The House Between the Fields

Gently Was Anastasia Passing

A border town on the Danube, 1944. The town is occupied by the Germans, and there are plenty of collaborators. A number of the young men join the partisans, kill a Serbian, and throw his body into the village, forbidding anyone to bury it. Anastasia refuses to obey the order…

Astray

In the communist Romania of Nicolae Ceausescu, a young Romanian woman marries a German citizen just to leave the country.

Who Is Right?

A breakdown occurs in a factory on the banks of the Danube and a ministerial team begins an investigation. Alexandru Nedelcu is the inspector who came to investigate and has the complicated mission of finding the truth.

Sequences...

Three sequences which could have formed separate stories are linked together to give a larger perspective on the nature of reality and film. The three episodes are joined together by one film crew at work. In the beginning, the crew is introduced as they juggle their dual roles as State-supported propagandists who laud their government and society, and as private movie makers working on their own film. Next, they are in a restaurant looking for suitable locations to film when the eatery’s owner is induced to wax long and lugubriously on his miserable life. In the last segment, two extras are in the background of a scene, sitting at a table in a restaurant. It slowly becomes apparent to one of them that the man he’s sitting with tortured him more than 40 years ago at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

The Secret of the Secret Weapon

In this allegorical fairy-tale, peaceful and warlike knights vie for the hand of a beautiful princess, while a discussion of disco goes on around them. She favors a peaceful knight, while her father and his advisors like the ones carrying around a lot of weapons.

Red Apples

In Alexandru Tatos’s debut film, a young urologist is assigned to a town hospital with no urology ward and keeps bumping up against his superiors because of both ethical and medical problems.

Gathering Clouds

Young lawyer Radu Comșa is confronted with an identity crisis as WWI starts.

Forest Fruit

The 17-year-old Amalia, the daughter of a widower lumberjack with many children, falls in love with a soldier. An irresponsible young man, the soldier refuses to admit that he is the father of the child to be born, as Amalia was just a fling in his eyes. Amalia decides to raise the kid all by herself, but she soon changes her mind…

House of Sand and Fog

Behrani, an Iranian immigrant buys a California bungalow, thinking he can fix it up, sell it again, and make enough money to send his son to college. However, the house is the legal property of former drug addict Kathy. After losing the house in an unfair legal dispute with the county, she is left with nowhere to go. Wanting her house back, she hires a lawyer and befriends a police officer. Neither Kathy nor Behrani have broken the law, so they find themselves involved in a difficult moral dilemma.

Life as a House

When a man is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he takes custody of his misanthropic teenage son, for whom quality time means getting high, engaging in small-time prostitution, and avoiding his father.

Days of Heaven

In 1916, a Chicago steel worker accidentally kills his supervisor and flees to the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend and little sister to work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer.

Lemon Tree

Salma Zidane, a widow, lives simply from her grove of lemon trees in the West Bank's occupied territory. The Israeli defence minister and his wife move next door, forcing the Secret Service to order the trees' removal for security. The stoic Salma seeks assistance from the Palestinian Authority, Israeli army, and a young attorney, Ziad Daud, who takes the case. In this allegory, does David stand a chance against Goliath?