Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened

In this humanistic comedy, set against the backdrop of economic crises and bad news, an extravagant international cast of characters meet, fight, and fall in love, while hiding from the end of the world and other calamities on the tiny Greek island of Khronos.

Based on true stories, ALLURE is a process-driven film, where filmmakers and actors worked together through a series of improvisations to tell the stories of five women in New York, who come from five very different countries. Each one struggles to overcome her personal conflict, set against the Occupy Wall Street movements of 2011. These stories touch and inform each other, and create a larger narrative about gender, emigration, power, class, and personal politics.

Robert, a jaded middle-aged New Yorker, travels to Belgrade to make some quick cash by marrying someone for U.S. immigration papers. The plan goes awry when the money never arrives, leaving Robert stuck in Serbia. Meanwhile in New York, Banko, the young Serb whose girlfriend Robert is to marry, fights to come up with the cash.

In New York, an absurd coincidence links the lives of a Yugoslavian hitman, his ex-wife and her new partner, a policeman whose father was a criminal. His code name is "Uncle Vanya". He grew up in Bosnia, an orphan of both parents and, having never met them, he does not know whether he is a Serb, a Croat or a Muslim. A victim of his fate and his past in war-torn Bosnia, he has become a hitman. He would like to stop killing but he can't.

In a hellish future where human beings have become stupefied by the state of permanent happiness they have been genetically altered to experience, Jack offers relief via drugs that cause his customers the welcome phenomenon of pain. But when Jack receives a mysterious videotape of his dead father, he sets out to unmask the dangerous conspiracy that has created this dystopian world.

The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, himself once an immigrant in New York, wrote that NYC is not a city, not a country, but all humanity in one drop. THE CITY explores this humanity, now, in New York City, through the unique eyes of non-native New Yorkers, exiles, immigrants, refugees, eccentrics, and a Ghost. A collage of stories, together with the montage of images, sound and music, running through the film like a heartbeat, create New York moments, frozen in a particular time. Accompanied by haunting visuals, Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry, and a unique score by Sxip Shirey's "mutant harmonica," THE CITY is also a visual poem to a city of immigrants, which keeps re-inventing itself through its history, and into the new century.