Arabian Nights

In ancient Arabia, a beautiful slave girl chooses a youth to be her new master, then she is kidnapped and they must search for each other. Stories are told within stories: love, travel and the whims of destiny.

This was the penultimate film of the great Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. It also concludes his “Trilogy of Life”, based on medieval story collections (the others are “The Decameron” and “The Canterbury Tales”). Like the others in the series, this is a portmanteau film (i.e. the film is not just one story but several).

House of Cardin

Millions know the iconic logo and ubiquitous signature but few know the man behind the larger than life label. Ultimately we seek to answer the question: Who is Pierre Cardin? What is the story behind this legendary icon? House of Cardin is a rare peek into the mind of a genius, an authorized feature documentary chronicling the life and design of Cardin. A true original, Mr. Cardin has granted the directors exclusive access to his archives and his empire, and unprecedented interviews at the sunset of a glorious career.

The Day I Became a Woman

This film is episodic and it consists of 3 stories about the women’s situation in Iran.

First story: Hava

One morning a small girl named Hava wakes up and notices that she has become a woman because she is now 9 years old and playing in the streets with the boys is considered a sin from that day on. Hava cries and asks her grandmother to go to the street for one last goodbye with the boys.

Second story: Ahoo
This episode is about a young lady whom participates in the women’s bicycle race with her black traditional chador (veil) and her husband, while riding a horse, threatens to divorce her if she doesn’t get off the bicycle.

Third story: Houra
This episode is about an old woman whom has inherited some money during the last years of her life after years of poverty and now she has decided to spend all the money before she dies and to buy all the stuff that she always wished to buy during her life.

Helmut Newton: The Bad the Beautiful

Born into a wealthy Jewish family, Helmut Newton came of age ensconced in the seductive decadence of an ‘anything goes’ Berlin under the Weimar Republic. His teenaged apprenticeship under commercial photography pioneer Yva – who perished in the Holocaust – coincided with his family’s persecution under the rise of the Third Reich and the emergence of the striking aesthetics of infamous Nazi propagandist, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. He escaped with members of his family in 1938 and met his life partner June while in Australia working as a commercial photographer. The couple eventually settled in Paris where Helmut’s gradual evolution beyond the, then, conservative confines of fashion photography coincided with the radical political upheaval of 60s France. Interpreting the most traumatic political and cultural shift in German history, Helmut established his artistic legacy by effectively channeling his past into an erotically charged, highly-subversive portfolio dominated by bold ‘Aryan’-esque women in stilettos navigating the shadowy past of Helmut’s motherland. Replete with Helmut’s arresting imagery, THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL features creative accomplices Grace Jones, Charlotte Rampling, Isabella Rossellini, Marianne Faithfull, Anna Wintour and widow June Newton as they reflect on Helmut’s life and legacy. (Mae Moreno)