Weird Movies

Using art as the catalyst, this film explores how the human spirit prevails in the face of tragedy. The film features three people; a photographer who becomes blind, a painter/sculptor who loses half her brain in a boxing match, and a musician losing his hearing to tinnitus. Using art to illustrate change, this film explores how the human spirit prevails in the face of tragedy and what new meanings emerge that otherwise would not have been found if not for their disability.

At the heart of the film's multiple narratives is an adaptation of A Distant Episode, the savage short story set in Morocco by American author Paul Bowles, first published in 1947. Moving between documentary, fiction and fable, "The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers" observes its protagonist, filmmaker Oliver Laxe, directing his own film Las Mimosas in Morocco, only to walk off set and into Rivers' narrative. Shot against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the Sahara, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, Laxe is drawn into a hallucinatory and perilous adventure of cruelty and madness to form a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself. "In a café in Morocco, about 50 years ago, Paul Bowles overheard a man, high on kif, say the title of this film. And so he wrote a story around this statement, a story that moves between different planes of reality. I read the story, and the story behind the story, and the strange phrase kept circling around my mind, creating images and dreams. This film is a manifestation of these images, along with obsessions about cinema and how far we will go to make it". Oliver Laxe.

Totally disconnected from his past and memory, the Passenger tries to define himself confronted by his pre-determined fate, a fate that he has to re-live upon every anniversary of his death.

Our figurine sized supermen hero embarks on an epic surreal journey that will take him across the Ethiopian post apocalyptic landscape in search of a way to get on the hovering spacecraft that for years has become a landmark in the skies.

Under the sun, the heavenly beauty of grasslands will soon be covered by the raging dust of mines. Facing the ashes and noises caused by heavy mining , the herdsmen have no choice but to leave as the meadow areas dwindle. In the moonlight, iron mines are brightly lit throughout the night. Workers who operate the drilling machines must stay awake. The fight is tortuous, against the machine and against themselves. Meanwhile, coal miners are busy filling trucks with coals. Wearing a coal-dust mask, they become ghostlike creatures. An endless line of trucks will transport all the coals and iron ores to the iron works. There traps another crowd of souls, being baked in hell. In the hospital, time hangs heavy on miners' hands. After decades of breathing coal dust, death is just around the corner. They are living the reality of purgatory, but there will be no paradise.

A Buddhist monk on a spiritual quest. A Student trying to test his limits. An organ dealer growing his business. A surgeon who heals by day and rapes women at night. The film interweaves various stories, on the threshold of pain, between life and death.

After the Supertyphoon Haiyan, which plunged the city of Tacloban in the Philippines into its horrendous state, the lives of Bebeth, Larry, and Erwin intertwine. The survivors are left to search for the dead while keeping their sanity intact and protecting what little faith might be left. A series of events continues to test their endurance.

In the wee hours of winter a night train travels through a sleepless city. This is a panorama of a Buddhist monk's journey through Tokyo at night. He also stops at a bath-house in a capsule hotel, where he makes a brief encounter.

An ultra-orthodox scholar is revived after dying for 40 minutes. After coming back to life, he suddenly feels a strange awakening in his body and suspects that God is testing him.

The dry quarry and a forest that still beats. A very sick father reviews the daughter. Resentments are brought to the table. The memory of the dead awakened by blood, objects, shadows and dreams affects Clarisse at this scenario of beauty and agony. Husband and business are expecting she in the city for a cathartic outcome.

In an invisible territory at the margins of society lives a wounded community who face the threat of being forgotten by political institutions and having their rights as citizens trampled. Disarmed veterans, taciturn adolescents, drug addicts trying to escape addiction through love; ex-special forces soldiers still at war with the world; floundering young women and future mothers; and old people who have not lost their desire to live. Through this hidden pocket of humanity, renowned documentarian Roberto Minervini opens a window to the abyss of today's America.

A shelter is threatened by shutdown and demolition. 60 women of different ages, nationalities and social backgrounds gather in order to defend it, attempting to redefine their place in today's world.

"Humans always doubt," says a father to his daughter. "Just imagine if suddenly everything (were) clear. What would you do?" What indeed? Such questions serve as a substitute for drama in Sharunas Bartas' "Peace to Us in Our Dreams," an old-school broodfest in which a man, his daughter and his violinist companion openly ponder Big Themes during a country getaway.

The venerated filmmaker Eisenstein is comparable in talent, insight and wisdom, with the likes of Shakespeare or Beethoven; there are few - if any - directors who can be elevated to such heights. On the back of his revolutionary film Battleship Potemkin, he was celebrated around the world, and invited to the US. Ultimately rejected by Hollywood and maliciously maligned by conservative Americans, Eisenstein traveled to Mexico in 1931 to consider a film privately funded by American pro-Communist sympathizers, headed by the American writer Upton Sinclair. Eisenstein's sensual Mexican experience appears to have been pivotal in his life and film career - a significant hinge between the early successes of Strike, Battleship Potemkin, and October, which made him a world-renowned figure, and his hesitant later career with Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible and The Boyar's Plot.

In the Japanese town of Ushimado, the shortage of labor is a serious problem due to its population's rapid decline. Traditionally, oyster shucking has been a job for local men and women, but for a few years now, some of the factories have had to use foreigners in order to keep functioning. Hirano oyster factory has never employed any outsiders but finally decides to bring in two workers from China. Will all the employees get along?

A yakuza enforcer is ordered to secretly drive his beloved colleague to be assassinated. But when the colleague unceremoniously disappears en route, the trip that follows is a twisted, surreal and horrifying experience.

A businessman accidentally kills The Metal Fetishist, who gets his revenge by slowly turning the man into a grotesque hybrid of flesh and rusty metal.

After being released, a wrongfully imprisoned black man exacts vengeance on those who've crossed him via the power of his newly sentient penis, which may or may not be the result of an experiment gone wrong.

The rise, fall and rise of a teen death-rock idol.

A Chinese restaurant worker wanted for murder in Hong Kong contracts Ebola in South Africa, becomes immune to it, and unknowingly spreads the virus there, then comes back to Hong Kong and continues to infect people with it.

A pair of whacked-out cartoon-like exterminator/hitmen kill the owner of a burglar-alarm company, and stalk the partner who hired them, his wife, and a nerd framed for the murder, who tells the story in flashback from the electric chair.

A woman buys a doll at a magic shop. Unbeknownst to her, the doll is possessed by an evil spirit, and it proceeds to take her over.

Punk rock gangs and music groups clash with one another and the brutal police force in a futuristic Tokyo setting.

While in Thailand to avenge his brother who was crippled in a fight with a corrupt Thai boxer, a man gets caught up in a web of fate, Buddhism and black magic.

A caretaker devotes himself to three demented siblings after their father's death.