Sacrificing the Few for the Many

A Materialaktion (an art performance/happening in which objects are used to create an art piece) by Viennese Aktionist Otto Muehl. The setting is a solemn Christmas celebration.

Adela has just settled in Madrid with her father, Claudio, a retired concert musician and a hermit. Both teach piano to small children in a quiet, sparsely-furnished flat in the centre of town.

It's a classic boy-meets-girl story, boy-loses-girl, boy gets mistaken for an escaped convict and ruthlessly chased by armies of cops across the countryside in a thrill-packed stunt-addled climax.

An alcohol/drug abuser re-examines his life until he nearly dies from an overdose. Then a friend convinces him to join a self-help group which turns out to be demonic.

It's Christmas time, and a grandmother spends a quiet afternoon tending to the family chores. But the arrival of an unexpected visitor brings with her some deadly consequences.

It's Christmas night when Victor gets stranded in a deserted hotel in Baltimore. To pass the lonely hours, he decides that for first time in his life he's going to order the services of a call girl. When Victor mistakenly recognizes a beautiful young woman at the bar for the call girl, he is taken aback by her warm response to his shy approach. From this moment on, the line between real love and paid love quickly dissolves.

Saori, a school girl, is molested on the notorious "molester train" of the Hanagawa line and rescued by another school girl who witnesses the act. The girl who rescues her turned out to be a new student of the same high school Saori attends. The mysterious new student Yuriko is rumoured to be a "parent killer". Yuriko then leads Saori and her friends to hunt molesters.

A reel of the Noh drama Momiji-gari, in which Danjuro Ichikawa played opposite Onoe Kikugoro V as an ogress who has disguised herself as the Princess Sarashina. Filmed by Shibata Tsunekichi in the open air on a windy day in November 1899, Danjuro would allow only the one take, so that when his fan blew away in mid-performance the scene had to stay. The film re-emerged at the Kikikan theatre in 1907 where it was a great success and inspired a wave of fiction filmmaking based on traditional Japanese narratives.

In this fragile yet frightening poetic fantasy set against a dark industrial landscape, a woman sits knitting on the porch of her home when a man appears and takes the knitting from her.