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World In Action looks at the controversy surrounding Acid House parties and the music associated with the drug Ecstasy, spending a weekend with a group of youngsters in London who travel by coach to secret destinations to evade the police.

Freed at last by death from tyranny of an elderly, querulous mother, Esme Fanshaw is persuaded to take a man, Amos Curry, into her house as a paying guest. At first wary of him, Esme becomes increasingly fond of this dapper little man with his mysterious summer occupation. When she finally learns the nature of this occupation she is at first shocked then sympathetic.

During World War II, Switzerland severely limited refugees: "Our boat is full." A train from Germany halts briefly in an isolated corner of Switzerland. Six people jump off seeking asylum: four Jews, a French child, and a German soldier. They seek temporary refuge with a couple who run a village inn. They pose as a family: the deserter as husband, Judith as his wife, an old man from Vienna as her father, his granddaughter and the French lad, whom they beg to keep silent, as their children. Judith's teenage brother poses as a soldier. The fabrication unravels through chance and the local constable's exact investigation. Whom will the Swiss allow to stay? Who gets deported?

The local country dancing team of old-age pensioners is forced to change its style when Jack, its leader, arrives with a new partner, one who is younger and prettier.

"Ellis Island Tales" - From 1892 to 1924, nearly 16 million emigrants from Europe passed through Ellis Island, a small block of land where a transit center was built, near the New York Statue of Liberty. "Ellis Island Tales, Stories of Wandering and Hope" - the book is composed of three major parts. Georges Perec and Robert Bober visited Ellis Island and with the help of texts and documents, restored what everyday life was about what some called "the island of tears".

Country: United States of America. Profession: Filmmaker. Done in Paris (France) on July 7, 1979 at 3:15 p.m.

For more than 100 years rugby union was for men only - until women, like those from the South Wales village of Magor, started their own teams.

Documentary about art theft during the nazi era.

A line-puller at the soccer stadium, apparently once an active footballer himself, breaks out in his chalk car and is confounded to discover that lines play an important role not only in his job.

A young woman shakes eels out from between the sheets of a bed. She sews the eels on to a sheet, then cuts them away and they fall to the ground. A dilemma. Jayne Parker discovered film as a medium when she was a sculpture student at Canterbury College of Art (1977-80). In early works, objects, performance and gesture were combined by the camera to explore space, duration and the physical body. The images in these early films were both literal and metaphoric, depicting exact events but also creating physical and personal associations for the viewer. Ideas are evoked in images rather than words; ordinary actions are also enigmas.

Out of over 4,000 ordinance survey maps (scale 1:25,000) charting all of West Germany, 88 maps were selected by random generator. Then random intersections of two coordinates were determined. Between March 1979 and February 1980 I visited the places at these coordinates, going from south to north. If the random place was determined by with the help of the survey map in the landscape, then I set up the camera at eye-level and pointed it northwards. This first shot was followed by 23 other shots, with the camera turning 15 degrees to the right for each next shot. The length of the shots follows a simple pattern: in the beginning, the shots are 6-5-4-3-4-5-6-5...and so seconds long. Towards the middle of the film they become progressively shorter, reaching ¼ of a second before becoming longer again at the end of the film.

Matthew and his wife are deeply suspicious of psychoanalysis. It's not their sort of thing at all.

A portrait of the Scottish island of Iona.

This film is the theatrical follow-up to a very popular German TV-series (also called "Anna"), about a young girl who wants to make it as a prima ballerina.

A portrait of the writer and former miner Günter Westerhoff

The seer speaks and evokes a journey into space. The journey is to Cuma and in Cuma there were the Sibyls...were there? There are! A ritual to open the past, to denounce the historical violence suffered by the Women/Sybils and their territory: Cuma, Naples.

In Hamburg, the police are faced with a mystery after a series of burglaries: there are no clues at the crime scene except for a Japanese character. The characters are soon found all over the city. A retired detective and a journalist finally uncover a huge conspiracy that goes back to the Japanese Middle Ages.

Héléna Werner leads a reclusive and deserted life. Alone, as if withdrawn from the world in her apartment of refined luxury. She places an ad for a private secretary, a "handyman" who would take her away from the daily grind. As soon as he starts working, Milo adopts an intriguing behavior. From the start, he takes everything in hand and the doors of the apartment close on them both.

After the essay "On Marionette theatre" by Heinrich von Kleist. The film focuses on Kleist himself, torn apart, searching for knowledge, for identity, trapped in his loneliness and self-absorption, jumping over walls, making grimaces, cruelty, suffering.

In 1833, the penalty for non-compliance is death! Andreas insists on his right as a free man and fights alone against the entire royal army.

Something very common in our days, an adolescent who does not find communication with her mother or stepfather falls into a depression that drags her down paths of difficult return. A film that shows the harshness of loneliness and the wrong search for drugs as a way out of problems.

Fred, a commercial director, decides to learn the flute to relieve his stress. His music teacher is none other than Isabelle, a flutist he once saw playing in the subway. He falls under her charm.

A forty-year-old man spends his working days surrounded by beautiful women, but he dares not do anything with any.

Matthias Müller’s films are always about both the eternal and the volatile qualities of cinema. They exaggerate the unreality and clinical perfection of the Hollywood studio films of the 1950s, quoting its sets and colours (Home Stories, 1990; Pensão Globo, 1997) or even reconstructing them in minute detail (Alpsee, 1994). But, at the same time, these attributes, known in film jargon as the production values, are exposed to decay – a decay which on closer inspection proves to include wilful acts of creation. As his own lab technician, Müller is responsible not only for subsequent wear and tear, but also for the initial developing of his own film material.

Martin, a sculptor, is dying in his bed on a barge that floats along a fog-shrouded waterway. As he agonizingly descends into a final oblivion, his second wife is at his bedside, comforted by his first wife -- also present.

One of the early short films of Italian independent filmmaker Fabio Salerno.

How to live in a prison when you have to serve a long sentence. Six inmates express themselves before the camera, telling about their everyday experiences, their feelings, their hopes and distress. Six prisoners but also six human beings who try to retain their dignity.

Will the homosexual find his alter-ego? Who's on the phone? While the hair is cut, the faces parade, which one is the good one? So many questions-pretexts for a visual and sound delirium.

A schoolgirl and her older girlfriend seduce the teacher in order to improve their grades.

Valeria, an Argentine exile in Bilbao, is involved against her will in a political kidnapping.

Short film about animal training in a circus.

Television film

Play by Robert Holman, about two brothers at a rural comprehensive in Teeside. The older brother, Gordon, joins the army and is killed by the IRA in Northern Ireland. The younger blames his father for letting Gordon join the army.

Dancers’ movements are traced out in space, where they hang suspended. The video makes use of audio feedback to bring about a double reading of movement that enables the viewer to better remember the incredible ballet of the human body.

This two-part film revolves around the correspondence between Antoine Vitez and the filmmaker

Climb Dance is a famous cinéma vérité short film, which features Finnish rally driver Ari Vatanen setting a record time in a highly modified four-wheel drive, all-wheel steering Peugeot 405 Turbo 16 GR at the 1988 Pikes Peak International Hillclimb in Colorado, USA. The film was produced by Peugeot and directed by Jean Louis Mourey. The record time set was 10:47.77.

In a brief life filled with prodigious artistic achievements, Federico García Lorca’s greatest legacy may well be his complex and compelling personality. Filmed on location in Spain, this BBC Arena documentary profiles the immortalized poet/dramatist, capturing the potent essence of Spanish culture in the process. Extracts from his poems, plays, and letters demonstrate his duende—burning passion—for the arts, while the details of his life and violent death, as told by his biographer Ian Gibson, contemporaries Rafael Alberti and Luis Rosales, and others, present a thoughtful perspective on Spain’s revered literary icon.

A fraudulent builder has planned to spend a few of days in Switzerland to hide his hoard in a swiss bank at once. Unfortunately an inspector of the Internal Revenue department is going to come and go over the firm's books.

A Frenchwoman tempts a man amid unrest on a balmy island

Ernesto, a seven-year-old boy who has the body of a thirty-year-old man, decides, upon attending his first day of school, that he no longer wishes to attend, because he does not wish to be taught matters that he does not know.

Years ago, SONY advertised with the slogan “The mobile memory”. We fell for it. The memory faded. The starting situation for the film was this crisis: The half-inch magnetic tapes dissolved and could no longer be played, they squeaked when trying to get them to work. We called it the squeak plague. Our archive threatened to disappear. We started talking about the future. How is everything supposed to go on, the whole thing here? Also the question of video or celluloid and whether we still feel like it at all. If you ask a lot, you get a lot of answers. A fan-like montage of images and sounds about the future was created. In search of social reality, the volume is also an answer, but without patent recipes.

Partly based on a true event, the death in 1817 of a Birmingham woman, Mary Ashford, and the consequent trial of a local man, Abraham Thornton, for her rape and murder. The film is concerned with the response of her contemporaries to her behaviour on the night before she died, and by situating this within the fictional circumstances of a modern woman, explores current attitudes to rape, and the forces and assumptions underlying them.

Short film about the eighth circle of hell as described in Dante's Inferno

Carlina returns to Milan from the United States and reunites with an old friend with whom she will begin a romantic relationship.

Documentary film about a research project that is promising at its time, with which the prerequisites for the production of a new generation of computer modules should be created. Especially in the case of common user computers, the introduction of the "X -ray lithograph" in the semiconductor technology can lead to an even unmistakable upheaval. The film describes the research work and reflects on the importance of such a development insertion. An unusual documentation about a work that has little external in itself. - from 16.

With 'AUGENBLICK' (the 'space of an instant'), Franz Reichle has given us a highly unusual work. During turbulent times, two young people find each other, fall in love, fight and ultimately separate. They are looking for new directions and ways of life, taking things one day at a time and squeezing the fulfilment of their desires out of every moment. The 'space of an instant' is surprising in form and style: Reichle positions himself against conventional ways of seeing, and takes an almost anarchic approach to the rules of drama. His point of view is shaped by interior processes: sensations, rather than events, are portrayed in the images appearing on screen. One of the few films which attempts to expand the language of the cinema. Urs Jäggi in Zoom-Filmberater, March 1986.

Two women navigate the challenges of life on a wintry day in 1980s Belfast. While Ruby has a cold and gets caught in the rain, Iris is job-hunting but feels lost in the traffic.

Karl Gass compiles film material to document the Pogromnacht in 1938.

Puerto Rican music band Menudo is in Venezuela for a country-wide tour. They arrive in Venezuela prepared to visit some of that country's largest cities, and to re-acquaintance themselves with their fans. As they travel, they each face different personal situations.

“Parting Shots from Animals” was inspired by essays by John Berger and developed in collaboration with Chris Rawlence. Shot entirely in the UK, it consists of a diverse series of arresting ‘films within a film’, each presented as if made about us from the perspective of the animals whose lives we may appear to celebrate, but continue to exploit and to destroy. While John Berger doesn’t appear in the film and wasn’t directly involved in it’s making, he narrates to great effect the text he co-wrote to accompany the film’s provocative opening sequence.

Clairvoyant Medium on the tracks of Jules Vernes steps towards the Center of Earth.

Within an all-purpose institution that might be part hospital, part museum, part asylum and part morgue, three characters (a thief, a nurse and a blind man) share indeterminate relationships of desire and power.