Dances with Wolves

Description: A "truly spectacular" film that combines action, romance and breathtaking adventure, Dances With Wolves is "a cinematic masterpiece" (American Movie Classics) that is nothing short of "a triumph" (Roger Ebert)!Sent to protect a US outpost on the desolate frontier, Lt. John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) finds himself alone in the vast wilderness. Befriending the very people he's sent to protect the outpost from, the Sioux Indians, Dunbar slowly comes to revere those he once feared. But when the encroaching US Army threatens to overrun the Sioux, he is forced to make a choice, one that will forever change his destiny and that of a proud and defiant nation.

Starring:Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell
Director:Kevin Costner
Duration: 180 minutes
Year: 1990

Endless Way

Description: As he comes of age, Ah Ming must begin a life of endless labor to bring water to his family. Forced into an arranged marriage with a young girl from a neighboring village, he must forsake his true love, Ah Shui. Unable to cope with the harsh routine that each villager must endure, Ah Ming's wife leaves, never to return, and the long suffering Ah Shui steps forth to care for Ah Ming and his ailing mother, sharing their pain and greif. Life takes a turn for the better when the government renews their work on dams and canals that will bring water directly to the village, thus ensuring a better future for everyone, but tragedy once again rears its ugly head for Ah Ming and his family.

Starring:Chuang Chen, Lu Xia
Director:Wensheng Shen
Duration: 88 minutes
Year: 2004

My Stroke of Insight

Description:One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor's brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a inside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness ... Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the "Singin' Scientist."

Starring:Jill Bolte Taylor
Duration: 18 minutes
Year: 2008

Eve and the Fire Horse

Description: Eve is a precocious nine year-old girl with a wild imagination growing up in a traditional Chinese immigrant family in Vancouver where Confucian doctrines, superstitious obsessions and divine visions abound. When Buddhism and Catholicism are thrown into the mix, life for Eve and her 11-year-old prim and authoritative sister, Karena, escalates into a fantasia of catastrophe, sainthood and cultural confusion. The journey of a young girl and her sister striving to grow up in world where childhood is lonely and the world is full of wonder.

Starring:Vivian Wu
Director:Julia Kwan
Duration: 92 minutes
Year: 2005

Curtain Call

Description: Stevenson Lowe has just moved into a fabulous brownstone with his girlfriend, Julia, who wants to get married. But all thoughts of proposing are quickly scared out of him by a couple of grouchy ghosts. They are Max and Lily Gale, the original residents of his newly purchased brownstone who have no intention of leaving to make room for this new couple. When Julia decides she's waited long enough for a proposal, she leaves Stevenson and his crazy ghost stories behind. Will his afterlife houseguests be able to reunite our young lovers?

Starring: James Spader, Polly Walker
Director:Peter Yates
Duration: 94 minutes
Year: 1999

Dragonfly

Description: Dr. Joe Darrow's (Kevin Costner) wife Emily (Susanna Thompson) has died in a bus accident in South America, and he's slowly learning how to cope with her death...until dead and dying patients start to speak to him in his wife's voice. With each new message he becomes more convinced she's trying to contact him, to tell him something important. But what? Is he just insane? Is she speaking to him from beyond the grave? Or is she still alive?

Starring:Lisa Banes, Kathy Bates, Kevin Costner
Director:Tom Shadyac
Duration: 104 minutes
Year: 2002

Imitation of Life

Description: When they first meet, Lora Meredith and Annie Johnson have a good deal in common. They are both single mothers struggling to make a life for themselves and their daughters, Susie and Sarah Jane. Lora is an aspiring model and actress who needs someone to look after Susie when she goes out on photo shoots or casting calls. Annie is an African-American who desperately wants to healthy home environment in which to raise her daughter. As Lora's career blossoms, she spends less and less time with Susie. While Annie is devoted to her daughter and would do anything for her, the fair-skinned Sara Jane is resentful of the racial bias around her and does everything to hide her origins.

Starring: Lana Turner, John Gavin
Director:Douglas Sirk
Duration: 125 minutes
Year: 1959

Warm Spring

Description: The story, which is set in countryside in China in the late 1980s, begins with a 7-year-old girl Xiao Hua (Yan Zhang) who has just run away from her abusive foster parents to a nearby village. The villagers just don't care, however, and none of them offers her a shelter until a kind old man (Tian Chengren) decides to take her home. But the old man's daughter-in-law doesn't want her and her indifferent husband doesn't want to interfere. Certainly the melodramatic story about Xiao Hua (meaning "Little Flower") involving several attempts of the daughter-in-law trying to get rid of her may sound too good to be true. Xiao Hua wins the love and respect from everybody with pure determination and good will.

Starring: Tian Chengren, Yu Weijie, Hai Yang
Director:Wulan Tana
Duration: 100 minutes
Year: 2003

Snow Cake

Description: Alex Hughes, an ex-convict, is on a road trip to Winnipeg to see an old friend. Along the way, he meets the annoying, but vivacious, Vivienne Freeman who manages to bum a ride with him. Just as he begins to warm to this eccentric girl, Alex's vehicle is in a serious automobile accident that kills Vivienne. After his meeting with the police, Alex decides to speak with Vivienne's mother. Upon arrival at her home, Alex discovers that the mother, Linda, is a highly functional autistic woman who convinces him to stay long to take out the garbage the day after the funeral he agrees to arrange. In those few days, Alex discovers new friends and learns more about the uniqueness of Linda even as he struggles to come to terms with his own grief.

Starring:Alan Rickman, Emily Hampshire
Director:Marc Evans
Duration: 112 minutes
Year: 2006

Night on Earth

Description: A collection of five stories involving cab drivers in five different cities. Los Angeles - A talent agent for the movies discovers her cab driver would be perfect to cast, but the cabbie is reluctant to give up her solid cab driver's career. New York - An immigrant cab driver is continually lost in a city and culture he doesn't understand. Paris - A blind girl takes a ride with a cab driver from the Ivory Coast and they talk about life and blindness. Rome - A gregarious cabbie picks up an ailing man and virtually talks him to death. Helsinki - an industrial worker gets laid off and he and his compatriots discuss the bleakness and unfairness of love and life and death.

Starring:Lisanne Falk, Alan Randolph Scott, Anthony Portillo
Director:Jim Jarmusch
Duration: 128 minutes
Year: 1991

Down by Law

Description: DJ Zack and pimp Jack end up in prison for being too laid-back to avoid being framed for crimes they didn't commit. They end up sharing a cell with eccentric Italian optimist Roberto, whose limited command of the English language is both entertaining and infuriating -but rather more useful to them is the fact that Roberto knows an escape route

Starring:Vernel Bagneris, Ellen Barkin, Richard Boes
Director:Jim Jarmusch
Duration: 107 minutes
Year: 1986

Legends of the Fall

Description: Colonel Wlliam Ludlow and his three sons (Samuel, Tristan and Alfred) live in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, USA, at the beginning of the 20th century. When Samuel brings with him his fiancé Susanna, the fellowship of the 3 brothers is about to be broken. The eldest son, Alfred, falls in love with Susanna, and she falls in love with Tristan. Thing becomes worse when the three brothers decide to join the first World War in Europe in 1914, despite their father's objection. The bond of the brothers is about to be broken forever, and so is Colonel William's heart

Starring:Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins
Director:Edward Zwick
Duration: 133 minutes
Year: 1995