The Trials

Fantasy adventure as the fairies face a new foe.

An adaptation of Franz Kafka's "The Trial"

Hanjiro of Kusama searches for his little sister Oyuki, who went missing after being desecrated by Hikosaku Tokurai three years ago. The first film in a series about the adventures of the wandering yakuza Hanjiro from Kusama.

“Our life is a movie! You shouldn’t be making another one,” an angry mother shouts, but her daughter is out the gate, determined to join a group of clandestine actors and filmmakers in a waiting van. In the dusty village of Khosro, twenty kilometers from Tehran, work can be found at the brick kiln, but amateur film production gives the locals something to live for. Or did, until the authorities discovered this community pastime, and writer-director Ali Matini was imprisoned. Now all but a few shun the project on pain of arrest. But Matini and company dared to make one more film so that the better-known director Moslem Mansouri (once a political prisoner himself) could document their art and courage. With a donkey for a dolly, the crew quips, “Even Orson Welles cannot work like this.” But then, Welles can’t honestly say, as Matini does, “Our life is what Kafka described. . . . We are hanging from the gallows of cinema.”

A sculptor, an enemy of modern art, sets an example. He sculpts a statue of Venus in the style of the Greek antiquity and buries it in a forest. When it's dug up in 1930, it's considered to be a 2 000 year old, antique statue.

a film by Khavn.

In 19th-century France, a little girl follows her two sisters into a Carmelite monastery with the goal of becoming a saint.

Hétpróba (Seven Trials) is a rarely shown film by Hungarian neo-avantgarde artist Dóra Maurer. It is an intimate portrayal of an opera singer/mother and her four children who act out amusing challenges while revealing hidden private tragedies in front of the camera.

Perhaps the most chilling testament to the ruthlessness of Albania’s communist regime, this documentary presents a public trial in a packed cinema: four young men accused of industrial sabotage and listening to foreign music. In the finale, replicating the Stalinist show trials of the 1950s, the audience applauds the death sentences for two defendants, and long prison terms for the other two who absurdly also lose their voting rights. The ice cold Poshnja is a rarely-screened, forbidden film (it is not even listed on the Albanian archive website) and the sole directing effort of Albania’s leading film scholar, Abaz Hoxha.

No one can understand why a successful and seemingly happily married actress killed herself, but some think that it has to do with what happened to her during the war.

A Trial. The Transcript. tells the story of how an evening presumably planned as a relaxed gathering of friends ended in rape. Fiona Rukschcio alternatingly aligns fragmentary testimony given by a young woman and the accused, as read by sober off-screen voices that reconstruct the events of that night step by step.

Investigating slavery in Canada through the story of Marie-Josèphe Angélique, a Black slave accused of burning Montreal in 1734. After an epic trial, this untameable slave is tortured and sentenced to death. But was she really guilty of this crime or was she the victim of a bigger conspiracy? Why this voluntary amnesia about this unknown page of Canadian history?

In the summer of 1931, a young Jewish lawyer, Hans Litten, put Adolf Hitler on the witness stand of a Berlin court. He forced Hitler to account for his violent methods, apparent contempt for the law and stated desire to destroy German democracy. Hitler survived the ordeal but it would be something he would never forget -- and for which he would make Hans Litten pay. Hitler on Trial reveals the little known story of Hans Litten and brings to life the drama of a Berlin courtroom in the run up to the Second World War.

In 1983, fifteen Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, landowners went to court to stop the spraying of herbicides by the local subsidiary of a Swedish multinational on forests adjacent to their properties. They found that the testimony of scientists and the support of public opinion, both here and abroad, were not enough to win their case. The film shows their ordeal and the landmark Sydney trial. Concerns raised included potential conflict-of-interest situations where a government must protect citizens' health while supporting certain kinds of industry; the relative value of the political and judicial processes in mediating social problems; and the need for a public forum for debating environmental issues. The film contains outstanding footage from chemical-industry films of the 1950s and recent material about Vietnam veterans affected by Agent Orange.

Koky, the little boy whose teacher tells him the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, does not believe that Ali Baba is a hero and wants to try him for his crimes. His parents perform a trial for Ali Baba to calm him down, but something unexpected happens.

The Makavejev Case or Trial in a Movie Theater explores the position of an artist in the Socialist FR Yugoslavia, focusing on the political and social climate that used public platforms to condemn the film WR: Mysteries of the Organism, under the auspices of the Communist Party.

August 2015, a courtroom in Rostov-on-Don. A man is peering through the bars of his cage, his eyes reveal that his nerves are about to snap. Today he will be handed down a sentence to which he must submit: 20 years’ imprisonment in Siberia for terrorism. The man is Oleg Sentsov, a film director and Maidan activist born in Simferopol in the Ukraine. He is charged with leading an anti-Russian terrorist movement and having planned attacks on bridges, power lines and a monument of Lenin. Sentsov defends himself, courageously and without flinching. He responds to the verdict with an emphatic denial of his crimes and instead accuses the accusers themselves ...

Following an illegal foreclosure order issued against his partner, Attorney Barak Cohen started a fight against the heads of the banking system, and created a new model of civil resistance demanding personal responsibility from the decision makers. The public uproar caused by the campaign led the heads of the banks, the attorney's office and the police to try to stop the activity of Barak and his friends in any way possible. The culmination of this attempted silencing was the "trial of the bankers" which included serious charges, as if taken from the world of organized crime. Barak and his friends did not panic and turned the trial into a serious indictment against the heads of the banking system, a move that was hailed as a resounding success and has since inspired all civil struggles in Israel.