Not in Foreign DVDs & Videos

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A Polish film set amid the ravages of World War II, PORNOGRAFIA follows two middle-aged men as they pontificate and speculate on the future of their country. Although the battle comes perilously close, the two men prefer to ignore it, and instead focus their lusty attentions on a nearby farmer's daughter.

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UN DIA SIN SEXO is a day in the life of four Peruvian couples of varying ages and backgrounds as they struggle over issues between the sheets. This is a lighthearted comic look at the pitfalls of sex in relationships, whether the couples are young and hot to trot, or a little bit older and less full of fire. Either way, these lovers find themselves in all sorts of hilarious scenarios that speak to the voyeurs among us.

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A lusty school headmaster, joined by his perverted nephews, recruits 12 female teachers to become their sex slaves. Whether the women will comply willingly remains to be seen!

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PORN THEATER, as its title suggests, covers a day in the life of a Parisian pornographic cinema, foregrounding its marginalized male patrons and their activities inside. Because the film cuts between only three locations--the ticket area, the main viewing theater, and the grungy, yellow bathroom--it effectively seals off the world outside, providing the viewer with a heightened sense of containment. An extraordinary amount of screentime is given to the spectators in the theater simply watching the film, the effect of which is almost Hitchcockean in the sense of cinematic double entendre--as one watches the characters in the movie viewing a movie, one becomes conscious of the architecture of the theater, the mechanics of film projection, and the other viewers. When PORN THEATER draws to a close, then, it is no surprise the pornographic film the characters watch also comes to conclusion, and everyone must leave their respective theaters more or less together. The film additionally makes comment on disease and desire and provides comic relief, though mostly at the expense of one hirsute drag queen. As one might also expect from the title, the film carries a ton of sexual content, though only between the male patrons of the theater, unsure as to whether they've come to reinforce their heterosexual desires through the movie or to cruise the other customers for homosexual encounters.

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Spanish actress turned director Laura Mana delivers an enchanting fable, by turns funny and achingly poignant, and seasoned with a bit of magical realism. Opening in black-and-white and set in a dull, drab Mexican town, the inhabitants of the film are beset by a bad case of the doldrums: the kids are taciturn, the adults are listless, and the elderly are afflicted. Among them, Dolores (Elisabeth Margoni, LOVE, ACTUALLY) stands out as a pious, big-hearted, and lovable woman, but her husband leaves her because he finds her undiluted goodness difficult to stomach. Shocked, hurt and angry, Dolores goes to bed with the first man who asks her, and soon she is providing all of the love-starved men of the town with the intimacy they have been missing. The changes are immeasurable and color is brought back into the lives of all the villagers, until problems arise in the form of the local prostitutes whose business has been hurt. Dolores's husband also returns and demands a stop to her behavior, forcing Delores to make a difficult decision. Mana delivers a beautiful, life-affirming, feminist take on the conservative mores of small-town life.

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An epic tale of the Spanish Civil War, LIBERTARIAS focuses on the role that women played in the conflict. Maria (Ariadna Gil, known in Spain for her success with roles deemed impossible for other actresses) is a nun forced to flee her convent when the war brings troops to Barcelona. She hides in a brothel, where she meets and unites with a women's organization to assist with the war effort against Franco's fascists, and thereby secures the rights for their sex. Through her experiences Maria encounters many women from various social groups and occupations, and learns that they are all united in being oppressed merely because of their gender. LIBERTARIAS concentrates on how the struggle for freedom and civil rights during the Spanish Civil War took on special meaning for women. The film was nominated for six Goya Awards in 1996, and director Vicente Aranda (best know internationally for his film AMANTES aka LOVERS) took home the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo Film Festival.

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REBELDE is a Mexican soap opera set in a school for the country's richest teens. Among the elite are a few poor kids whose natural gifts have allowed them entrance to this exclusive institution. When these two markedly different groups meet, the have-nots become the objects of scorn from their wealthier counterparts, resulting in an explosive mix of comedy, drama, and pop-music interludes that would make BEVERLY HILLS 90210 proud. This release presents the sudsy series' third season.

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Italian director Gabriele Salvatores (MEDITERRANEO) masterfully directs this eerie and engrossing suspense thriller involving a 10-year-old boy who lives in rural southern Italy. It is summertime and Michele (Guiseppe Cristiano) is free to spend the long sunny days riding his bike and running through the wheat fields. In fact, the wheat could be considered Michele's costar, as it often consumes the entire scope of the screen, showing how Michele plays, hides, and ponders life in the vast expanses of flowing yellow stalks. Because there are only a few other children in the village, Michele often plays alone, and one day he discovers a hole in the ground, obscured by wheat, where a boy his age is chained and imprisoned. The boy has clearly been starved and mistreated, yet Michele approaches him fearlessly and attempts to make friends with him. With the dreaminess that is a 10-year-old's truest treasure, Michele doesn't ask too many questions, nor does he draw conclusions about why the boy is in the hole, or who put him there. Through the expressions on young Michele's face, viewers can read his light questioning of human existence, human morality, and human rights. However, as the film draws on, subtly revealing shocking secrets about the adults in Michele's village, the beauty of this utterly simple yet deadly powerful plot come clear. I'M NOT SCARED is a moving film built on crystal-clear images of the Italian sun, sky, and wheat fields; strangely offset by its startling loss-of-innocence story.

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THE SISSI COLLECTION includes the trilogy of romantic films about the Austrian princess: SISSI, THE YOUNG EMPRESS, and SISSI: THE FATEFUL YEARS OF THE EMPRESS. The three movies follow the adventures of Sissi and her husband Kaiser Franz Josef (Karl Heinz Böhm). Romy Schneider (WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT, TRIPLE CROSS), stars as the young princess, who has to endure the frustrations of court life in Vienna and a difficult mother-in-law. This popular series of costume dramas was directed by Ernst Marischka (SEASON IN SALZBURG), and this collection also includes two of his other movies, THE STORY OF VICKI and FOREVER MY LOVE.

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This Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Language Film was a big art house hit, spawning a whole international subgenre, "foodie" (films about the liberating effects of good food). It's adapted from a story by Isak Dinesen about two sisters in a 19th century Calvinist settlement in Denmark who, under their late father's rigorous spiritual dictates, pass up their chances for romance and worldly success. Years pass; they grow into charitable old spinsters and one day a French war refugee, Babette (Stéphane Audran), comes to work for them. Life goes quietly one for years until one day Babette decides to prepare a lavish gourmet dinner for the elders of the town, even though the thought of such decadence makes the sisters fear for their Christian souls. This all may sound rather dull to some viewers, but rest assured, no one who has seen this film has ever regretted it. Even with its measured pacing and austere emotional palette this remains a riveting experience from the first frame to the last. The acting is marvelously naturalistic, and the cinematography evokes the dark beauty of 19th century Scandinavian paintings, rendering the ancient, white-whiskered faces of the villagers, the windswept coastline, the wood-hewn interiors, and of course the incredible food, with a vital, deeply felt reverence that lingers in the mind long after the film is over.

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In this Mexican comedy classic, Tin-Tan and El Zorrillo are the same person and Lupe has fallen in love with the latter. But when Don Martin and his workers are jailed by the evil Don Gaspar, it's up to El Zorrillo to save the day.

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Loosely based on the classic WEST SIDE STORY, JOSH tells the tale of two rival gangs, one led by Prakash (Sharad Kapoor), and the other by Max (Shah Rukh Khan). When Prakash's twin brother (Chandrachur Singh) returns to town, his newfound love for Max's sister, Shirley (Aishwarya Rai), threatens to upset the tenuous peace between the gangs.

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Bizarre and frequently hilarious, EL CHAVO DEL 8 is a Latin American television show in which adults dress up as children. A simple premise, but one that has garnered millions of viewers over the years, and turned its creator and principle star Roberto Gomez Bolanos into a big celebrity. A selection of episodes from the show is contained on this collection.

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The popular South Korean mini-series DAE JANG GEUM (aka JEWEL IN THE PALACE) earned that country's highest-ever television ratings with an epic blend of historical and personal intrigue. Based on a true story, the period-piece costume drama centers on its titular heroine, Jang-geum (Yeong-ae Lee), a 16th-century orphan girl who enters the king's royal court as a lowly kitchen maid. When the political machinations of an evil duchess send Jang-geum into exile, she leaves to study medicine and triumphantly returns to the palace as the King's personal physician. Bolstered by strong acting, gripping plotlines, and well-drawn characters, the series' most remarkable achievement remains the lavish, detail-rich production design that presents a historically accurate depiction of 16th-century Korean history, culture, and politics--as well as mouthwatering cooking sequences a la BABETTE'S FEAST. This third volume concludes the series with episodes 37-54.

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REBELDE is a Mexican telenovela based in a school for the country's richest kids. But among the elite are a few children from poorer families whose natural gifts in a number of different fields have allowed them entrance to this exclusive institution. When these two markedly different groups meet, the poverty-stricken kids are tormented by their wealthy counterparts, and some explosive action follows. This release presents the series' first three seasons.

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A police officer loses his colleague in an intense operation to bump off a gangster kingpin, leading to a botched operation, and a killer on the lose. After ten years pass, the deceased officer's kids grow up, and decide to take on the task of seeking vengeance for their father.

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Three young women move to Moscow from the country in search of love and a better life. One finds a proper, but dull husband. The other lands a famous hockey player, but ends up disappointed in him. The third becomes pregnant by a television cameraman who promptly leaves her upon hearing the news. Twenty years later the women are still living in Moscow, having learned how to cope with the reality of their respective situations. Winner of the 1980 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

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A lonely street vendor, Hsiao Kang (Lee Kang-Sheng), sells watches near a Taipei subway stop. The death of his father (Miao Tien) furthers his isolation as his widowed mother (Lu Yi-Chang) slips into an unhealthy mourning, hoping her dead husband's spirit will return to her. The street vendor encounters a woman (Chen Shiang-Chyi) seeking a watch for a trip to Paris--one that can display both Taipei time and Paris time. Unimpressed with his watch selection, the woman persistently attempts to buy the watch off the young man's wrist. After acquiescing, the woman presents him with a token gift that shines a loving light into the street vendor's dreary, solitary life. Unable to stop thinking about his obstinate customer, the vendor begins obsessively changing every clock he sees to Paris time, beginning with his own watches and culminating with gigantic clocks atop skyscrapers. His customer, meanwhile, endures a rather lonesome and difficult Parisian vacation. Writer/director Tsai Ming-Liang (THE RIVER; THE HOLE) meditates on obsession and loneliness with this enchanting unrequited romance that combines elements of deep sorrow and ridiculous slapstick comedy. The film makes great use of his strengths such as the lack of musical score and long, often comedic, takes. Jean-Pierre Léaud joins Ming-Liang's usual ensemble in a memorable cameo.

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A man calls a suicide hotline and falls in love with the woman who takes his call in this erotic drama from director Lee Kang-Sheng.

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In his final collaboration with Akira Kurosawa, Toshirô Mifune portrays Dr. Kyojio "Red Beard" Niide, a gruff but caring head doctor at a 19th-century clinic for the poor. Sorely in need of competent assistance, Red Beard takes on a new intern, the ambitious Noboru Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama). However, Yasumoto isn't made aware of his appointment until after he's visited the facility and seen its grim conditions and impoverished patients. Initially, the brash young physician rebels against the wise elder and declines his duties, but gradually Yasumoto begins to respect Red Beard and his difficult yet essential work. As Yasumoto slowly acclimates to the clinic, the story also follows the lives (and deaths) of various patients. Truly the end of an era, RED BEARD marks the dissolution of the Kurosawa/Mifune partnership and also Kurosawa's last black-and-white production. Although surprisingly little has been written about the rift between Mifune and Kurosawa, it's likely that tensions were largely due to the film's grueling two-year shoot. Despite the drama behind the camera, RED BEARD remains one of Kurosawa's underrated classics. Although Mifune is best known for his earlier roles as an impetuous youth, here he gives a mature, though no less vital, performance, echoing the mentor character Takashi Shimura played in STRAY DOG, SEVEN SAMURAI, and other Kurosawa movies. (However, Mifune does get one action-packed, YOJIMBO-worthy fight scene.) In turn, Kayama admirably fills the role of the headstrong young intern. A sort of period-piece MASH or ER, RED BEARD is a moving drama that uses doctors and patients to address the timeless notion of trying to be a good person in an often cruel world.

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Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou) is a young woman who glides through the streets of Paris as quietly as a mouse. With wide eyes and a tiny grin, she sees the world in a magical light, discovering minor miracles every day. A shy and reserved person whose favorite moments are spent alone skimming stones into the water, Amélie was raised by a pair of eccentrics who falsely diagnosed her with a heart problem at the age of six and so limited her exposure to the outside world. Now a free and independent woman, Amélie wears a bob that curls in every direction and dresses in red. With a job in a café and an aptitude for spying on her neighbors, Amélie entertains herself by enacting a series of homemade, kindhearted practical jokes. She returns a long-forgotten box of childhood knickknacks to its proper owner, she sends her father's garden troll on a trip around the world, and she creates a love connection at the café between the hypochondriac druggist and a beer-drinking old grouch. But when the day is done, Amélie finds one stone unturned, and decides to work her magic on the quirky object of her affections, Nino Quincampoix (Matthieu Kassovitz), whom she has never met. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who codirected DELICATESSEN and THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN with Marc Caro) presents AMÉLIE, an aesthetically gorgeous and inventive film. The rich, glowing color scheme is offset by flashbacks in black and white archival footage that give short biographies of each character. A soft-spoken narrator guides viewers through this enlightening fairy tale, which sometimes speeds through the streets and other times drifts in slow motion. AMÉLIE is humorous, questioning, and strange, and it will change the lives of all who watch it, if only for a short while after leaving Amélie's world.

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Lasse Nielson's YOU ARE NOT ALONE is the story of innocence, young love, and sexual coming-of-age. Set in a Danish all-boys boarding school, the film explores the intimate connection that develops between two of the school's students in the midst of much tension between the children and their headmaster.

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In Federico Fellini's seminal film LA DOLCE VITA, a three-hour masterpiece that shows one man's descent into "the sweet life" of debauchery, Marcello Mastroianni stars as eccentric journalist Marcello Rubini. On assignment to chronicle the lives of the rich and famous Italian aristocracy in a gossip column for a Roman newspaper, Marcello floats from one fabulous party to the next, meeting all varieties of beautiful, extravagant people. While he would never protest this seemingly ideal job, it makes him feel lonely and empty, and he stays up drinking and dancing night after night only to wake up each morning unbalanced and unfocused. The film follows Marcello's ups and downs in an episodic pattern in which each evening is a new story, a new adventure, a new dare, a new woman with whom to fall helplessly in love--but only for that night. Each morning the slate is wiped clean, and Fellini resets Marcello's score to zero. Sprinkled with religious images and gestures at salvation, LA DOLCE VITA is supreme in the beauty of its all-encompassing symbolism that is expressed through lavish sets, an alluring script, overemphasized physical movements, roller-coaster jazz music, and helpless emotions.

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Based on the Japanese drama HEAVEN'S COINS, the popular South Korean mini-series SPRING DAYS is a romantic melodrama of unspoken tragedy and sibling rivalry. Jung-eun (Hyun-jung Go) is a beautiful young woman whose traumatic past has rendered her mute. Admitted to a hospital, Jung-eun is treated by a handsome and compassionate doctor, Eun-ho (Jin-hee Ji), who begins to fall in love with his new patient. But the couple's burgeoning relationship becomes complicated by the arrival of Eun-ho's stepbrother, Eun-sub (In-sung Jo), triggering a tense love triangle with some unexpected consequences. Brimming with the strong acting, gripping storylines, and well-drawn characters for which K-dramas have become known, the sudsy mini-series is presented in its entirety with this collection of 20 episodes.

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Michèle (AMELIE's adorable Audrey Tautou) is a 20-year-old tornado. With a bouncing, perfectly round Afro and a job posing for fashion photography, she boldly describes herself as a "top model," though her miniature physical size and girlish grin reveals her subdued, searching interior. Overloaded with passion and personality, she seeks a way to channel her spirituality into an identity. Buddhism works. So does Judaism, when she falls for François (Edouard Baer), a Jewish veterinarian. Her insistence that François prove his religious faith to her by observing Shabbat and obeying other rules causes him a lot of grief. But he adoringly complies. GOD IS GREAT, I'M NOT follows Michèle over a three-year period via the impulsive and always poetic exclamations she writes in her diary. The film shows how her aggressive attitude towards her family, François and all those she holds dear sometimes alienates her. She demands a lot of other people--mainly, that they live life with all the zest with which she has chosen to live her own, and sometimes those demands backfire on her. In total, GOD IS GREAT is an intense and beautiful film fueled by a powerful performance by Tautou, who rules the screen, and an inspired script from director Pascale Bailly.

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TELL NO ONE starts off innocently enough: sunlight streams through the trees at a gorgeous summer home as an Otis Redding song plays. But the ominous title is apt: the events in this French thriller based a Harlan Coben novel soon turn dark. Happily married couple Alex (François Cluzet) and Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) go for a swim, but their idyllic evening is interrupted by a brutal attack. Alex is knocked unconscious, and his wife is murdered. Almost a decade later, that night still haunts Alex. He receives an email pointing him to a link to a live webcam, where he sees a woman who looks remarkably like his dead wife turn and stare into the camera. Hope and confusion mount, but a discovery at the crime scene causes Alex to become the prime suspect in his wife's death, a murder that was thought to have been solved years ago. When TELL NO ONE played in its native France, it picked up four César awards, the country's equivalent of the Oscar, and it's easy to see why. Director Guillame Canet (who also plays a small role in the film) has crafted a taut, well-told film. TELL NO ONE's narrative journey is filled with numerous twists and turns, but the audience is content to be along for the ride with Canet at the wheel. There are elements of Hitchcock and THE FUGITIVE, but the film never feels like a rip-off of the classics. It's a gripping, entertaining tale that features solid performances, especially from Canet (L'ENFER) and Kristin Scott Thomas in a supporting role.

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The Hmong are a traditional people residing in the mountains of northern Vietnam. The music of the Hmong is an important part of their culture, which focuses on cultivating beauty and the art of attraction, whether that focus goes to a living person, an ancestor or a spirit.

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NOT ONE LESS is an original, extremely affecting story of a small Chinese village and the children that inhabit it. When an elementary school teacher leaves her assignment to care for her ill mother, the community leader allows a 13-year-old girl, Wei Minzhi, to take her place. After the class clown is forced to leave the village in order to find work, Wei Minzhi organizes a fundraiser that will give her enough money to track him down and return him to his rightful place in the classroom. Zhang's (RAISE THE RED LANTERN) film proves that determination and will can conquer any odds.

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A frank, often shocking documentary on so-called "boy prostitution" in Prague, with no-holds-barred interviews with the young boys who make their living peddling their bodies on the streets.