In sepia tones, the film moves back and forth among three periods in Robert Tucker's life: he's an old man, near death, in a nursing home at Christmas time; he's in middle age caring for his cheerful but dying mother; he's a lad at Catholic school, practicing his catechism, going to confession for the first time, receiving the Eucharist, surrounded by the singing of a children's choir. In middle age, he looks through his scrapbook of photographs of muscular men; he recalls lovers and his mother's cremation. A nurse sits beside him on his last night; in his last breath, he reaches forward and back..

　　The lines start with “O Somma Luce” which is the title of the film and also the 67th line of the 33rd canto in “Paradiso” of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” to the end of “Paradiso”.  The film is completed with music and lines instead of emotions and narrations.  This is a recent attempt to combine film with literature.
　　The film begins with a black screen and the music of Edgard Varese. The BGM is “Deserts” that was recorded in 1954. After some moments of darkness, the music ends and a middle-aged man sits on a hill, reciting something. He is Giorgio Passerone, an Italian literature professor, and he is reading out of the last part of ‘Paradiso’ of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Jean-Marie Straub expressed how he thinks of Dante through a subtle accent and dialect. The director who had encoded many great artists and musicians including Bach, complete the combination of Dante and Varese, which could seem strange. (Lim Kyung Yong)

　　Six unused scenes from WHERE LIES YOUR HIDDEN SMILE? One of the more priceless of the "bagatelles" in this collection features a lounging Jean-Marie Straub who gives a non-stop disquisition on liberty and filmmaking while Danièle Huillet busies herself with laundry, and their dog Melchior frisks in and out of frame.

　　Guy Maddin writes, "Tscherkassky has made two films cannibalizing Sidney J. Furie's 1982 Barbara Hershey horror film THE ENTITY, the story of a woman who is continually assaulted and raped either by real ghosts or by awfully adept repressed traumas… The screen literally explodes with a tumult of Hershey faces, shattering Steve Burum's original cinematography into shards of frightened eyes, trembling hands and violent outbursts of self-defense, presented in multiple exposures too layered to count, too arresting to ignore."

　　RFA/1972/15‘/VOSTF/16mm
　　d'après « I cani del Sinaï » de Franco Fortini.

　　1984年七月， Varda 在 Avignon 的一棟養老院裡看到一個名為《活生生與人造的》（Le vivant et l'artificiel）的展覽。展覽場裡，藝術品與動物、人工心臟、發霉的牆壁混亂地共存著。視覺上的震憾讓她久久不能自己，於是她決定帶領我們，重回險地。我們看到一間間住宅，或空的、或滿的。隨著時間流逝，卻留下奇怪的痕跡。另外， Varda 也在這家養老院裡遇到了即將是《無法無家》裡的「女僕」 Yolande Moreau 和「老太太」 Marthe Jarnias 。
　　Varda 曰：
　　『在高速火車的搖晃下，我無法讓自己不去想–那些我的精神正試著去吸納的不協調的影像。一到巴黎，我立刻打電話給 Louis Bec 和 Bernard Faivre d'Arcier ，要求他們讓我去拍這個展覽，不是為了去理解它，而是為了從中汲取靈感。他們答應了。幾天之後，我們出發前往拍片。在回到 Avignon 的高速火車的搖晃下， Nurith Aviv 要求看我的大筆記，好知道他將要拍的是甚麼。筆記紙幾乎還是空白的，我們只看到一些標題：廚房、父母的房間、用餐、窗戶。所有的家庭生活都註記到了，但沒有一樣是準備好了的。整部影片完全是以即興的方式去拍的，沒有標記、沒有脈絡。我只不過是跟隨著因參觀現場而感受到自己真實的心臟跳動，和那些仍然令人感到溫暖的老人的存在。』
　　A.   Varda,1993年, in Varda par Agnès, Ed. Cahiers du cinéma, 1994.

　　改编自埃德加·爱伦·坡的短篇小说《贝蕾妮丝》（Berenice,1835），由侯麦本人出演男主角。

　　Based on one of the major literary texts survived from the Middle Kingdom, the classical period of Egyptian literature, The Eloquent Peasant is a combination of a morality/folk tale and a poem. The events are set between 2160 and 2025 BC. When the peasant Khun-anup and his donkey stumble upon the lands of the noble Rensi, the peasant’s goods are confiscated and he’s unjustly accused of theft. The peasant petitions Rensi who is so taken by the peasant’s eloquence that he report his astonishing discovery to the king. The king realises the peasant has been wronged but delays judgement so as to he can hear more of his eloquence. The peasant makes a total of nine petitions until finally, his goods are returned.

　　短片

　　男子学校的课堂上，男孩们等待着老师的到来。当一脸严肃的男老师走进来的时候，气氛一下子变得沉闷不堪。教室广播突然响起：同学们，今天学校将会有一些改革和变化。你们的老师将会对于你们的未来给出建议和规划，而你们需要做的就是仔细地听取老师们的建议，并严格遵从他们的指示。你们将是学校和同学们的骄傲。
　　广播播报完毕后，男老师在黑板上写下“2+2=5”。大家都非常吃惊，这根本就不符合常理。但是老师宣称这是让男孩们学会的第一个“真理”。一片安静过后，男孩们都跟随老师一起读着。终于，一个男孩举手质疑这个答案。可是在老师的强迫下，他默默地坐下了。此时第二个男孩也站起来跟老师争辩。可是老师的答案却是：你不需要任何思考。男老师甚至找来大学生来恐吓这个男孩，他的同班同学更是不想惹祸上身。老师再次疾言厉色地问道：答案到底是几？男孩毅然在黑板上写下了：4。随之，悲剧的一幕发生了……

　　一部关于一个穷人和他的狗的短片，法国导演让·雅克·贝奈克斯的电影处女作

　　In beautiful sunny afternoon in Prague, a man of a certain age discusses his love of Provence. Suddenly, a black flag is suspended. The composer Foerster died.
　　Graduation film of director Jirí Menzel.

　　An insane man first loves then grows to hate his neighbor, an old man whose penetrating gaze unnerves the insane man. He plans a perfect crime and executes it one night. The next day, two officers knock on the insane man's door, investigating a shriek heard in the night. The insane man invites them in, answers their questions, and submits to an examination of his eyes by one of the officers, who proclaims him innocent. The insane man invites them to stay and relax awhile, then regales them with his theories of crime. His heart begins to beat louder. Angles on the set are skewed to suggest the man's internal disarray.

　　A bit of color for once, all the better to see the red flags with, not to mention the obvious aerial file footage of Warsaw. The story concerns Jozef Malesa, the mason or bricklayer of the title. He was once the darling of the party, the son of two old party activists, a worker of heroic reputation, his own commitment to The Movement unquestioned. He was chosen to be destined for great things, specially educated and pushed forward to positions of responsibility in the Party. Eventually he decides, because of the ethical pressures which he feels from the obstructionism of the bureaucracy from above, he asks to return to be a simple bricklayer. He is disturbed with the way the Party deals with people, especially their lack of direct contact. He thinks workers know better than the leadership many times but that's not the way power flows. He is uncomfortable with the compromises to his idealism. He remains committed to social justice and joins his friends for the May Day rally where his comfort and confidence in his place in society cause him to defer to no man, certainly no rat faced men in overcoats with red armbands. His great pleasure in life moreover is laying brick. He finds the work satisfying and fulfilling which is why he was such an obviously superior worker in the first place.

　　Voice 1 (male "professional announcer" type): This neighborhood(1) was made for the wretched dignity of the petty bourgeoisie, for respectable occupations and intellectual tourism. The sedentary population of the upper floors was sheltered from the influences of the street. This neighborhood has remained the same. It was the strange setting of our story, where a systematic questioning of all the diversions and works of a society, a total critique of its idea of happiness, was expressed in acts.
　　These people also scorned "subjective profundity". They were interested in nothing but an adequate and concrete expression of themselves.
　　Voice 2 (Debord, monotone): Human beings are not fully conscious of their real life - usually groping in the dark; overwhelmed by the consequences of their acts; at every moment groups and individuals find themselves confronted with results they have not wished.
　　Voice 1: They said that oblivion was their ruling passion. They wanted to reinvent everything each day; to become the masters and possessors of their own lives.
　　Just as one does not judge a man according to the conception he has of himself, one cannot judge such periods of transition according to their own consciousness; on the contrary, one must explain the consciousness through the contradictions of material life, through the conflict between social conditions and the forces of social production.
　　The progress achieved in the domination of nature was not yet matched by a corresponding liberation of everyday life. Youth passed away among the various controls of resignation.
　　Our camera has captured for you a few aspects of a provisional microsociety.
　　The knowledge of empirical facts remains abstract and superficial as long as it is not concretized by its integration into the whole "” which alone permits the supersession of partial and abstract problems so as to arrive at their concrete essence, and implicitly at their meaning.
　　This group was on the margins of the economy. It tended toward a role of pure consumption, and first of all the free consumption of its time. It thus found itself directly engaged in qualitative variations of everyday life but deprived of any means to intervene in them.
　　The group ranged over a very small area. The same times brought them back to the same places. No one went to bed early. Discussion on the meaning of all this continued...
　　Voice 2: "Our life is a journey "” In the winter and the night. "” We seek our passage..."�
　　Voice 1: The abandoned literature nevertheless exerted a delaying action on new affective formulations.
　　Voice 2: There was the fatigue and the cold of the morning in this much-traversed labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to resolve. It was a looking-glass reality through which we had to discover the potential richness of reality.
　　On the bank of the river evening began once again; and caresses; and the importance of a world without importance. Just as the eyes have a blurred vision of many things and can see only one clearly, so the will can strive only incompletely toward diverse objects and can completely love only one at a time.
　　Voice 3 (young girl): No one counted on the future. It would never be possible to be together later, or anywhere else. There would never be a greater freedom.
　　Voice 1: The refusal of time and of growing old automatically limited encounters in this narrow, contingent zone, where what was lacking was felt as irreparable. The extreme precariousness of the means of getting by without working was at the root of this impatience which made excesses necessary and breaks definitive.
　　Voice 2: One never really contests an organization of existence without contesting all of that organization's forms of language.
　　Voice 1: When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere representation of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment "ordinary life"� can prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Any game takes place within the contours of its spatial domain. Around the neighborhood, around its fleeting and threatened immobility, stretched a half-known city where people met only by chance, losing their way forever.
　　The girls who found their way there, because they were legally under the control of their families until the age of eighteen, were often recaptured by the defenders of that detestable institution. They were generally confined under the guard of those creatures who among all the bad products of a bad society are the most ugly and repugnant: nuns.
　　What usually makes documentaries so easy to understand is the arbitrary limitation of their subject matter. They describe the atomization of social functions and the isolation of their products. One can, in contrast, envisage the entire complexity of a moment which is not resolved into a work, a moment whose movement indissolubly contains facts and values and whose meaning does not yet appear. The subject matter of the documentary would then be this confused totality.
　　Voice 2: The era had arrived at a level of knowledge and technical means that made possible, and increasingly necessary, a direct construction of all aspects of a liberated affective and practical existence. The appearance of these superior means of action, still unused because of the delays in the project of liquidating the commodity economy, had already condemned aesthetic activity, whose ambitions and powers were both outdated. The decay of art and of all the values of former mores had formed our sociological background. The ruling class's monopoly over the instruments we needed to control in order to realize the collective art of our time had excluded us from a cultural production officially devoted to illustrating and repeating the past. An art film on this generation can only be a film on its absence of real creations.
　　Everyone unthinkingly followed the paths learned once and for all, to their work and their home, to their predictable future. For them duty had already become a habit, and habit a duty. They did not see the deficiency of their city. They thought the deficiency of their life was natural. We wanted to break out of this conditioning, in quest of another use of the urban landscape, in quest of new passions. The atmosphere of a few places gave us intimations of the future powers of an architecture it would be necessary to create to be the support and framework for less mediocre games. We could expect nothing of anything we had not ourselves altered. The urban environment proclaimed the orders and tastes of the ruling society just as violently as the newspapers. It is man who makes the unity of the world, but man has extended himself everywhere. People can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive. There were obstacles everywhere. There was a cohesion in the obstacles of all types. They maintained the coherent reign of poverty. Everything being connected, it was necessary to change everything by a unitary struggle, or nothing. It was necessary to link up with the masses, but we were surrounded by sleep.
　　Voice 3: The dictatorship of the proletariat is a desperate struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative, against the forces and traditions of the old world.
　　Voice 1: In this country it is once again the men of order who have rebelled. They have reinforced their power. They have been able to aggravate the grotesqueness of the ruling conditions according to their will. They have embellished their system with the funereal ceremonies of the past.
　　Voice 2: Years, like a single instant prolonged to this point, come to an end.
　　Voice 1: What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, fit into the tastes and illusions of an era, carried away with it.
　　Voice 2: The appearance of events that we have not made, that others have made against us, now obliges us to be aware of the passage of time, its results, the transformation of our own desires into events. What differentiates the past from the present is precisely its out-of-reach objectivity; there is no more should-be; being is so consumed that it has ceased to exist. The details are already lost in the dust of time. Who was afraid of life, afraid of the night, afraid of being taken, afraid of being kept?
　　Voice 3: What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it. We are engulfed. We are separated. The years pass and we haven't changed anything.
　　Voice 2: Once again morning in the same streets. Once again the fatigue of so many similarly passed nights. It is a walk that has lasted a long time.
　　Voice 1: Really hard to drink more.
　　Voice 2: Of course one might make a film of it. But even if such a film succeeds in being as fundamentally disconnected and unsatisfying as the reality it deals with, it will never be more than a re-creation "” poor and false like this botched traveling shot.
　　Voice 3: There are now people who pride themselves on being authors of films, as others were authors of novels. They are even more backward than the novelists because they are unaware of the decomposition and exhaustion of individual expression in our time, ignorant of the end of the arts of passivity. They are praised for their sincerity since they dramatize, with more personal depth, the conventions of which their life consists. There is talk of the liberation of the cinema. But what does it matter to us if one more art is liberated through which Tom, Dick or Harry can joyously express their slavish sentiments? The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in the perspectives of history but for us and right away. This entails the withering away of alienated forms of communication. The cinema, too, has to be destroyed.
　　Voice 2: In the final analysis, stars are created by the need we have for them, and not by their talent or lack of talent or even by the film industry or advertising. Miserable need, dismal, anonymous life that would like to expand itself to the dimensions of cinema life. The imaginary life on the screen is the product of this real need. The star is the projection of this need.
　　The images of the advertisements during the intermissions are more suited than any others for evoking an intermission of life.
　　To really describe this era it would no doubt be necessary to show many other things. But what would be the point?
　　Better to grasp the totality of what has been done and what remains to be done than to add more ruins to the old world of the spectacle and of memories.
　　1. This film, which evokes the lettrist experiences at the origin of the situationist movement, opens with shots of the Paris district frequented by the lettrists in the early 1950s.

　　A dramatization of the methods in which young women are abducted or otherwise procured for prostitution.

　　拉美西斯大帝旗下的一个士兵，把卡默斯的爹娘赶出了他们的家园。卡默斯决定对这个不公平的事件展开抗争。於是他出发前往埃及的首都底比斯，想到土地司去调查这件事情。然而进入土地司之前，必须先经历过一番锻鍊；卡默斯下定决心要克服一切的阻碍。因缘际会之下，他遇到了一位名唤诺菲的女孩，疯狂地陷入热恋，并且获得了她的支持，准备一起携手打这场官司。然而诺菲与卡默斯来自两个完全不同的常阶层。不过，他们还是决定心手相连，一起面对所有的挑战，即便最後必须去面见法老王本人也不害怕......拉美西斯大帝时代，在底比斯附近的一座小村庄，住著一对农民和他们的儿子卡默斯。有一天，他们家来了一个身材高大的士兵，自称是法老王大军的退伍军人。这士兵夺走了他们的田产和房屋，还声称这是法老王的命令。
　　於是卡默斯决定到底比斯去讨回公道。抗争的过程中，他认识了一个同年龄的女孩──美丽的诺菲，两人坠入了情网。这一对小情侣，真的能替卡默斯的爹娘讨回公道吗？

　　A loving film tribute to Russian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko, who died tragically in a car accident in 1979 at the age of 40. This documentary by her husband, Elem Klimov, includes excerpts from all of Shepitko's films, and her own voice is heard talking about her life and art.
　　Elem Klimov's grief-stricken elegy Larisa examines the life of his late wife—the film director Larisa Shepitko—through a series of direct-address interviews and photomontages, set against a mournful visual-musical backdrop. Typically, Klimov films his subjects (which include himself and several of Shepitko's collaborators) within a stark, snow-covered forest, its tangled web of trees standing in as metaphorical representation of a perhaps inexpressible suffering, the result of Shepitko's premature death while filming her adaptation of Valentin Rasputin's novella Farewell to Matyora. Interweaving home movie footage with sequences from Shepitko's work (Maya Bulgakova's pensive plane crash reminiscence from Wings takes on several new layers of resonance in this context), Larisa's most powerful passage is its first: accompanied by the grandiose final music cue from Shepitko's You and I, Klimov dissolves between a series of personal photographs that encompass Larisa's entire life, from birth to death. This brief symphony of sorrow anticipates the cathartic reverse-motion climax of Klimov's Come and See, though by placing the scene first within Larisa's chronology, Klimov seems to be working against catharsis. The pain is clearly fresh, the wound still festering, and Klimov wants—above all—to capture how deep misery's knife has cut.

　　Golden Bear for Best Short Film (win) - - 2004 Berlin International Film Festival

　　一个打公益官司的女律师，面对工厂的阻挠、村民的不解和庭审的困难，。而她的心里的原告，是一条鱼……

　　Two strangers meet in a subway car. Both bring their past with them. Both look from their present. Both will determine their future in that fleeting, and ephemeral, vital journey that brings them together briefly.