Tag: poverty

  • El mil usos

    The tragic adventures of a illiterate man named “Milusos” who leaves his family & hometown to go to the big city and try to better his luck. And finds he’s unprepared for what he encounters.

  • Withnail & I

    Two out-of-work actors — the anxious, luckless Marwood and his acerbic, alcoholic friend, Withnail — spend their days drifting between their squalid flat, the unemployment office and the pub. When they take a holiday “by mistake” at the country house of Withnail’s flamboyantly gay uncle, Monty, they encounter the unpleasant side of the English countryside:…

  • El Lute II: Tomorrow I’ll Be Free

    This is the story of a man fighting with all his might for his life and his freedom. Eleuterio (”El Lute”) embarks upon an action-packed future, fuelled by the notions of freedom and dreams of living just as his countrymen, ever-growing in his mind. Nothing and no-one can stop him. After escaping the Puerto de…

  • The Dull-Ice Flower

    Ku Ah-ming is a 4th grader at Chungshan Elementary School in Shuiyu Township, Taiwan. Despite being not very good in most subjects at school, he is very talented in art and has a great imagination, though most teachers don’t know what he’s expressing in his artwork.

  • The Ox

    In desperation brought on by near-starvation, Helge Roos kills his master’s ox to feed his wife and baby daughter, setting off a devastating and unexpected chain of events.

  • Curly Sue

    Bill is a penniless drifter who scams strangers out of just enough money to feed himself and his partner in crime, an orphan girl known as Curly Sue. Bill and Curly Sue target Grey, a yuppie lawyer, but their con takes an unexpected turn when the successful woman begins to like the ramshackle duo. But…

  • My Own Private Idaho

    In this loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV,” Mike Waters is a hustler afflicted with narcolepsy. Scott Favor is the rebellious son of a mayor. Together, the two travel from Portland, Oregon to Idaho and finally to the coast of Italy in a quest to find Mike’s estranged mother. Along the way they turn tricks…

  • A Home of Our Own

    In 1960s Los Angeles an energetic widow and her six children try to make a dream of theirs come true: to have a home of their own. They leave L.A. and head for the countryside, all the while facing numerous difficulties and obstacles during their journey.

  • Satantango

    Inhabitants of a small village in Hungary deal with the effects of the fall of Communism. The town’s source of revenue, a factory, has closed, and the locals, who include a doctor and three couples, await a cash payment offered in the wake of the shuttering. Irimias, a villager thought to be dead, returns and,…

  • Mi Vida Loca

    Mousie and Sad Girl are childhood best friends in a contemporary Los Angeles poor Hispanic neighborhood. But when Sad Girl becomes pregnant by Mousie’s boyfriend, a drug dealer named Ernesto, the two become bitter enemies. While their dispute escalates towards violence, the violence of the world around them soon also impacts their lives.

  • Bandit Queen

    Born a lower-caste girl in rural India’s patriarchal society, “married” at 11, repeatedly raped and brutalized, Phoolan Devi finds freedom only as an avenging warrior, the eponymous Bandit Queen. Devi becomes a kind a bloody Robin Hood; this extraordinary biographical film offers both a vivid portrait of a driven woman and a savage critique of…

  • Cyclo

    Follows a young cyclo driver on his poverty-driven descent into criminality in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City. The boy’s struggles to scratch out a living for his two sisters and grandfather in the mean streets of the city lead to petty crime on behalf of a mysterious Madame from whom he rents his cyclo.

  • Jerusalem

    Members of a devout Christian congregation try to start a new life in Palestine.

  • Blackboards

    Itinerant Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offers to guide them, and takes as his wife Halaleh, the clan’s lone woman,…

  • Lawn Dogs

    In the affluent, gated community of Camelot Gardens, bored wives indiscriminately sleep around while their unwitting husbands try desperately to climb the social ladder. Trent, a 21-year-old outsider who mows the neighborhood lawns, quietly observes the infidelities and hypocrisies of this overly privileged society. When Devon, a 10-year-old daughter from one family, forges a friendship…

  • The Rose Seller

    Monica is 13 years old and has already created her own world, on the street, where she fights courageously to defend what little she has: her friends, her boyfriend, who sells drugs, and her dignity and pride that makes no concessions to anyone. On Christmas night, like every night, she sells roses to make a…

  • Tess of the D’Urbervilles

    Thomas Hardy’s classic epic remains one of the most popular novels, this TV adaptation vividly depicts the powerful tale of a peasant girl whose life is torn apart by the love and jealousy of two men. Justine Waddell stars as the hapless Child of Nature who is tossed around by the dark forces of fate.…

  • Love Will Tear Us Apart

    The film gets under the skin of a very marginalized group: recent immigrants to Hong Kong from Mainland China. Belying the expectation that they will belong in a territory now returned to China’s sovereignty, they find themselves lonely, frustrated, poor, and employable only in the most menial jobs, from elevator service staff to prostitution.

  • Rosetta

    Young, impulsive Rosetta lives a hard and stressful life as she struggles to support herself and her alcoholic mother. Refusing all charity, she is desperate to maintain a dignified job.

  • Angela’s Ashes

    An Irish Catholic family returns to 1930s Limerick after a child’s death in America. The unemployed I.R.A. veteran father struggles with poverty, prejudice, and alcoholism as the family endures harsh slum conditions.

  • Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets

    Ali, Kwita, Omar and Boubker are street kids. The daily dose of glue sniffing represents their only escape from reality. Since they left Dib and his gang, they have been living on the portside of Casablanca. They live in constant fear of Dib’s revenge. Ali wants to become a sailor – when he was living…