Like a Son

A married couple who have managed to remain blissfully happy into their autumn years, are surrounded over the course of the four seasons of one average year by friends, colleagues, and family who all seem to suffer some degree of unhappiness.

Russian filmmaker Alexsandr Sokurov directs this study of the intense bond between a father (Andrey Schetinin) and his son, Aleksei (Aleksey Neymsyshev). Having lived alone together for years in a rooftop flat overlooking the sea, the two have created their own private world filled with memory and ritual. Like his father before him, Aleksei attends military school and the two spend their free time wrestling and lifting weights together. But as Aleksei's recurrent nightmares and the demands of the outside world place mounting pressure on their intimate and rarefied existence, it seems that family life as they know it will eventually have to come to an end.

A boy is abandoned in the heart of the desert by his step father. He takes refuge with two orphans who live in an abandoned mining town. The three kids struggle to survive through series of increasingly desperate and serious crimes. They meet their downfall after a murder weighs too heavy upon their conscience.

The first feature film from acclaimed independent African American filmmaker Charles Burnett, this intensely emotional drama concerns a man who makes his living at a slaughterhouse as he struggles for economic and emotional survival and tries to patch up his often strained relationship with his family. Shot on weekends over a period of several years and first shown publicly in 1977, Killer of Sheep slowly but surely began to develop a potent reputation among film enthusiasts; in 1981, it won honors at the Berlin International Film Festival and an enthusiastic reception at the Sundance Film Festival. It was added to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 1990.

LIFE DURING WARTIME focuses on three sisters and the people they love as they struggle to find their places in an unpredictable and volatile world where the past haunts the present and imperils the future. The question of forgiveness and its limits threads throughout a series of intersecting love stories, offering clarity and, perhaps alternatives, to the comforts of forgetting.

Recently widowed American opera diva Caterina takes her teenaged son Joe with her on a long singing tour to Italy. Absorbed in her hectic work in various Verdi operas around Rome, Caterina is soon shocked to discover that her troubled and lonely son has become a heroin addict. Her desperate attempts to wean the youth off the drug result in an incestuous relationship, but also in a possibility to reunite Joe–maybe even herself–with his real father, whose existence she has kept a secret from him.