Letters from Santiago

In Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers peer deep into the cosmos in search for answers concerning the origins of life. Nearby, a group of women sift through the sand searching for body parts of loved ones, dumped unceremoniously by Pinochet's regime.

War photographer W. Eugene Smith travels back to Japan where he documents the devastating effect of mercury poisoning in coastal communities.

Santiago, capital of Chile during the Marxist government of elected, highly controversial president Salvador Allende. Father McEnroe supports his leftist views by introducing a program at the prestigious "collegio" (Catholic prep school) St. Patrick to allow free admission of some proletarian kids. One of them is Pedro Machuca, slum-raised son of the cleaning lady in Gonzalo Infante's liberal-bourgeois home. Yet the new classmates become buddies, paradoxically protesting together as Gonzalo gets adopted by Pedro's slum family and gang. But the adults spoil that too, not in the least when general Pinochet's coup ousts Allende, and supporters such as McEnroe.

A young woman's desperate search for her abducted boyfriend draws her into the infamous Colonia Dignidad, a sect nobody ever escaped from.

When famed photographer Christina Eames dies unexpectedly, she leaves her estranged daughter, Mae, hurt, angry and full of questions. When Mae finds a photograph tucked away in a safe-deposit box, she soon finds herself delving into her mother's early life -- an investigation that leads to an unexpected romance with a rising journalist.

After 20 years of exile, Aron returns to Chile to find out who he is. He asks questions, not only of those who stayed behind but also of himself, examining his relationship with his past and his own memory. The people who stayed lived through 20 years of dictatorship. They were either victims or executioners. Amidst this wreckage, Aron wonders what name his brother is using now, where his father is... Can he, in Isol's arms and through her love, find his way again ? What future awaits him? Like Mola the torturer, he has returned from an impossible journey, and Aron knows that each man is his own executioner. Shipwreck and resurrection are the two facets of a complex truth.

Karen Bender is a plastic surgery expert who will soon be promoted to Senior Physician. Her family life with her husband Christoph and little daughter Kim could hardly be more harmonious. However, when a routine check-up reveals that the seven-year-old is a lethal tumor, Karen is unexpectedly caught up in her past: Professor Victor Novak, an internationally renowned neurosurgeon, is the only one who can save Kim's life. But years ago Karen had an affair with Viktor during a joint engagement in the Balkan war.

Three women who share a familial bond but little more come to know each other better in this beautifully-photographed drama. Marie-Madeleine (Sylvie Drapeau) is a photographer in her mid-30s who, for the first time, has come into contact with Mado (France Arbour), her biological mother, who put her up for adoption shortly after she was born. Marie-Madeleine is to take a long road trip for a magazine assignment, and she invites Mado along. Joining the two women is Marie-Madeleine's daughter (Isadora Galwey), who has yet to meet her German father. The three women share their thoughts and ideas as they travel through an idyllic setting to photograph birds. Les Fantomes des Trois Madeleine was shown at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival as part of the Directors Fortnight series.

Ariane Ostler manages a dairy farm in the mountains of Bavaria.Her former lover Georg visits her to live again a new love.Bernhard Maywald is a income tax inspector send to Reichertsbrunn.

The relationship between journalist Nina and her mother Eva has always been tense. One day Nina is supposed to be interviewing Richard Gere in Budapest. Her friend Flora and her mother Eva accompany her there. Flora succeeds in defusing the tensions between mother and daughter. Then Eva is suddenly admitted to the hospital. Nina's visit to her mother's sickbed is moving for both women.

After Lucy (17) finds out that she was conceived during a porn shoot she sets out to find her father and meets Udo, a has-been former porn star. Together this unlikely couple go on a journey during which both find more than they bargained for…

Irene is a magazine editor living under the shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Francisco is a handsome photographer and he comes to Irene for a job. As a sympathizer with the underground resistance movement, Francisco opens her eyes and her heart to the atrocities being committed by the state.

An American couple in Chile is drawn into the turmoil that followed President Salvador Allende's 1973 overthrow.

It's been a year since Moritz Wagner and his daughter Aluna turned their backs on Kenya and moved to Hamburg. They searched in vain for Farrah, Moritz's wife and Aluna's mother. Moritz's strenuous, sometimes traumatic job as a war photographer had put a lot of strain on their marriage. Farrah took some time off and disappeared without a trace. Now news reaches Moritz from the Kenyan police that his wife has been recovered dead from her car in Kenya. Shortly after, Farrah's sister Pascale suggests that Farrah was not the victim of an accident, but was murdered. Moritz sets off for Kenya. But when he wants to meet his sister-in-law, she dies in front of him. Moritz is now considered a suspect and has to justify himself to the Kenyan police and flee. Together with Caroline, a shirt-sleeved used car saleswoman and good friend of Farrah, Moritz sets out to find the secret behind Farrah's death. The trail leads them both to the Congo.

A portrait of a brutal Pinochet military dictatorship made during a three month visit to Chile in 1985 by David Bradbury. The footage reveals a country torn with civil strife and political unrest; military intimidation of the population; indiscriminate arrests: murder torture and disappearances were facts of Chilean life.

The tale of three mothers of first graders whose apparently perfect lives unravel to the point of murder.

April, an aspiring journalist, is balancing her ambitious career with her family and a new office romance. In an unexpected twist of fate, April learns that she has leukemia.

Lyra is an orphan who lives in a parallel universe in which science, theology, and magic are intertwined. Her search for a kidnapped friend uncovers a sinister plot involving stolen children and turns into a quest to understand a mysterious phenomenon called Dust. She is later joined on her journey by Will, a boy who possesses a knife that can cut windows between worlds. As she learns the truth about her parents and her prophesied destiny, the two young people are caught up in a war against celestial powers that ranges across many worlds.

16-year-old Lux was given up for adoption at birth but never adopted. When she is put back into the custody of her estranged-since-high-school birth parents, Cate and Baze, the three form an unlikely family.

Samantha Newly has been a bad, bad girl. But thanks to an 8-day coma, she can't remember a thing. Fortunately her best friend Andrea is by her side with a cocktail and the 4-1-1 on every dirty deed. But the more Sam pieces together her past, the less she likes her old self. Maybe this is a chance to start over and do it all again.

The Waltons live their life in a rural Virginia community during the Great Depression and World War II.

This critically acclaimed drama focuses on the Drombuschs, an average German family living in Darmstadt near Frankfurt.

Based on the historical work "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", "The Nightmare Years" tells the story of William Shirer, American journalist who, during his days of correspondence as a foreign press in report in 1930s Germany, had to deal with the growing oppression of the Nazi regime, the increasing censorship of the press, and finally the prospect of World War. In the last days of peace, Shirer also struggles to have his German wife and child escape to the United States.

When author Rosalind Leigh is assigned to write a book about the life of Olive Martin, a woman sentenced to life in prison for killing her mother and sister, she develops a relationship with Olive and is soon convinced of her innocence. With the help of restaurant owner and former policeman Hal Hawksley, she sets out to prove it and undo what she sees as a miscarriage of justice.

At the Berlin dance school "Galant," worlds collide and the struggle between prudishness and emancipation is carried out. The proprietor of the dance school, Caterina Schöllack, has three daughters whom she orders to integrate into this hierarchically structured society. Two of her daughters seem to abide by their mother's wish. Only Monika, the middle daughter, rejects the given path and discovers rock 'n' roll for herself.

After receiving a bizarre chance to go back in time, a man wakes up to find that his whole life — including the person he married — is different.

The Germanic cult 'Colonia Dignidad' abused children, tortured and killed prisoners in its secret compound. Now, with Chilean dictator Pinochet gone, Leo Ramírez, a young federal prosecutor, must bring its leader Paul Schaefer to justice.

The single mother Caterina Schöllack takes over the management of the Galant dance school on Kurfürstendamm ("Ku'damm") in Berlin after the end of the Second World War. The father of their three daughters did not return to the family after the war, he is officially missing.

When strange young misfit Kim Noakes was just a little girl, her father died in murky circumstances and her mother Tina whisked her away to a remote rural life of seclusion and bizarre survival techniques. Now all grown up, Kim sets out into the real world for the first time to begin a secret mission of honouring her father’s memory.

A missing astronaut sets her family on a frantic hunt for answers. But the more they uncover, the greater the threat becomes to them — and the world.